Category: Reviews
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Cole, Lucinda, The Fifth Plague: Cattle, Contagion, and the Medical Posthumanities
Lucinda Cole, The Fifth Plague: Cattle, Contagion, and the Medical Posthumanities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) xii, 260 pp. £87.50 ebook £109.99 Hb. ISBN: 978-3031927928 Lucinda Cole’s The Fifth Plague: Cattle, Contagion, and the Medical Posthumanities, published as part of the series, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, takes up the vexing and urgent question of how…
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Skuse, Alanna, Hurt Feelings: Wounding Oneself in Early Modern Literature
Alanna Skuse, Hurt Feelings: Wounding Oneself in Early Modern Literature (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2025)246 pp. Open access eBook. ISBN: 978-3-032-04565-2. £44.99 Hb. ISBN: 978-3-032-04564-5 Hurt Feelings is an exploration of the range of functions to which self-wounding could be put in early modern literature. Alanna Skuse analyses five categories of function: persuasion (chapter 2), protest…
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Foster, Kate and Crozier, Molly (eds), The Human and the Machine in Literature and Culture: Cultures of Automation
Kate Foster and Molly Crozier (eds), The Human and the Machine in Literature and Culture: Cultures of Automation (New York: Routledge, 2026) 216pp. £116.00 Hb. £34.39 e-book. ISBN: 9781032895871 The subtitle of The Human and the Machine in Literature and Culture – Cultures of Automation – is a useful shorthand for what this collection most…
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Joseph-Lester, Jasper, Kahane, Ahuvia, King, Simon and Leslie, Esther (eds), Walking in Cities: Navigating Post-Pandemic Urban Environments
Jaspar Joseph-Lester, Ahuvia Kahane, Simon King and Esther Leslie (eds), Walking in Cities: Navigating Post-Pandemic Urban Environments (New York: Routledge, 2024) 352 pp. $180.00 Hb. $52.99 Pb. $39.74 e-book. ISBN: 978-1-032-41260-3 ‘Walking in Cities’ is perhaps one of the simplest yet most evocative titles one might give to a book about urban life. As a…
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Howick, Jeremy, The Power of Placebos: How the Science of Placebos and Nocebos Can Improve Health Care
Jeremy Howick, The Power of Placebos: How the Science of Placebos and Nocebos Can Improve Health Care (Johns Hopkins University Press: 2023) 320 pp. $32.95 Hb. ISBN: 9781421446387 Can the solution to the opioid crisis—and perhaps even the superbug problem—lie in using less medication, without compromising pain relief or curability? Professor and Director of Empathic…
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Riccardi, Silvia, Dark Romanticism: Literature, Art, and the Body
Silvia Riccardi, Dark Romanticism: Literature, Art, and the Body, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) 242 pp. £109.99 Hb, ISBN 978-3-031-64364-4 Silvia Riccardi’s Dark Romanticism: Literature, Art and the Body brings together elements of the visual, literary, and scientific in a beautifully illustrated and incredibly detailed volume. Throughout the work, Riccardi presents a fascinating interplay between the…
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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…
