Tag: 2008
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Reeves, Eileen, Galileo’s Glassworks: the Telescope and the Mirror
Eileen Reeves, Galileo’s Glassworks: The Telescope and the Mirror (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2008). 240 pp. $23.00 Hb. ISBN 978-0-6740-2667-4 In Galileo’s Glassworks, Eileen Reeves deftly reassesses the lapse between the invention of the telescope in Middleburg, September 1608 and the publication of Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius (Starry Messenger) in Venice, March 1610. Mapping out the…
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Engels, Eve-Marie and Thomas F. Glick (eds), The Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe
Eve-Marie Engels and Thomas F. Glick (eds), The Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe , vols 1 and 2 (London: Continuum, 2008), lxxii + 659 pp, £225 hb, ISBN 9780826458339; Thomas F. Glick and Elinor Shaffer (eds), The Literary and Cultural Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe , vols 3 and 4 (London: Bloomsbury Academic,…
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Golston, Michael, Rhythm and Race in Modernist Poetry and Science
Michael Golston, Rhythm and Race in Modernist Poetry and Science (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), pp. 272. £38.00. ISBN 978-0-231-14276-2. Different climates and different bloods have different needs, different spontaneities, different reluctances, different ratios between different groups of impulses and unwillingness, different constrictions of throat, and all these leave trace in the language, and…
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Reiss, Benjamin, Theaters of Madness: Insane Asylums and Nineteenth-Century American Culture
Benjamin Reiss, Theaters of Madness: Insane Asylums and Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008), pp. 237. £34.50 hb. ISBN: 0-226-70963-9. £14 pb ISBN: 0-226-70964-7. When Dickens first toured America in 1842, he decided to visit many of the country’s public charity institutions. At Boston he looked around the State Hospital…
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Jackson, Noel, Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry
Noel Jackson, Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). pp. 288+xiv. £50.00 hb. ISBN 978-0521869379. It is by now a long time since the supposed hostility of Romantic poets to science was shown to be a myth—an extrapolation of Wordsworth’s ‘we murder to dissect’ made by C. P. Snow, among others,…
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Holmes, Richard, The Age of Wonder
Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (London: Harper Collins, 2008), pp. xxi + 554. £25. ISBN 978-0-00-714952-0 The best feature of this fascinating survey of Romantic science is Richard Holmes’s skill in bringing to utterly believable life the domestic circumstances in which scientific discovery was…
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Gooday, Graeme, Domesticating Electricity
Graeme Gooday, Domesticating Electricity: Technology, Uncertainty and Gender, 1880-1914 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008). 292 pp. £60 hb. ISBN 978 1 85196 580 9. Scholars of the history of technology will be justifiably pleased by this informative survey of the slow but steady progression of electricity from an uncertain and luxurious alternative to generating power…
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McLean, Steven, H. G. Wells: Interdisciplinary Essays and The Early Fiction of H. G. Wells
Steven McLean (ed.), H.G. Wells: Interdisciplinary Essays (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 184 pp. £19.99pbk. ISBN: 978-1443811262. Steven McLean, The Early Fiction of H.G. Wells: Fantasies of Science (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 242pp. £50hbk. ISBN: 978-0230535626. H.G. Wells: Interdisciplinary Essays (first published in hardback in 2008) is the product of an annual H.G. Wells Society symposium,…
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Cordle, Daniel, States of Suspense
Daniel Cordle, States of Suspense: The Nuclear Age, Postmodernism and United States Fiction and Prose (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008). ix+172pp. £50.00 hb. ISBN 978 0 7190 7712 8. Daniel Cordle’s brilliant analysis of North American literature during the Cold War focuses not on images of nuclear destruction, but instead on descriptions of nuclear anxiety.…
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King, Christa Knellwolf, Faustus and the Promises of the New Science
Christa Knellwolf King, Faustus and the Promises of New Science, c. 1580-1730: From the Chapbooks to Harlequin Faustus (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008). 216 pp. £55 hb. ISBN 0754661334. (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) It is one of the most widely acknowledged truths in the Faustus criticism that the dangers of unrestrained curiosity…