Category: Modern and Contemporary

Mark S Morrisson, Modernism, Science, and Technology (London: Bloomsbury 2017) 192 pp. $23.00 EPUB, PDF, $29.95 Pb, $94.00 Hb. ISBN 9781474233415 Modernist studies have been at the forefront of the recent turn towards interdisciplinary research in literature and science. In Modernism, Science, and Technology (2017), Mark S Morrisson offers an illuminating overview of the field.…

John Rieder, Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2017) viii + 208 pp. $22.95 Pb, $75.00 Hb. ISBN: 978-0-8195-7715-3 Rieder’s thesis in this innovative approach to the history of what we understand to be science fiction is that ‘it is an organic genre of the mass cultural genre system’…

Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim, eds, Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2015) 360 pp. $105.00 Hb. $35.00 Pb. ISBN: 9780226276496 Visions of the future, such as those contained within science fiction, involve depictions of social and technological change as closely related processes. Despite these familiar…

Kelly Sultzbach, Ecocriticism in the Modernist Imagination: Forster, Woolf, and Auden  (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2016) 250 pp. £80.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781107161412 In Ecocriticism in the Modernist Imagination, Kelly Sultzbach seeks to trace and elucidate the development of a modernist environmental consciousness. The author begins by attempting to answer a problem posed through the ending…

Francesco Cassata, Building the New Man: Eugenics, Racial Science and Genetics in Twentieth-Century Italy, trans Erin O’Loughlin (Budapest: Central European University Press 2011) 438 pp. €44.95 Hb. ISBN: 978-963-9776-83-8 Cassata’s study of the national specificity of Italian eugenics is an elegant, original, and well-researched contribution to the ongoing transnational mapping of European and international eugenics.…

Marie-Laure Ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality 2: Revisiting Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 2015) 291pp. $34.95 Pb. ISBN: 978-1-4241-1797-4 Narrative as Virtual Reality was first published in 2001, the same year as the original Xbox console, three years before Facebook, and well before the Oculus Rift finally…

Samuel J Redman, Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press 2016) 373 pp. $29.95 Hb. ISBN: 978-0-674-66041-0 Samuel J Redman’s Bone Rooms chronicles the growth of collection of human remains in American museums from the time of the Civil War through to the twentieth century.  Redman aims…

Scott Selisker, Human Programming: Brainwashing, Automatons and American Unfreedom (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2016) 272 pp. $26.00 Pb, $91.00 Hb. ISBN: 978-0-8166-9987-2 Human Programming is a focused analysis of the history of the trope of the human automaton, starting with its early use as cold war American propaganda and rising to the contemporary treatment…

Heather Houser, Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect (New York: Columbia University Press 2014) 328pp. $30 Pb, $65 Hb. ISBN: 9780231165143 Heather Houser’s Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction seeks to explore the connection between environmental change and human illness through the under-represented lens of affect. Her study looks exclusively at contemporary novel, and…

Sam Solnick, Poetry and the Anthropocene: Ecology, Biology and Technology in Contemporary British and Irish Poetry (London: Routledge 2017) xii + 224 pp. £35 EPUB, £75 Hb. ISBN: 978-1-138-941687 In Poetry and the Anthropocene, Sam Solnick considers the way in which contemporary poetry ‘addresses the revolutions the Anthropocene creates in humanity’s condition’ (4). One challenge, as Solnick…