Category: Modern and Contemporary
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Endersby, Jim, The Arrival of the Fittest: Biology’s Imaginary Futures 1900–1935
Jim Endersby, The Arrival of the Fittest: Biology’s Imaginary Futures 1900–1935, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2025) 400 pp. $37.50 Pb. ISBN: 9780226837567 Jim Endersby’s The Arrival of the Fittest: Biology’s Imaginary Futures, 1900-1935 intervenes in histories of evolution by unearthing the popularity of a largely dismissed theory: mutation. Tracing the diffusion of Hugo de…
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Harrison, Jaime, Digital Culture in Contemporary Fiction
Jaime Harrison, Digital Culture in Contemporary Fiction (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2024), 208 pp. £80 Hb. ISBN:9781802074710 The texts that Jaime Harrison considers in Digital Culture in Contemporary Fiction are part of a broader discussion of contemporary concerns about the way that digital culture, particularly issues of privacy and digital surveillance, can be witnessed in…
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Hamann-Rose, Paul, Genetics and the Novel: Reimagining Life Through Fiction
Paul Hamann-Rose, Genetics and the Novel: Reimagining Life Through Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) 243 pp. £99.00 Hb. £79.99 eBook. ISBN: 9783031531002 In 1953, when James Watson and Francis Crick unveiled the double helix structure of DNA, some marvelled at the molecular blueprint of life, while others speculated…
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Taylor, Stuart J., Mathematics in Postmodern American Fiction
Stuart J. Taylor, Mathematics in Postmodern American Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) ix+308 pp. £109.99 Hb. £89.99 ebook. ISBN: 978-3-031-48670-8 As mathematics appears unreasonably effective in defining and solving problems, we now observe its arresting spread, in real time, into each and every aspect of our life, through its various forms and incarnations – models, data,…
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Farzin, Sina, Gaines, Susan M. and Haynes, Roslynn D., Under the Literary Microscope: Science and Society in the Contemporary Novel
Sina Farzin, Susan M. Gaines and Roslynn D. Haynes, Under the Literary Microscope: Science and Society in the Contemporary Novel (Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 2021) 220 pp. $99.95 Hb. $34.95 Pb. ISBN: 9780271089782 Under the Literary Microscope: Science and Society in the Contemporary Novel is a new collection of essays by Farzin, Gaines and…
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Hall, Kersten T., Insulin – The Crooked Timber: A History from Thick Brown Muck to Wall Street Gold
Kersten T. Hall, Insulin – The Crooked Timber: A History from Thick Brown Muck to Wall Street Gold (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022) 480 pp. £31.49 Hb. ISBN: 9780192855381 Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made. — Immanuel Kant Whether you interpret Kant’s famous quote in a moral sense,…
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Welch, Tana Jean, Advancing Medical Posthumanism through Twenty-First Century American Poetry
Tana Jean Welch, Advancing Medical Posthumanism through Twenty-First Century American Poetry (Palgrave MacMillan, 2024) xv + 200 pp. £99.99. Hb: ISBN 978-3-031-49887-9 Tana Jean Welch inhabits a space where poetry, posthumanism, and medicine converge to show how poetry can provide a posthumanist perspective that activates an ethical understanding of what it means to be ‘human’…
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Jameson, Conor Mark, Finding W. H. Hudson: The Writer Who Came to Britain to Save the Birds
Conor Mark Jameson, Finding W. H. Hudson: The Writer Who Came to Britain to Save the Birds (London: Pelagic Publishing, 1923), 360 pp. £17.99 Pb. ISBN: 9781784273286 It is almost a given that any review or essay (and there is precious few of either) of the work of W. H. Hudson (1841-1922) will lament the…
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Campos, Liliane and Pierre-Louis Patoine (eds), Life, Re-Scaled: The Biological Imagination in 21st-Century Literature and Performance
Liliane Campos and Pierre-Louis Patoine (eds.), Life, Re-Scaled: The Biological Imagination in 21st-Century Literature and Performance (Open Book Publishers, 2022) xvi + 402. £31.41 Hb. £22.91 Pb. ISBN: 978-1-80064-750-3 We live in a world whose multiscalar entanglements can no longer be ignored: the climate crisis is more conspicuous than ever, while our agency and indeed…
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DeFalco, Amelia, Curious Kin in Fictions of Posthuman Care
This book gives all its key terms serious play in service of its exploration of ‘forms of care that resist […] human exceptionalism’ (26). Ranging through curiosity’s interest and strangeness, the biological connections and physical divisions of kin, fictions in several media, and a breathtaking array of posthumanist framings, to the combinations of feeling and…
