Product Description: Nineteenth-century men of science aligned scientific practice with moral excellence as part of an endeavor to secure cultural authority for their discipline. Anne DeWitt examines how novelists from Elizabeth Gaskell to H. G. Wells responded to this alignment...read more

Product Description: A surprising number of Victorian scientists wrote poetry. Many came to science as children through such games as the spinning-top, soap-bubbles and mathematical puzzles, and this playfulness carried through to both their professional work and writing of lyrical and satirical verse...read more

In the 1860s and 1870s, leading neurologists used animal experimentation to establish that discrete sections of the brain regulate specific mental and physical functions. These discoveries had immediate medical benefits: David Ferrier's detailed cortical maps, for example, saved lives by helping surgeons locate brain tumors and haemorrhages without first opening up the skull. These experiments both incited controversy and stimulated creative thought, because they challenged the possibility of an extra-corporeal soul. This book examines the cultural impact of neurological experiments on late Victorian Gothic romances by Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, H. G. Wells and others. Novels like Dracula and Jekyll and Hyde expressed the deep-seated fears and visionary possibilities suggested by cerebral localization research and offered a corrective to the linearity and objectivity of late Victorian neurology.

Product Description: Britain in the long nineteenth century developed an increasing interest in science of all kinds. The essays in this collection uncover this symbiotic relationship between literature and science.

Product Description: This edited collection aims to examine the popularisation of science for children in Britain and France from the middle of the eighteenth century to the end of the Victorian period. It compares and contrasts for the first time popular science works published at the same time in the two countries, focusing both on non-fictional and fictional texts...read more

Product Description: This book, the first to consider Gerard Manley Hopkins as an ecological writer, explores the dimension that social ecology offers to an ecocriticism hitherto dominated by romantic nature writing. The case for a 'green Hopkins' is made through a paradigm of 'Victorian Ecology' that expands the scope of existing studies in Victorian literature and science...read more

Product Description: Gillian Beer's classic Darwin's Plots, one of the most influential works of literary criticism and cultural history of the last quarter century, is here reissued in an updated edition to coincide with the anniversary of Darwin's birth and of the publication of The Origin of Species...read more

Product Description: This collection demonstrates how late-Victorian and Edwardian neurology and fiction shared common philosophical concerns and rhetorical strategies. Between 1860 and 1920 witnessed unprecedented interdisciplinary collaboration between scientists and artists, finding common ground in the prevailing intellectual climate of biological determinism...read more