Category: Early Modern to Eighteenth Century

Rebecca Laroche and Jennifer Munroe, Shakespeare and Ecofeminist Theory (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2017) 216 pp. £75.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781472590473. Ecofeminism has emerged as a relatively new feminist theory as part of third-wave feminism. Ecofeminist literary criticism ‘redress[es] inequalities that result not only from dominations that subject women…Others..and non-humans to destructive pratices’ (xvii). Such readings…

Joseph Drury, Novel Machines: Technology and Narrative Form in Enlightenment Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017) 269 pp. £60 Hb. ISBN: 978-0-19-879238-3 In a book that considers how the novel functions as a machine, it is comforting to find an approach which leaves programmatic thinking far behind. In Novel Machines, Joseph Drury employs a set…

Mary Fairclough, Literature, Electricity and Politics 1740-1840: ‘Electrick Communication Every Where’ (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2017) 264 + ix pp. £63.99 PDF & EPUB, £79.99 Hb. ISBN: 978-1-137-59314-6 Throughout history, perhaps few phenomena have seemed as strange or as spectacular as electricity –observable and demonstrated long before it was understood. Mary Fairclough’s Literature, Electricity and Politics…

Claire Hansen, Shakespeare and Complexity Theory (Oxford: Routledge 2017) 222 pp. £105 Hb. ISBN: 9781138291287 Early modern literary studies is witnessing renewed interest in the period’s understanding of knowledge production. From the framework of disknowledge (Katherine Eggert), intuition in the sciences (Mary Thomas Crane), and occult ways of understanding (Mary Floyd-Wilson), scholars are turning to…