Category: Romantic and Victorian

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…

Amanda Jo Goldstein, Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism and the New Logics of Life (Chicago: Universiity of Chicago Press 2017) 336 pp. $35 PDF, $35 Pb, $100 Hb. ISBN: 9780226458441 In De rerum natura, Lucretius imagines the universe as beginning in rain: atoms fall through the void like raindrops, come into contact with one another, and…

Peter Merchant and Catherine Waters (eds), Dickens and the Imagined Child (Farnham: Ashgate 2015) 226 pp. £70.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781472423818 This book contributes to an already abundant field of criticism of Dickens and his work. It is divided into three parts, with twelve essays focused on various aspects of childhood in Dickens’s life and literature. Part…

Leif Weatherby, Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ: German Romanticism between Leibniz and Marx (New York: Fordham University Press 2016) 472 pp. $23.99 Epub, $35.00 Pb, $125 Hb. ISBN: 9780823269402 Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ is an ambitious project in the disciplines of literature, natural philosophy and metaphysics. Weatherby’s ‘Romantic organology’ discusses the organ as ‘the tool for…

Melissa Bailes, Questioning Nature. British Women’s Scientific Writing & Literary Originality 1750-1830, (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press 2017) 272 pp. $45.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780813939766 Melissa Bailes’s Questioning Nature explores prominent female authors’ scientific production in the long eighteenth century in light of the contemporary cultural debate on authorship, plagiarism and copyright laws, which eventually…

Chad Luck, The Body of Property: Antebellum American Fiction and the Phenomenology of Possession (New York: Fordham University Press 2014) 298 pp. $17.99 EPUB, $ 27.00 Pb,, $95.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780823263004 In this book the author touches upon a wealth of interconnected concepts including possession, space and anxiety in relation to the nature of ownership…

Monika Pietrzak-Franger, Syphilis in Victorian Literature and Culture: Medicine, Knowledge, and the Spectacle of Invisibility (London: Palgrave 2017) 338 pp. £73.50 PDF EPUB, £92.00 Hb. ISBN: 978-3-319-49534-7 Syphilis in Victorian Literature and Culture is an authoritative survey of the interrelated cultural associations surrounding syphilis in the Victorian period. Part of the impressive Palgrave Studies in…