Category: Modern and Contemporary

Laura Marcus, Dreams of Modernity: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Cinema (New York: Cambridge University Press 2014) 263 pp. £19.99 Pb, £52.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781107622951 This book provides a comprehensive and readable introduction to Modernism by covering the literary, artistic and scientific achievements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Examining Modernism as a movement emerging around…

Rosalind Ridley, Peter Pan and the Mind of J M Barrie: An Exploration of Cognition and Consciousness (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2016) 191 pp. £47.99 Hb. ISBN: 978-1-4438-9107-3 When the theatre manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree read a draft of J M Barrie’s play Peter Pan in 1904,1 he looked at the large cast, the exuberant…

Peter Middleton, Physics Envy: American Poetry and Science in the Cold War and After (University of Chicago Press 2015) 272 pp. $45 Hb. ISBN: 9780226290003 Peter Middleton’s most recent book Physics Envy: American Poetry and Science in the Cold War and After charts a compelling map of the evolution of a literary engagement with science…

Miriam Wallraven, Women Writers and the Occult in Literature and Culture: Female Lucifers, Priestesses, and Witches (New York: Routledge 2015) 236 pp. £95 Hb. ISBN: 978-1-138-82418-8 In Women Writers and the Occult in Literature and Culture: Female Lucifers, Priestesses and Witches Miriam Wallraven investigates the ‘epistemological triad’ of interrelationships between occultism, gender and text –…

David Kaiser and W Patrick McCray, eds, Groovy Science: Knowledge, Innovation and American Counterculture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2016) 416 pp. $25.00 Pb, $75.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780226372884 Groovy Science: Knowledge, Innovation and American Counterculture examines the boom of American scientific and technological advancement between the late 1960s and the early 1980s. However, rather than…

Wyatt Bonikowski, Shell Shock and the Modernist Imagination: The Death Drive in Post-World War I British Fiction (Oxford: Routledge 2013) 200pp. £34.99 Pb, £100.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781409444176 Wyatt Bonikowski’s study, Shell Shock and the Modernist Imagination: The Death Drive in Post-World War I British Fiction, makes an extensive investigation of the understanding and representation of…

Tommy Dickinson, ‘Curing Queers’: Mental Nurses and their Patients, 1935-74 (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2015) 304pp. £70.00 Hb, £14.99 Pb. ISBN: 978-0-7190-9588-7 ‘Curing Queers’: Mental Nurses and their patients, 1935-74 is a much needed account of the role of ‘aversion therapy’ utilized as an alternative to imprisonment as punishment for homosexuality during an era when…

Alison Adam, A History of Forensic Science (Oxford: Routledge 2016) 236 pp. £90 Hb. ISBN: 9780415856423 The history of forensics is certainly not a large field, but thus far 2016 has witnessed a bumper crop of forensic-centric history books. Alison Adam’s A History of Forensic Science joins David Arnold’s Toxic Histories: Poison and Pollution in…

Stefaan Blancke, Hans Henrik Hjermitslev, and Peter C. Kjærgaard (eds), foreword by Ronald L. Numbers, Creationism In Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 2014) 296 pp. $39.95 Hb. ISBN: 978-1-4214-1562-8 ‘As insidious as it may seem, at least it’s not a worldwide movement […] I hope everyone realizes the extent to which this is a…