Category: General and Theory
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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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Klinger, Sebastian P., Sleep Works: Experiments in Science and Literature, 1899-1929
Sebastian P. Klinger, Sleep Works: Experiments in Science and Literature, 1899-1929 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025) 255 pp. £45.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781421450803 In Sleep Works, historian and literary scholar Sebastian P. Klinger sets out to provide a ‘comprehensive account’ of early twentieth-century scientific, pharmaceutical and literary understandings of sleep (134). By examining developments in…
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Chi, Chienyn, Madness, Psychiatry, and Empire in Postcolonial Literature
Chienyn Chi, Madness, Psychiatry, and Empire in Postcolonial Literature. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) xvii + 143 pp. £109.99 Hb. £89.99 ebook. ISBN: 978-3-031-59891-3 Chienyn Chi’s work is a bold attempt to decolonize psychiatric and psychoanalytic discourse by revealing how theories of madness are deeply entangled in imperial histories and power…
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Waller-Peterson, Belinda, Womb Work: Healing Narratives as Reparative Praxis in Black Women’s Literature
Belinda Waller-Peterson, Womb Work: Healing Narratives as Reparative Praxis in Black Women’s Literature (South Carolina: Clemson University Press, 2024) 156 pp. $130 Hb. ISBN: 9781638040644 This book is deservedly on the BSLS 2024 Book Prize shortlist. It is impressive in a number of ways and it feels politically urgent. The series it is published in…
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Dimick, Sarah,Unseasonable: Climate Change in Global Literatures
Sarah Dimick, Unseasonable: Climate Change in Global Literatures (Ohio: Columbia UP, 2024) 328 pp. £30 Pb. ISBN: 9780231209250 Sarah Dimick has coined the term ‘climate arrhythmias’ to describe that feeling the seasons are not working as they should be or as they usually have done in the past (p. 2). These arrhythmias can be experienced…
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Christensen, Joel P., Storylife: On Epic, Narrative, and Living Things
Joel P. Christensen, Storylife: On Epic, Narrative, and Living Things (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2025) x+234 pp. £20.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780300269239 Fifteen years ago I wrote a review for the BSLS of three books that sought to make profound claims about epic, narrative and living things. Two of them – Jonathan Gottschall’s The Rape…
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Clayton, Jay, Literature, Science, and Public Policy: From Darwin to Genomics
Jay Clayton, Literature, Science, and Public Policy: From Darwin to Genomics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023) 290 pp. £85.00 Hb. Open Access via Cambridge Core. ISBN: 9781009263528 Jay Clayton’s valuable book takes a range of texts that may seem familiar to BSLS readers and remakes them as the foundations for a new set of approaches…
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Evens, Aden, The Digital and Its Discontents
Aden Evens, The Digital and Its Discontents (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2024) 264 pp. $116.00 Hb. $29.00 Pb. ISBN: 9781517916329 Changing one’s laptop can be likened to moving into a new house. The rooms would be located differently, and walls would not immediately have the frames one is so used to seeing. One’s body feels…
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Langbein, Julia, Fuchs, Anne and Cosgrove, Mary (eds) Framing Aging: Interdisciplinary Perspectives for Humanities and Social Sciences Research
Julia Langbein, Anne Fuchs and Mary Cosgrove (eds) Framing Aging: Interdisciplinary Perspectives for Humanities and Social Sciences Research (London: Bloomsbury, 2024) 264 pp. £76.50 Hb. ISBN: 9781350341418 Framing Aging is the latest in Bloomsbury’s Studies in the Humanities, Ageing and Later Life series, boasting an interdisciplinary response to the rising field of gerontology, or the…