Category: Early Modern to Eighteenth Century

Claire Preston, The Poetics of Scientific Investigation in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2015) 320 pp. Hb, £60. ISBN: 9780198704805 The language of early modern scientific inquiry was neither predetermined nor did it elicit consensus among its practitioners regarding the most effective means for conveying information. Instead, as Claire Preston amply demonstrates, the rhetoric…

Elizabeth Yale, Sociable Knowledge: Natural History and the Nation in Early Modern Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2016) 384pp. Hb, PDF $69.95. ISBN: 978-0-8122-4781-7 Tracing the networks of correspondence, authorship, and print in early modern natural history, Elizabeth Yale describes the field’s project of delineating Britain topographically and thus as a political object. Sociable Knowledge…

Katherine Eggert, Disknowledge: Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) 368 pp. Hb, EPUB, PDF $55.00. ISBN: 978-0-8122-4751-0 Katherine Eggert’s examination of early modern alchemy and epistemic practices begins with a seemingly irrational proposition; namely, it is “possible not to know what one knows” (2). As…

Mary Thomas Crane, Losing touch with Nature: Literature and the New Science in Sixteenth-Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 2014) 248 pp. Hb, EPUB, Mobi, PDF $49.95. ISBN: 978-1-4214-1531-4 Losing touch with Nature focuses on the reception of new scientific views in sixteenth-century England, a changing period during which the Aristotelian, Galenic, and Ptolemaic systems…

Mona Narain and Karen Gevirtz,(eds.), Gender and Space in British Literature, 1660-1820 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014). 239 pp. £95.95 Hb, PDF, ePUB. ISBN: 978-1-4724-1508-0 This book covers the period of British history and literature between 1660 and 1820 when borders and boundaries including gendered geographies of power began to be reconfigured due to structural transformations in…

Jen E Boyle, Anamorphosis in Early Modern Literature (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010) ix + 169 pp. £95 Hb. ISBN 9781409400691 Jen Boyle’s Anamorphosis in Early Modern Literature traces the developments in anamorphic representations in art, science and literature from late seventeenth through to the eighteenth century. Aptly beginning the book with an extract from Samuel Pepys’s…

Brad Pasanek, Metaphors of Mind: An Eighteenth-Century Dictionary (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2015). 392 pp.  $49.95 Hb, ePUB, PDF, MOBI. ISBN 978-1-4214-1688-5 Brad Pasanek’s Metaphors of Mind is a bold, broad and ambitious study. This compendium of metaphors that were used in the eighteenth century – ‘the heyday of figurative empiricism in Green Britain’…

Gottlieb, Evan and Juliet Shields, (eds.) Representing Place in British Literature and Culture, 1660–1830: From Local to Global (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013) 234 pp. £95.00 Hb, PDF, EPub. ISBN: 978-1-4724-0218-9. Although dedicated to British literary culture, this stimulating volume participates in a wider critical shift which looks beyond the nation-state towards varieties of local, trans-local, national,…

Jennifer Munro, Edward Geisweidt, and Lynne Bruckner, eds. Ecological Approaches to Early Modern English Texts: A Field Guide to Reading and Teaching (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015). xx + 274pp. £58.50 Hb, £19.99 Pb, ePUB, PDF. ISBN 978-1-4724-1675-9 Ecological Approaches to Early Modern English Texts is an ambitious and useful reevaluation of contemporary ecocritical and environmentalist practices in literary studies. Indeed,…

Monica Matei-Chesnoiu, Re-imagining Western European Geography in English Renaissance Drama (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 220 pp. £56 Hb, EPUB, PDF. ISBN 978-0-230-36630-5. Literary geography, or the study of connections between literary and geographic texts, has profited from extensive scholarly inquiry in the past decade. In line with this ‘spatial turn’ in research, scholars of early…