Tag: 2009

  • McConnell, Frank, The Science of Fiction and the Fiction of Science

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    Patrick Parrinder

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    Frank McConnell, The Science of Fiction and the Fiction of Science: Collected Essays on SF Storytelling and the Gnostic Imagination, ed. by Gary Westfahl (Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland, 2009). xii+212 pp. £28.95 hb. ISBN 978-0-7864-3722-1. The J. Lloyd Eaton conferences on science fiction and fantasy have been held annually at the University of California,…

  • Fromm, Harold, The Nature of Being Human

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    Roger Ebbatson

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    Harold Fromm, The Nature of Being Human: From Environmentalism to Consciousness (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). x+299 pp. £18.00 hb. ISBN 9780801891298. Walter Benjamin maintained that the writer should use ‘I’ only in personal letters, but in The Nature of Being Human Harold Fromm does not hesitate to personalise his eco-critical discourse, producing a…

  • Rudy, Jason R., Electric Meters: Victorian Physiological Poetics

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    Jason David Hall

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    Jason R. Rudy, Electric Meters: Victorian Physiological Poetics (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2009). xiii + 222 pp. £40.50 hb. ISBN 0821418823. Electric Meters—the subject of which should not be confused with devices you may (or may not) have fitted to your power mains at home—is an ambitious and welcome addition to the growing field…

  • Knight, Leah, Of Books and Botany in Early Modern England

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    Sam George

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    Leah Knight,Of Books and Botany in Early Modern England: Sixteenth-Century Plants and Print Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009). pp xvi +163. £55.00. hb. ISBN 978-0-7546-6586-1 (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) Leah Knight’s Of Books and Botany in Early Modern England explores the unexpected ways in which plants and texts were imagined in…

  • Höfer, Bernadette, Psychosomatic Disorders in Seventeenth-Century French Literature

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    Lisa Wynne Smith

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    Bernadette Höfer, Psychosomatic Disorders in Seventeenth-Century French Literature (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). 245 pp. £55 hb. ISBN 978-0-7546-6621-9 (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) In her fascinating book Psychosomatic Disorders, Höfer explores the ‘dialogue’ between the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries on the subject of the relationship of mind and body (7). Neurobiologists, among…

  • Kuhn, Bernhard, Autobiography and Natural Science in the Age of Romanticism

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    Amber K. Regis

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    Bernhard Kuhn, Autobiography and Natural Science in the Age of Romanticism: Rousseau, Goethe, Thoreau (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). 171 pp. £55 hb. ISBN 978-0-7546-6166-5. (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) Bernhard Kuhn’s engaging study draws life writing into current academic debates concerning the historical relationship between the arts and sciences. Contesting C.P Snow’s…

  • Faubert, Michelle, Rhyming Reason

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    Jane Darcy

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    Michelle Faubert, Rhyming Reason: The Poetry of Romantic-Era Psychologists, The Enlightenment World: Political and Intellectual History of the Long Eighteenth Century Series (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009), 304 pp. £60.00 hb, ISBN 9781851969555 In Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, Hunter and Macalpine noted the curiosity that many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century psychiatric physicians wrote verse. They…

  • Davidson, Jenny, Breeding: A Partial History of the Eighteenth Century

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    Carolyn D. Williams

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    Jenny Davidson, Breeding: A Partial History of the Eighteenth Century(New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), xx+292 pp. £22.50 hb. ISBN 978-0-231-13878-9 (book), ISBN 978-0-231-51111-7 (ebook). Jenny Davidson’s original synthesis appeals equally to specialists in eighteenth-century literature and science, and readers interested in the history of the life sciences, agriculture, education or language. With elegance and…

  • Talairach-Vielmas, Laurence, Wilkie Collins, Medicine and the Gothic

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    Verity Burke

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    Laurence Talairach-Vielmas, Wilkie Collins, Medicine and the Gothic (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009). 224pp. £75 hb. ISBN 0708322239. Teresa Goddu’s assertion that ‘Gothic registers its culture’s anxieties’ frames an important literary theme in the nineteenth century. With medical theories such as physiology that reduced ‘man to “matter”’ (p. 5), scientific revelations such as Darwin’s…

  • Bowler, Peter J., Science for All

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    Rachel Crossland

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    Peter J. Bowler, Science for All: The Popularisation of Science in Early Twentieth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). xii+339 pp. £31 hb. ISBN 978-0-226-06863-3. In Science for All: The Popularisation of Science in Early Twentieth-Century Britain Peter Bowler seeks to redress the balance as far as studies of popular science are concerned, investigating…

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