Category: Romantic and Victorian

Megan Coyer, Literature, Medicine and the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press: Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 1817–1858 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2017) 246 pp. £70 Hb. ISBN: 978–1–4744–0562 Megan Coyer’s Literature, Medicine and the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press: Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 1817–1858 examines the relationship between medical culture and the periodical press in the early nineteenth century, focusing on the…

Lena Wånggren, Gender, Technology and the New Woman (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2017) xi + 218 pp. £75 Hb. ISBN: 978-1-474-416269 Wånggren’s book opens with a quote that perfectly embodies its focus.  In Olive Schreiner’s short story ‘Three Dreams in a Desert’ (1890), the narrator comes across the figure of a woman weighed down with…

Rachel Ablow, Victorian Pain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2016) 208 pp. $39.95 Hb. ISBN: 9780691174464 Victorian Pain explores the ways in which nineteenth-century thinkers tried to reconcile the deeply personal nature of pain, with its unavoidably social manifestations. From the outset Rachel Ablow asserts that her focus is not on representations and constructions of…

Karin Koehler, Thomas Hardy and Victorian Communication: Letters, Telegrams and Postal Systems (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2016) xii + 246 pp. £58.00 Hb. ISBN: 978-3-319-29101-7 Thomas Hardy was a prolific writer of letters. Although his correspondence was seemingly exhausted with the seven volume collection of 1978-88, a further volume of the author’s letters was released in…

Laura White, The Alice Books and the Contested Ground of the Natural World(Oxford: Routledge 2017) xvi + 250 pp. £105 Hb. ISBN: 9781138630826 The application of scholarly detective work to the life and literature of Lewis Carroll has resulted in an influx of research on his exploration of science. The idea that Alice’s Adventures in…

Anna Kornbluh, Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form (New York: Fordham University Press 2014) 232 pp. $50.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780823254972 As the world slowly recovered from the devastating financial crisis of 2008, accounts of the catastrophe reflexively blamed investors for recklessly abusing byzantine financial instruments culminating in global hysteria. While everyday market…

Marit Grøtta, Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics: The Gaze of the Flâneur and Nineteenth-Century Media (London: Bloomsbury 2015) 216 pp. £27.09 EPUB, PDF, £31.09 Pb, £88.09 Hb. ISBN: 9781628924404 Much has been made, over the years, of the nineteenth-century French poet Charles Baudelaire’s criticism of photography, especially in his review of the Salon of 1859. On the…

Monika Elbert and Bridget M. Marshall (eds), Transnational Gothic: Literary and Social Exchanges in the Long Nineteenth Century (Farnham: Ashgate 2013) 282 pp. £37.99 Pb, £110.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781409447702 Through its engaging and multiple approaches, Transnational Gothic: Literary and Social Exchanges in the Long Nineteenth Century offers original insights on the development of the Gothic…

Jordan Kistler, Arthur O’Shaughnessy, A Pre-Raphaelite Poet in the British Museum (Oxford: Routledge 2016) 199pp. £110.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781472467355 I approached this book (as I suspect many readers will) with a keen interest in interactions between Victorian science and literature, but little knowledge of Arthur O’Shaughnessy (1844-81). As such, I was at first intrigued by…