Category: Early Modern to Eighteenth Century

Jennifer Flaherty and Deborah Uman, eds, Liberating Shakespeare: Adaptation and Empowerment for Young Adult Audiences (London: Bloomsbury, 2023), 215pp. PB £21.79. ISBN 978-1-350-32024-3 Flaherty and Uman emphasise in their introduction, ‘Taking Young Adults Seriously’, that Young Adult (YA) Shakespeare is not about ‘dumbing down’ Shakespeare’s work: ‘fun is not synonymous with inconsequential or frivolous. Contemporary…

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…