Tag: 2007
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Dawson, Gowan, Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability
Gowan Dawson, Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), xii + 286 pp. £64 ISBN: 9780521872492 Charles Darwin did not much care for literature. His autobiography confessed an intolerance of poetry, a love of middlebrow fiction and, in later life, feelings of nausea when reading Shakespeare. It is, therefore, perhaps ironic that…
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O’Connor, Ralph, The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802-1856
Ralph O’Connor, The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802-1856 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 448 pp. £ 31 hb. ISBN 9780226616681. The geologist, like the historian, is constantly faced with the difficulties of incomplete evidence. Gaps in strata spanning thousands or millions of years, partial skeletons, and limited information…
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Cummins, Juliet and David Burchell (eds), Science, Literature and Rhetoric in Early Modern England
Juliet Cummins and David Burchell (eds), Science, Literature and Rhetoric in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 256 pp. £60 hb. ISBN 0754657817. (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) This volume brings together ten scholars from various fields in early modern studies to discuss the ways in which science, literature and rhetoric contributed…
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Leane, Elizabeth, Reading Popular Physics
Elizabeth Leane, Reading Popular Physics: Disciplinary Skirmishes and Textual Strategies (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 208 pp. £55 hb. ISBN 978-0-7546-5850-4. (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) A critical consideration of the literary, scientific, and cultural contexts in which popular physics writing intervenes, Elizabeth Leane’s Reading Popular Physics: Disciplinary Skirmishes and Textual Strategies establishes surveyors’…
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Jenkins, Alice, Space and the ‘March of Mind’: Literature and the Physical Sciences in Britain, 1815-1850
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by
Bernard Lightman
Alice Jenkins, Space and the ‘March of Mind’: Literature and the Physical Sciences in Britain, 1815-1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 268 pp. £69.00 hb. ISBN 978-0-19-920992-7. Alice Jenkins’ ambitious study of British literary and scientific culture in the nineteenth century breaks new ground in at least two respects. The influential work of Gillian Beer…
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Söderqvist, Thomas (ed.), The History and Poetics of Scientific Biography
Thomas Söderqvist (ed.), The History and Poetics of Scientific Biography (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). xv + 270 pp. £60 hb. ISBN 978-0-7546-5181-9. (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) If the modern impulse to write biography—split between seriousness and celebrity, the cerebral and the gossipy—can be traced from James Boswell’s systematic courting and recording…
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Coleman, Philip (ed.), On Literature and Science
Philip Coleman (ed.), On Literature and Science: Essays, Reflections, Provocations (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007), 270pp. £50hb. ISBN: 978-1846820717. Reading a medievalist on the relations between The Canterbury Tales and sci-fi is not an enticing prospect: “Chaucer, technology and the rise of science fiction in English” sounds like the most egregious piece of shoe-horning since Cinderella’s…
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Lightman, Bernard, Victorian Popularizers of Science
Bernard Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 564 pp. £31 hb. ISBN 0226481182. If there is one text that should be compulsory reading in science and literature in the nineteenth century, it must surely be this. It may have taken fifteen years to produce but…
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Lightman, Bernard and Aileen Fyfe (eds), Science in the Marketplace
Bernard Lightman and Aileen Fyfe (eds), Science in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century Sites and Experiences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). pp 432. hb £31. ISBN 0226276503. The study of ‘popular science’, one of the biggest growth areas in the history of science, is fraught with definitional difficulties. As Jonathan Topham reminds us in his illuminating…
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Morse, Deborah Denenholz and Martin A. Danahay (eds.), Victorian Animal Dreams
Deborah Denenholz Morse and Martin A. Danahay (eds), Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007). xvi + 281 pp. £55 hb. ISBN 978-0-7546-5511-4. (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) A couple of years ago, I set an experimental exercise for students on…
