Category: General and Theory

Elissa Marder, The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Psychoanalysis, Photography, Deconstruction (New York: Fordham University Press 2012) 320 pp. $35.00 Pb., $90.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780823240555 Since the nineteenth century, the prevailing discourse concerning mechanical reproduction has been bound to the question of labour: William Morris, the Art and Crafts Movement, and later Walter…

Evaldas Nekrašas, The Positive Mind: Its Development and Impact on Modernity and Postmodernity (Budapest-New York: Central European University Press 2016) 382 pp. £41.00 Hb. ISBN: 978-963-386-081-6 In this insightful book, the author sets out to re-evaluate what society often regards as a passé theory in philosophy. The Positive Mind: Its Development and Impact on Modernity…

Shelley Trower, Rocks of Nation: The Imagination of Celtic Cornwall (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2015) vii + 258 pp. £70.00 Hb. ISBN: 978-0-7190-9096-7 Does the land beneath our feet define us? Do places have inherent meaning, and if so where do those meanings come from? Shelley Trower’s exciting new study, Rocks of Nation, brings together…

Corinna Wagner and Andy Brown (eds), A Body of Work: An Anthology of Poetry and Medicine (London: Bloomsbury 2016) 532pp. £28.99 Pb , £95.00 Hb.  ISBN: 978-1472511812 Beginning with Wilfred Eastwood’s A Book of Science Verse (Macmillan 1961), there have been several anthologies of poetry and science, most notably Poems of Science, ed. John Heath-Stubbs and…

Deborah Lupton, The Quantified Self (Cambridge: Polity Press 2016) 183 pp. £15.99 Pb, £50.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781509500598 Deborah Lupton’s timely sociological survey of the latest trends in technologically assisted self-tracking cultures focuses on both voluntary and coercive forms of personalized data gathering. In contrast to older forms of collecting and reflecting on information about oneself…

John Seamon, Memory and Movies: What Films Can Teach Us about Memory (Cambridge MA: MIT Press 2015) 272 pp. $21.95 ePub, PDF, $30.95 Hb. ISBN: 9780262029711 From psychoanalysis to ecocriticism, commentators of various theoretical hues have attempted to marry scientific discourse and film studies. However, critical discussions that use neuroscience and cinema in concert are…

Hilary Rose and Steven Rose, Can Neuroscience Change Our Minds? (Cambridge: Polity Press 2016) 170 pp. £35.00 Hb, £9.99 Pb. ISBN: 9780745689319 The equivocal title of this short book by Emerita Professor of Social Policy Hilary Rose and Emeritus Professor of Neuroscience Steven Rose is admittedly ‘a restatement of our overall perspective on the mutual…

Martin Willis (ed.) Staging Science: Scientific Performance on Street, Stage and Screen (London: Palgrave 2016) xi+140 pp. £29.99 EPUB & PDF, £37.99 Hb. ISBN: 978-1-137-49993-6 The relationship between science and performance is an issue which scholars across many disciplines have found compelling. In the field of geography, Charles Withers and David Livingstone have examined the…

Karin Sellberg, Lena Wånggren, and Kamillea Aghtan (eds), Corporeality and Culture: Bodies in Movement (Oxford: Routledge 2015) 210 pp. £60 Hb. ISBN: 9781472421272 Occasioned by the 2011 Bodies in Movement: Intersecting Discourses of Materiality in the Sciences and the Arts conference in Edinburgh, Corporeality and Culture is a collection of eleven eclectic – yet wonderfully…

Helena Feder, Ecocriticism and the Idea of Culture: Biology and the Bildungsroman (Abingdon: Routledge 2014) 192 pp.  £95.00 Hb.  ISBN: 978-1-409-40157-5 In Ecocriticism and the Idea of Culture: Biology and the Bildungsroman, first published by Ashgate in 2014, Helena Feder reinterprets that ‘most enduring of modern Western cultural forms’ – the Bildungsroman – as ‘humanism’s…