Category: General and Theory

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…

Douglas Robinson, Translationality: Essays in the Translational-Medical Humanities (London: Routledge 2017) 239pp.  £105 Hb. ISBN: 9781138727045 At first glance, the main title of this book seems ordinary to the point of blandness, easily mistaken for the simple word ‘translation’; even if this mistake isn’t made, ‘translational’ is common enough and the suffix ‘-ity’ is readily…

A David Redish, The Mind Within the Brain: How We Make Decisions and how those Decisions Go Wrong (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2013) 392 pp. £27.49 Hb. ISBN: 9780199891887 Redish’s book is ambitious in its scope and style; not only does he want to explain how action-selection systems work in the brain, but also how…

Anna Katharina Schaffner, Exhaustion: A History (New York: Columbia University Press 2016) 304 pp. $24.00 Pb, $30.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780231172301 Anna Katharina Schaffner’s Exhaustion: A History offers a comprehensive overview of exhaustion-related conditions from antiquity until the present day. Tracing exhaustion as a medical diagnosis, a cultural phenomenon, and a vehicle of social critique, Schaffner’s…

Anne Whitehead and Angela Woods (eds), The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2016) 700 pp. £175 EPUB, PDF Hb. ISBN: 9781474400046 The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities is a large and well-structured volume with a great deal of ambition. The idea of the project is to move…

Roberto Simanowski, Data Love: The Seduction and Betrayal of Digital Technologies, trans. Brigitte Pichon, John Cayley and Dorian Rydnystsky (New York: Columbia University Press 2016) 176 pp. $30.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780231177269 A notable feature of many recent science fiction novels is that they imagine a future for social media which is very much like its…

Susanne Bach and Folkert Degenring (eds), Dark Nights, Bright Lights: Night, Darkness, and Illumination in Literature (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter 2015) viii + 233 pp. £90.99 Hb. ISBN 978-3-11-041510-0 In an essay entitled ‘From Shakespearean Nights to Light Pollution’ in the collection Urban Lighting, Light Pollution and Society (ed. Josiane Meier, Ute Hasenöhrl, Katharina Krause,…

Chris Danta and Helen Groth (eds), Mindful Aesthetics: Literature and Science of the Mind 224 pp. (London: Bloomsbury 2014) £27.00 PDF. ISBN: 9781441102867 What is the current state of the cognitive turn in literary studies? Mindful Aesthetics: Literature and the Science of the Mind is a good example of an eclectic collection of essays about…

Michael Burke and Emily T Troscianko (eds), Cognitive Literary Science: Dialogues between Literature and Cognition (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2017) 368pp. £56 Hb. ISBN: 9780190496869 Early work in the field of cognitive science held to the faith of a unified model grounded in a supposed correspondence between the mind and the computer which has been…

Michael Lundblad (ed.), Animalities: Literary and Cultural Studies Beyond the Human, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017) vii + 256 pp. £80 EPUB, PDF, £80 Hb. ISBN: 9781474400022 Michael Lundblad’s edited collection, Animalities, is a timely intervention in literary and cultural criticism, appearing at a moment when, as Lundblad points out, the burgeoning interdisciplinary fields of…