Category: Romantic and Victorian

Lara Karpenko and Shalyn Claggett (eds), Strange Science: Investigating the Limits of Knowledge in the Victorian Age (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,2017) 312 pp. 8 B&W Illustrations. $60.00 Hb. ISBN:9780472130177 Strange Science is a thoughtfully compiled collection of essays exploring various intersections of Victorian fringe science and mainstream culture. The essays are grouped into three sections,…

Marie Mulvey-Roberts, Dangerous Bodies: Historicising the Gothic Corporeal (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2016) 272 pp. £72 Hb. ISBN: 9780719085413 The gothic imaginary foregrounds the body unlike any other imaginary. In her methodically researched and richly detailed work, Dangerous Bodies: Historicising the Gothic Corporeal, Marie Mulvey-Roberts confirms this truth. Corporal parts, the bloodied bits, scraps and…

Alex Tankard, Tuberculosis and Disabled Identity in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Invalid Lives (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2018) ix + 238 pp. £62.99 PDF & EPUB, £79.00 Hb. ISBN 978-3-319-71445-5 Alex Tankard’s Tuberculosis and Disabled Identity in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Invalid Lives is a title in Palgrave Macmillan’s Literary Disability Studies, a series dedicated to literary readings informed by…

Michael Tondre, The Physics of Possibility: Victorian Fiction, Science, and Gender (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press 2018) 242 pp. $45.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780813941455 Michael Tondre considers the ways in which mathematical physics influenced Victorian literature, science, and statistics from 1850 to 1880. His book is divided into two parts, with four chapters that survey a…

Matthew Wilson Smith, The Nervous Stage: Nineteenth-century Neuroscience and the Birth of Modern Theatre Oxford University Press 2017 240 pp. £29.99 Hb. ISBN: 9780190644086 In The Nervous Stage Matthew Wilson Smith unfolds a fascinating world of relationships between nineteenth-century studies on the nerves and drama, in order to demonstrate that the roots of brain research…

Nicholas Roe (ed.), John Keats and the Medical Imagination (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2017) xviii + 262 pp. EPUB, PDF £56.99, £72 Hb. ISBN: 978-3-319-63810-2 John Keats and the Medical Imagination is a compilation of ten specially commissioned essays based on contributions to the third Keats Bicentenary Conference at Guy’s Hospital, May 2015. The focus of…

Michael Jonik, Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018) 276 pp. $80.00 ebook, £75.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781108420921 Inhumanity is a rich vein through which to mine the thought of Herman Melville. Michael Jonik’s Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman follows this line through Melville’s work. To Jonik,…

Margrit Pernau, Helge Jordhem et al., Civilizing Emotions. Concepts in Nineteenth-Century Asia and Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2015) £83.00 Hb. ISBN: 978-0-19-874553-2 Civilisation is at the heart of today’s campaigns for increasing social harmony and courtesy in public space. This process, Pernau and Jordheim tell us in their recent edited book, pertains not only…

J. Andrew Hubbell, Byron’s Nature: A Romantic Vision of Cultural Ecology (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2018) ix + 289 pp.  £76 EPUB, £80 Hb. ISBN: 978-3-319-542379 In Byron’s Nature, J. Andrew Hubbell seeks a ‘full accounting of Byron’s environmental thought’ (1).  In so doing, Hubbell sidesteps Heideggerian inflections of oikos – ‘narratives of dwelling’ which have, as he…

Bennett Zon, Evolution and Victorian Musical Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017) 374 pp. $96.00 PDF, £90.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781107020443 It is the ever raging ‘cheesecake wars’ that Evolution and Victorian Musical Culture takes as its starting pistol. Broadly speaking, these wars – begun with Rousseau and re-igniting in the twentieth century – have revolved…