Ralph O’Connor, The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802–1856

The 19th century certainly knew how to appeal to the sensibilities of the British public, marketing sensation and making the audience’s hair stand on end and their flesh creep. At the time when geology and paleontology emerged as new scientific disciplines, scientists particularly took pains to popularise their theories and finds through dramatic mises-en-scènes. Though 19th-century geologists contributed to the popularisation of their discipline through public platforms (whether in the shape..

David Philip Miller and Peter Hanns Reill (eds), Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany and the Representations of Nature

Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany and the Representations of Nature, edited by David Philip Miller and Peter Hanns Reill, is a volume which derives from a conference held at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library and entitled “Visions of Empire”. Although the conference and the hardback publication that followed are not recent, the fresh publication of the collection in paperback fully deserves a review. This engaging book deals with representations of nature and tackles the significance..

Saverio Tomaiuolo, Victorian Unfinished Novels: The Imperfect Page

The field of literature abounds with unfinished novels which have often inspired later writers to rewrite the story with a closure. Recently, Dan Simmons’s revision of The Mystery of Edwin Drood in Drood (2009) took fans of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins into the catacombs beneath London, and many neo-Victorian novels are frequently sequels of unfinished Victorian novels. These unfinished novels, however, are seldom examined by literary critics, as Saverio Tomaiuolo’s Victorian Unfinished..

Ingrid H. Tague, Animal Companions: Pets and Social Change in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Ingrid H. Tague’s Animal Companions: Pets and Social Change in Eighteenth-Century Britain is Animalbus’s fifth volume – a series which includes books such as Rachel Poliquin’s The Breathless Zoo: Taxidermy and the Cultures of Longing (2012), Gorgeous Beasts: Animal Bodies in Historical Perspective (2012), edited by Joan B. Landes, Paula Young Lee and Paul Youngquist, and Animals on Display: The Creaturely in Museums, Zoos and Natural History (2013), edited by Liv Emma Thorsen, Karen A. Rader ..

Ingrid H. Tague, Animal Companions: Pets and Social Change in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Ingrid H. Tague’s Animal Companions: Pets and Social Change in Eighteenth-Century Britain is Animalbus’s fifth volume – a series which includes books such as Rachel Poliquin’s The Breathless Zoo: Taxidermy and the Cultures of Longing (2012), Gorgeous Beasts: Animal Bodies in Historical Perspective (2012), edited by Joan B. Landes, Paula Young Lee and Paul Youngquist, and Animals on Display: The Creaturely in Museums, Zoos and Natural History (2013), edited by Liv Emma Thorsen, Karen A. Rader ..

Lawrence Frank, Victorian Detective Fiction and the Nature of Evidence: The Scientific Investigations of Poe, Dickens, and Doyle

Victorian Detective Fiction and the Nature of Evidence has recently been republished in paperback, and it is a very good opportunity to present Frank’s argument to those who are still unfamiliar with it, as interdisciplinary approaches are increasingly in vogue in the humanities. Indeed, Frank’s study sets side by side detective fiction and the history of science, probing the connections between the two through the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle. At a time wh..

Ann C. Colley, Wild Animal Skins in Victorian Britain: Zoos, Collections, Portraits and Maps

From the eighteenth century and throughout the Victorian period wild animals were recurrently exhibited in Britain. Locked up behind bars in zoological gardens or menageries, these exotic animals entertained children and adults from all social classes just as they emblematized the global expansion of the British empire. But the Victorians particularly assigned meanings to the wild skins that were exhibited throughout the country, as Ann C. Colley’s Wild Animal Skins in Victorian Britain argue..

Fay Bound Alberti, Matters of the Heart: History, Medicine and Emotion

Where is the seat of emotions and has it changed through time? This is one of the questions that Fay Bound Alberti’s Matters of the Heart: History, Medicine and Emotion addresses, in a study that traces the trajectory of the meanings of the heart from the symbol of emotions to an organ subject to pathologies, medical theorizing and specialization. Still, as the book makes explicit, it is the enduring presence of the heart as an emotional organ which explains that the heart remains a problemat..

Andrew Cunningham, The Anatomist Anatomis’d: An Experimental Discipline in Enlightenment Europe

After his fascinating The Anatomical Renaissance: The Resurrection of the Anatomical Projects of the Ancients (1997), Andrew Cunningham offers us a new study of anatomy, The Anatomist Anatomis’d: An Experimental Discipline in Enlightenment Europe. This time, Cunningham looks at how anatomists contributed to the creation of anatomy as a discipline in the long eighteenth century, the “Enlightenment” being a time when the discipline flourished as never before or since. Thus anatomy, throughout t..

Srdjan Smajic, Ghost-Seers, Detectives and Spiritualists: Theories of Vision in Victorian Literature and Science

Srdjan Smajic’s Ghost-Seers, Detectives and Spiritualists: Theories of Vision in Victorian Literature and Science is a study which looks at the links between the narrative techniques of ghost stories and those of detective stories in the 19th century in the context of contemporary theories of vision and sight. Smajic makes explicit how the visual was a problematic category and examines "the ways in which ghost and detective fiction are structured by and in conversation with contemporary philo..