Category: General and Theory

Terence Cave, Thinking with Literature: Towards a Cognitive Criticism (Oxford University Press 2016) xiv + 199 pp. £25.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780198749417 Although Terence Cave’s Thinking with Literature contains the early disclaimer that it is not meant to be read as an introductory handbook, teaching manual, or systematic account of cognitive literary criticism (viii), it lends…

Tim Lewens, Cultural Evolution: Conceptual Challenges (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) 224 pp. £25.00 Hb. ISBN: 9870199674183 As a leading Darwin scholar, Tim Lewens is admirably qualified to produce a useful work on the knotty problems of cultural evolution. In this book Lewens guides us through the various arguments on evolutionary approaches to cultural change,…

Ute Frevert, Christian Bailey, Pascal Eitler, Benno Gammerl, Bettina Hitzer, Margrit Pernau, Monique Scheer, Anne Schmidt, and Nina Verheyen, Emotional Lexicons: Continuity and Change in the Vocabulary of Feeling 1700-2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) x + 287 pp. Hb £68.00. ISBN: 9780199655731 In the opening chapter of this ambitious collaborative book, Ute Frevert acknowledges…

Gary B. Ferngren, Medicine and Religion: a Historical Introduction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014) 256 pp. Hb $49.95, Pb, EPub, Mobi, PDF $24.95. ISBN: 9781421412153 Gary Ferngren’s Medicine and Religion is a survey of the intersections between medical practices, broadly defined, and religious traditions across different societies and historical periods in the Western world.…

Patrick Parrinder, Utopian Literature and Science: From the Scientific Revolution to Brave New World and Beyond (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) ix, 222 pp. Hb £55.00. ISBN: 978-1-137-45677-9 Several questions provide the framework for Patrick Parrinder’s Utopian Literature and Science, the most compelling of which, perhaps, is whether or not there is a profound and irresolvable…

Paul B. Armstrong, How Literature Plays with the Brain (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013) xv+221 pp. Hb $49.95, Pb, EPub, Mobi, PDF $29.95. ISBN: 978-1-4214-1576-5 Although this study covers ground familiar to anyone conversant with scientific and/or humanist perspectives on such notions as empathy, de-familiarization or hermeneutics, Armstrong’s analysis – as suggested by the…

Stuart Peterfreund, Turning Points in Natural Theology from Bacon to Darwin: The Way of the Argument from Design (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2012). 212 pp. £58 Hb, EPUB, PDF. ISBN 978-0-230-10884-4. Since the publication of Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots in 1983, Darwin and evolution have remained essential topics around which the preoccupations and methodologies of…

Christopher Hamlin, More Than Hot: A Short History of Fever (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 2014). 400 pp, 11 halftones, 9 line drawings. £16.50 Pb, EPub, PDF. ISBN: 978-1-421-41502-4. Christopher Hamlin’s comprehensive work seeks to address the common experience of fever, moving from its role in classical medicine, to post-modern conceptions of the affliction.  With…

Margareth Hagen and Margery Vibe Skagen (eds.) Literature and Chemistry: Elective Affinities (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2014), 340pp. ISBN 978-87-7124-174-7.   The Interdisciplinary study of literature and science has continued to progress in the last few decades. Academics are beginning to leave behind the concept of C. P. Snow’s “two cultures” and are focusing on the commonalities…