Category: Reviews
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Fyfe, Paul, Digital Victorians: From Nineteenth-Century Media to Digital Humanities
Paul Fyfe, Digital Victorians: From Nineteenth-Century Media to Digital Humanities (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2024) 294 pp. $60.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781503640948 Paul Fyfe’s Digital Victorians eloquently takes readers on an exploratory journey bringing together the Victorian period’s ‘new media’ moment and our own. Indeed, for Fyfe, contemporary developments in media technologies and communication – and…
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Joseph, May and Varino, Sofia, Aquatopia: Climate Interventions
May Joseph and Sofia Varino, Aquatopia: Climate Interventions (Routledge, 2023) 97pp. £38.39 Hb. ISBN: 9781032326405 In Aquatopia: Climate Interventions, May Joseph and Sofia Varino present a concise yet conceptually ambitious reflection on climate performance, colonial histories and water ecologies. Situated within Routledge’s Critical Climate Studies series, the book documents and theorises the site-specific performances of…
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Durham, Rebecca A., Be Still Mere Molecule
Rebecca A. Durham, Be Still Mere Molecule (Raleigh, NC, USA: Broken Tribe Press, 2025) 120 pp. $14.95 Pb. ISBN: 9781965412107 How does a poet witness the world? How does a scientist? What if a person were to be both at once? Would that experience of the in-betweenness of both worlds aid them in finding, perhaps…
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Endersby, Jim, The Arrival of the Fittest: Biology’s Imaginary Futures 1900–1935
Jim Endersby, The Arrival of the Fittest: Biology’s Imaginary Futures 1900–1935, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2025) 400 pp. $37.50 Pb. ISBN: 9780226837567 Jim Endersby’s The Arrival of the Fittest: Biology’s Imaginary Futures, 1900-1935 intervenes in histories of evolution by unearthing the popularity of a largely dismissed theory: mutation. Tracing the diffusion of Hugo de…
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Carey, Brycchan, The Unnatural Trade: Slavery, Abolition, and Environmental Writing, 1650-1807
Brycchan Carey, The Unnatural Trade: Slavery, Abolition, and Environmental Writing, 1650-1807 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024) 280 pp. $65.00. Hb. IBSN: 978-0300224412 The Unnatural Trade: Slavery, Abolition, and Environmental Writing, 1650-1807 by Brycchan Carey magnifies the cross-section of eighteenth-century British abolitionist writing that sought to un-naturalize slavery in a part of the world that…
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Berry, Chelsea, Poisoned Relations: Healing, Power, and Contested Knowledge in the Atlantic World
Chelsea Berry, Poisoned Relations: Healing, Power, and Contested Knowledge in the Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025) 273 pp. $49.95 Hb. ISBN: 9781512826494 Chelsea Berry’s work Poisoned Relations: Healing, Power, and Contested Knowledge in the Atlantic World is a deeply interdisciplinary study that reimagines how we understand poison, healing, and power in the context…
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Hayles, N. Katherine, Bacteria to AI: Futures with our Nonhuman Symbionts
N. Katherine Hayles, Bacteria to AI: Futures with our Nonhuman Symbionts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2025) 304 pp. $27.50 Pb. ISBN: 9780226837475 As a species, we Homo sapiens often take it for granted that humanity is separate from, and superior to, the rest of existence. It’s a view that has permeated much of our…
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Martin, Meredith, Poetry’s Data: Digital Humanities and the History of Prosody
Meredith Martin, Poetry’s Data: Digital Humanities and the History of Prosody (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025) 224 pp. £84 Hb. £30 Pb. ISBN: 9780691254678 Meredith Martin’s Poetry’s Data is a large-scale attempt to bring together literary studies, linguistics, digital humanities, and critical archives studies. It presents a compelling case on why we should critically examine…
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Lars Chittka, The Mind of a Bee; Thomas Halliday, Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth’s Extinct Worlds
Lars Chittka, The Mind of a Bee (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2022) 272 pp. £30 Hb. £16.99 Pb. ISBN: 9780691180472 Thomas Halliday, Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth’s Extinct Worlds (Random House, 2022), 416 pp. £10.99 Pb. £9.99 e-book. ISBN: 9780141991146 Both books reviewed here are invitations to travel to imagined worlds: to the…
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Markovits, Stefanie, The Number Sense of Nineteenth-Century British Literature
Stefanie Markovits, The Number Sense of Nineteenth-Century British Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025) 240 pp. $100 Hb. ISBN: 9780198937791 ‘Number sense’ is the term Stefanie Markovits uses to describe the numerical thinking that permeates the lines and pages of nineteenth-century novels and poems, crafting patterns across the tapestry of poetic imagery and narrative arcs. As she…
