Category: General and Theory

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…

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…

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…

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…

Abelardo Gil-Fournier and Jussi Parikka, Images, Plants and Environments of Media: Living Surfaces (The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA: 2024) 328 pp. $45.00 Pb. $44.99 eBook. ISBN: 9780262547956 This complex but engaging work conducts a media archaeological analysis of the aesthetics of planetary surfaces, exploring the technological, artistic and cultural practices that respond to, but also…

Jerome de Groot, Double Helix History: Genetics and the Past (Abingdon: Routledge, 2023) 222 pp. £29.59 Pb. £108.00 Hb. £29.59 eBook ISBN: 9780367512354 Considering the ways in which genetic science has begun to inflect not only what we make of the past but especially how historians investigate the past and what they envision this science…

Olga V. Lehmann and Oddgeir Synnes (eds), A Poetic Language of Ageing (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023) 232 pp. $115.00 Hb, $39.95 Pb. ISBN: 9781350256804 A Poetic Language of Ageing brings together the deeply personal experiences of growing older, as expressed through poetry and other creative writing avenues, with research on ageing. It also highlights that…

David N. Livingstone, The Empire of Climate: A History of an Idea (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024) 552 pp. £32.00 Hb. £22.40 ebook. ISBN: 9780691236704 David Noel Livingstone’s The Empire of Climate: A History of an Idea offers to his readers an examination of how the concept of climate has shaped human thought, society, and…

George Estreich, Fables and Futures: Biotechnology, Disability, and the Stories We Tell Ourselves (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2019) 240 pp. $27.95 Hb. ISBN: 9780262039567 Across ten chapters of Fables and Futures: Biotechnology, Disability, and the Stories We Tell Ourselves, George Estreich applies a rhetorical lens to expose the tactics of persuasion and exclusion employed by…