Category: Romantic and Victorian

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…

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…