Category: General and Theory

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…

Fred Botting and Catherine Spooner (eds), Monstrous Media/Spectral Subjects: Imaging Gothic from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2017) 192 pp. £75.00 Hb. ISBN: 978-0-7190-8977-0 Fred Botting and Catherine Spooner’s edited collection Monstrous Media/Spectral Subjects: Imaging Gothic from the Nineteenth Century to the Present is the latest installment of Manchester University…

Josie Billington, Is Literature Healthy? (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2016) 145pp. £14.99 Pb. ISBN: 9780198724698 In the concluding pages of Is Literature Healthy? Josie Billington states that ‘literature and literary reading are possibly the best forms of thinking that humans in need or trouble will ever have’ (134), and certainly the book offers a very…

Fay Bound Alberti, This Mortal Coil: The Human Body in History and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2016) 302 pp. £20.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780199599035 This Mortal Coil is an ambitious work that attempts to contextualize representations of the human body through eight metonymical body parts: the spine, the breast, the vagina, the heart, the brain,…

Robert T Tally Jr (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space (Abingdon: Routledge 2017) 375pp. £175 Hb. ISBN: 978-1-138-81635-0 The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space is a collection of thirty-two essays through which editor Robert T Tally Jr. showcases a variety of approaches to questions of space and place in literature. The Handbook…

Rajani Sudan, The Alchemy of Empire: Abject Materials and the Technologies of Colonialism (New York: Fordham University Press 2016) $16.99 EPUB, $25.00 Pb, $85.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780823270675 In The Alchemy of Empire, Rajani Sudan exposes the significant extent to which British Enlightenment science was informed by Indian technology, thus undermining the traditional Orientalist idea that…

Sarah M Pourciau, The Writing of Spirit: Soul, System, and The Roots of Language Science (New York: Fordham University Press 2017) $16.99 EPUB, $25.00 Pb, $90.00 Hb ISBN: 9780823275625 The Writing of Spirit opens up new directions of thinking about the rise of language science from the eighteenth century into the first half of the…

Kenneth Asher, Literature, Ethics, and the Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2017) 194 pp. $80 PDF, £75 Hb. ISBN: 9781107185951 In Literature, Ethics, and the Emotions, Kenneth Asher takes further what he describes as the ‘ethical turn’ in literary studies (175). At a time when literary theory was dominated by deconstruction, postmodernism and a scepticism…

Ursula K Heise, Jon Christensen and Michelle Niemann (eds), The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities (Oxford: Routledge 2017) 490pp. £175.00 Hb. ISBN: 1138786748 If we were judging a book by its size, weight or cover, The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities is an intimidating collection on all counts. The collection claims to make…

Bruce Clarke (ed.), Earth, Life, and System: Evolution and Ecology on a Gaian Planet (New York: Fordham University Press 2015), xiii+347 pp. Pb $35, $95 Hb. ISBN: 9780823265244 Lynn Margulis (1938-2011) was one of the boldest and most imaginative evolutionary and ecological theorists of the late twentieth century. Although her name does not appear on…