Martin Willis

Using key canonical science fiction narratives, 'Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines' examines the intersection of the literary and scientific cultures of the 19th century.

Science Fiction and the Cultures of Science in the Nineteenth Century

Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines

This book explores the Victorian concept of vision across scientific and cultural forms. Willis charts the characterization of vision through four organizing principles – small, large, past and future – to arrive at a Victorian conception of what vision was. Willis then explores how this Victorian vision influenced twentieth-century ways of seeing.

Ocular Horizons

Vision, Science and Literature, 1870-1920

This book considers scientific performances across two centuries, from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Performances include demonstrations of technologies, experiments that look like theatre, theatre that looks like science, tourist representations and natural history film-making. Its key aim is to open debate on how scientific activity, both historical and contemporary, might be understood in the context of performance studies and the imaginative acts required to stage engaging performances. Scientific performances have become increasingly of interest to historians of science, literature and science scholars, and in the field of science studies. As yet, however, no work has sought to examine a range of scientific performances with the aim of interrogating and illuminating the kinds of critical and theoretical practices that might be employed to engage with them. With scientific performance likely to become ever more central to scholarly study in the next few years this volume offer a timely, and early, intervention in the existing debates, and aims, too, to be a touchstone for future work.

Scientific Performance on Street, Stage and Screen

Staging Science

Alexandra Warwick

One-stop resource offering a complete textbook for courses in Victorian literature - provides students with a comprehensive guide to the historical and cultural context; major authors and movements; reading primary and critical texts; key critics, concepts and topics; major critical approaches; directions of new research.

The Victorian Literature Handbook

Catherine Wynne

Victorian Literary Mesmerism examines the engagement between literature and mesmerism in Victorian writing. Drawing on recent trends in interdisciplinary literary scholarship the essays collected here investigate the complex connections between scientific mesmerism, its manifestations in the Victorian social and cultural world, and the literary imagination. Here, for the first time, the varied themes and contexts shaped by mesmeric practices are brought together in one volume. Mesmerism's influence on phrenology, medicine and mental health; its interaction with the occult and with communication technologies; the effects of mesmeric principles on gender and sexuality, as well as on criminal behaviour, are all set within the context of literary texts that interrogate and critique mesmerism's influence on the Victorians. This volume will be of interest, therefore, to scholars of Victorian literature and the history of science, as well as to those interested in cultural history with a focus on gender, sexuality, and sciences of the mind.

Victorian Literary Mesmerism

This edited work collects together some of the best academic work on the most important and sensational murder case of the 19th century.

Media, Culture, History

Jack the Ripper

David Clifford

Alex Warwick

Elisabeth Wadge

The essays in this collection explore the influence of nineteenth-century culture on the rise of these sciences, investigating the emergence of marginal sciences such as scriptural geology and spiritualism. Repositioning Victorian Sciences is a valuable addition to our understanding of nineteenth-century science in its original context, and will also be of great interest to those studying the era as a whole.

Martin Willis

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