Category: Romantic and Victorian

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…

Julia S. Carlson, Romantic Marks and Measures: Wordsworth’s Poetry in Fields of Print (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) xiv + 354 pp. £50.00 Hb. ISBN 9780812247879 In this ambitious, important book, Julia Carlson sets out to reassess two of the most fundamental elements of Wordsworth’s poetry. Claiming in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads that…

Heather Tilley, Blindness and Writing: From Wordsworth to Gissing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017) 294 p. £80.00 PDF, £75.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781107194212   Blindness and Writing: From Wordsworth to Gissing ushers in a new way of understanding ocularcentric constructs of blindness and new writing technologies for blind people during the nineteenth century. Heather Tilley’s study…

Benjamin Morgan, The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017) 368 pp. £26.00 Pb. ISBN: 9780226462202 Benjamin Morgan’s The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature undertakes a compelling and persuasive analysis of the somewhat obscure but nonetheless engaging relationship between aesthetics and science in the Victorian period.…

Jason D. Hall, Nineteenth-Century Verse and Technology: Machines of Meter (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2017) 288 pp. £80.00 Hb. ISBN: 9783319535012 This book considers the ‘ways in which machine culture impacted on fundamental conceptions of what poetic meter was and how it worked’ (2). Jason Hall moves from the eighteenth century to the twentieth century but…

James Whitehead, Madness and the Romantic Poet: A Critical History (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2017) 320 pp. £55 Hb. ISBN: 9780198733706 For hundreds of years, scholars, writers, and mental health professionals have debated, discussed, endorsed, rebuked, or reveled in, associations between madness and creativity, specifically between madness and poets. Is the relationship correlational, or causational?…

Jeff Rosen, Julia Margaret Cameron’s ‘Fancy Subjects’: Photographic Allegories of Victorian Identity and Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2016) 336 pp. £20.00 Pb, £75.00 Hb. ISBN: 978-1-7849-9317-7 Victorian photography is en vogue. In 2015, to mark the bicentennial of Julia Margaret Cameron’s birth, the Victoria and Albert Museum reminded viewers of the innovation and power…