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Music and Academia in Victorian Britain by Rosemary Golding, and: Music & the British Military in the Long Nineteenth Century by Trevor Herbert and Helen Barlow, and: Music and Institutions in Nineteenth-Century Britain ed. by Paul Rodmell (review)

knowledges, “concerns itself primarily with representation,” but she suggests that comparing the practices of historians and literary critics with those of scientists might prompt consideration of how an “overemphasis on language can lead to a blindness to materiality beyond language” (8). When exploring Darwin’s views on human-animal continuities, moreover, humanities scholars, confronted by the more material concerns of scientists, could be led to ponder “what of the animals themselves?”, and even to reflect how the obfuscating preoccupation with language and rhetorical representation in academic research “can be complicit with the inhumane treatment of animals” (8). The genuine but sometimes awkward multidisciplinarity of After Darwin provokes profound ethical concerns for the kinds of humanities disciplines that are involved in the academic field of Victorian studies. In Reflecting on Darwin, on the other hand, the interdisciplinarity is between literary critics and contemporary cultural and social theorists, and throughout the emphasis of the various different chapters is unashamedly on language, rhetoric, and representation. The final section of the book is titled, rather inelegantly, “Darwin as ‘Pop Star’ of Contemporary Theory,” and it explores, among other things, how Darwin’s ateleology and emphasis on variation can provide a basis for modern literary theory concerned with events and pattern, as argued by Virginia Richter in her chapter “Displacing Humans, Reconfiguring Darwin in Contemporary Culture and Theory,” and how Darwin can help anchor the poststructuralist celebration of polytheistic diversity, as proposed in Nils Wilkinson’s chapter “Ordering Darwin: Evolution and Normativity.” In “(Mis)Representations of Darwin’s Origin,” meanwhile, Felix Sprang avows that “scientific metaphors . . . fundamentally define the questions put to the data and the hypotheses accepted in the scientific community,” although he also assumes that the Origin has certain fixed and stable underlying meanings that have been subject to no less inherently erroneous “misreadings” (114). Reading Reflecting on Darwin alongside After Darwin makes all the more compelling Richardson’s reflections in the latter that working in conjunction with scientists can “remind us of the limits of language, recalling to us an appreciation that it is part of a larger world” (3). It is notable that most of the contributors to Reflecting on Darwin are based in Germany, while those in After Darwin are predominantly Anglo-American, and while Darwin—and especially the “affective Darwin” who has emerged in recent years —is a pivotal figure in both intellectual traditions, their different conceptions of interdisciplinarity are evident in the two book’s respective approaches to him. Gowan Dawson University of Leicester