Tag: 2011

Katherine Byrne, Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 223pp. £55 hb. ISBN 978–0–521–76667–8. It has become something of a cliché to observe just how destructive consumption or pulmonary tuberculosis was in the nineteenth century and before: one in four people suffered from it, so writers like Thomas Beddoes claimed. Arguably…

Tamara Ketabgian, The Lives of Machines: The Industrial Imaginary in Victorian Literature and Culture (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2011), 252pp. Pb £30.50. ISBN 0472051407. This fascinating and challenging book stages an intervention not only in our habitual readings of the Victorian industrial novel, but also in our larger sense of how and…

Ian Hesketh, The Science of History in Victorian Britain: Making the Past Speak (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011) 240pp. £60 hb ISBN 978 1 84893 126 8. As all students of cultural history are aware, the way we categorise thinkers depends on the criterion by which we look at them. Victorian historiography is no exception. In…

Virginia Richter, Literature After Darwin: Human Beasts in Western Fiction, 1859-1939 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2011), 272pp, £50 hb, ISBN: 9780230273405 Darwin’s evolutionary theories shattered traditional ideas of human identity. Common origins with the brutes reduced the human from fallen angel to rising ape; and even this image of progressive development was undermined by random mutation and…

Laurie Garrison, Science, Sexuality and Sensation Novels: Pleasures of the Senses (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 248pp, £50.00 hb, ISBN 9780230203167 Of all Victorian literary genres, sensation fiction is perhaps the one which has leant itself most readily to interdisciplinary readings concerning its engagement with contemporary science and pseudo-science. The depiction of extreme mental states such…