Category: Romantic and Victorian

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…

Catherine Maxwell, Scents and Sensibility: Perfume in Victorian Literary Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2017) xviii + 361pp, 13 colour plates. £30 Hb. 9787-0-19-870175-0 Today’s perfume industry is worth millions of pounds, but for all the scientific sophistication of modern fragrances, advertisers still struggle with a fundamental sensory conundrum, namely, how can scent be conveyed…

Anna West, Thomas Hardy and Animals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017) 210 pp. $80.00 PDF, £75.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781107179172 Animals play an important role in Thomas Hardy’s work, but, with honourable exceptions, Hardy scholars have tended to overlook them. In Thomas Hardy and Animals, Anna West has at last made Hardy’s literary response to the non-human…

Michael R. Finn, Figures from the Pre-Freudian Unconscious from Flaubert to Proust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017) 250 pp. $80.00 PDF, £75.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781107184565 In Figures from the Pre-Freudian Unconscious from Flaubert to Proust, Michael R. Finn explores the cultural meaning of the unconscious between 1850 and 1920. Framing society as defined by two…

Adriana Craciun, Writing Arctic Disaster: Authorship and Exploration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2016) 326 pp. $40.00 PDF, £31.99 Pb, £96.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781107125544 Adriana Craciun’s Writing Arctic Disaster: Authorship and Exploration is essentially a study on dynamic narratives of discovery and mythmaking. As such, one of its central goals is to examine ‘how changing codes…