Reviews
The Smallpox Report:
Vaccination and the Romantic Illness Narrative
Author: Fuson Wang
The Wordsworth Circle
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Written in the shadow of vaccine hesitancy and motivated by the urgent problem of vaccine refusal, this book is by no means an isolated tale about the first decades of the nineteenth century…
Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies
Author: Maddie Mortimer
Journal of Medical Humanities
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This is a work of brilliant formal experimentation. Achieving the consolation required of elegy is difficult to pull off at any time; that Mortimer manages to do so through the voice of cancer is a masterstroke…
Romantic Medicine and the Gothic Imagination
Author: Laura Kremmel
Modern Philology
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The cordon sanitaire that high realism has placed around this most pungent of genres—in an apparent effort to contain its contaminating influence—has had precisely the opposite effect than the one intended. The Gothic proves to be far more flexible and powerful than realist fiction, more able to imagine solutions to the most uncanny and supernatural fact of human life in the twenty-first century…
Kept from All Contagion
Author: Kari Nixon
Nuncius: Journal of the Material and Visual History of Science
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Any book published in 2020 will inevitably be read through the conditions of pandemic, but this book, on the representation of contagious disease in nineteenth-century literature, proves to be spookily prescient…
The Warm South: A Novel
Author: Paul Kerschen
Public Books
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Out of a poem that begins with a desire for oblivion comes a lush novel that imagines the poet’s narrow escape from mortality into an unexpected life in Italy. Paul Kerschen’s alternative, realist history asks how a reborn Keats might have navigated his personal and professional futures if he had not died in Rome in 1821…
The Politics of Romanticism: The Social Contract and Literature
Author: Zoe Beenstock
Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas
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A specter haunts Romanticism: the specter of Jean-Jacques Rousseau…
Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century
Author: Anne Stiles
Victorian Network
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Before the term ‘science fiction’ was available for literary-critical taxonomy, which genre was available to an author of creative fiction who wanted to investigate the human brain? In Anne Stiles’s estimation, for late nineteenth-century writers, that genre was the ‘Gothic romance’...
Chaos and Cosmos: Literary Roots of Modern Ecology in the British Nineteenth Century
Author: Heidi C.M. Scott
Studies in Romanticism
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Chaos and Cosmos is an authoritative, truly interdisciplinary book that turns the usual impulse of Romantic studies on its head: instead of ‘sketching out a literary ecocriticism,’ to paraphrase a famous phrase, Scott ambitiously sets out to find the origins of contemporary ecological methods in Romantic and Victorian literature…
The Measure of Manliness: Disability and Masculinity in the Mid-Victorian Novel
Author: Karen Bourrier
Review 19
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According to his reviewers, Henry James ought to have called his novel about Isabel Archer not The Portrait of a Lady, but The Portrait of Two Gentlemen…
Death and Mr Pickwick
Author: Stephen Jarvis
Public Books
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The amorphous literary period that directly preceded Queen Victoria’s ascension to the English throne in 1837 is notorious for true crimes of book history, from the suspicious disappearance of the middle chapters of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein manuscript to the regrettable posthumous burning of Lord Byron’s handwritten Memoirs. But these controversies have nothing on the mysterious circumstances surrounding the publication of Charles Dickens’s first serialized book…
Pathologies of Motion
Author: Kevis Goodman
BARS Review
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Kevis Goodman’s excellent new book opens on a scene of Samuel Taylor Coleridge grumbling. This erstwhile champion of Germanic philosophy was not, it seems, a fan of aesthetics…