Category: General and Theory

Steven Meyer, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 350 pp. $26.00 Pdf. £74.99 Hb. £24.99 Pb. ISBN: 9781107079724 It is perhaps the fact that 2018 is the anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein that this eclectic collection reminded me of Victor Frankenstein’s response on first seeing…

Wendy Wheeler, Expecting the Earth: Life, Culture, Biosemiotics (London: Lawrence and Wishart 2016) 288 pp. £20 Hb. ISBN: 9781910448670 One of the core pursuits of literature and science scholarship is to confidently uncover the mutual entanglements of science and culture. Yet frequently, humanities scholars addressing the sciences assume a tone of self-conscious apology for dabbling…

N. Katherine Hayles, Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017) 272 pp. 1 Halftone. $24.00 Pb. $72.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780226447742 N. Katherine Hayles’s latest book offers plenty of food for thought, but this volume’s major contribution is actually her positing of an even greater yet simultaneous abundance of food for unthought.…

Ursula K. Heise, Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), xiii + 280 pp. £21.00 Pb. and ebook. £62.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780226358024 There have been five naturally occurring mass extinctions since the beginning of life on Earth. We are now, largely unwittingly, perpetrating the sixth. But who are ‘we’?…

Debra Hawhee, Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw: Animals, Language, Sensation (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2016) 444 pp. 3 halftones. $45.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780226398174 From the start, Debra Hawhee (1970-) is clear about three major elements in her exemplary and pioneering study, Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw: Animals, Language, Sensation: 1) Nonhuman animals pervade premodern, medieval, and early…

Roslynn D. Haynes, From Madman to Crime Fighter: The Scientist in Western Culture (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017) 424 pp. 23 halftones. $34.95 Pb. ISBN: 9781421423043 From Madman to Crime Fighter is actually a version of a book that first appeared in 1994 under the title From Faust to Strangelove: Representations of the Scientist in Western Literature.…

Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, The Forgetting Machine: Memory, Perception, and the Jennifer Aniston Neuron (Dallas, TX: BenBella Books, Inc., 2017) 170 pp. $14.95 Pb. ISBN: 9781944648541 Quiroga begins his exploration of memory by relating a key scene from the film Bladerunner (1982) which posits a world with synthetic humans, known as replicants. They are gifted with…

Naomi Rokotnitz, Trusting Performance: A Cognitive Approach to Embodiment in Drama (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan 2011) 197 pp. £50.99 EPUB, PDF, £64.00 Hb. ISBN: 978-0-230-33737-4 Through her exploration of four key plays written and performed throughout history, Rokotnitz presents her audience with the hypothesis that art doesn’t just imitate life but it is a direct exemplar…

Nathan Brown, The Limits of Fabrication: Materials Science, Materialist Poetics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017) 312 pp. £30.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780823272990 Nathan Brown’s The Limits of Fabrication is based an analogy between poetics and material science. These practices are united, in Brown’s view, by a shared concern with ‘fabrication’ and material limits: in their…

Richard Halpern, Eclipse of Action: Tragedy and Political Economy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017) 313 pp. £34.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780226433653 Halpern begins Eclipse of Action with an argument that modern tragedy reflects a crisis in the political economy, a ‘crisis of action’ rather than a ‘crisis in action’, one that threatens the definition of…