Category: Modern and Contemporary

Jeannette Baxter, Valerie Henitiuk and Ben Hutchinson (eds), A Literature of Restitution. Critical Essays on W G Sebald (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2013) 320 pp. £70.00 Hb, £17.99 Pb. ISBN: 978-0-7190-8852-0 In the last essay of this book, ‘The Question of Genre in W G Sebald’s “Prose” (Towards a Post-Memorial Literature of Restitution)’, Russell Kilbourn…

Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr, Theatre and Evolution from Ibsen to Beckett (New York & Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2015). xiv + 380 pp. £34.50 Hb. ISBN: 9780231164702 In her Preface, Shepherd-Barr recounts wisely rejecting her original name for this book: Darwin and the Dramatists. This admittedly ‘catchy’ title would, as she realised, have totally betrayed her…

Ewa Barbara Luczak, Breeding and Eugenics in the American Literary Imagination: Hereditary Rules in the Twentieth Century (New York: Palgrave 2015) viii + 275 pp. £58.00 Hb, £45.99 PDF. ISBN: 978-1-137-54578-7 Because of its association with Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, the field of eugenics has often been dismissed as an anomaly within the American…

J P Telotte & Gerald Duchovnay, eds, Science Fiction, Double Feature: The Science Fiction Film as Cult Text (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press 2015) 256 pp. £75.00 Hb. ISBN 9781781384640 Science Fiction, Double Feature is a fascinating collection that addresses the fairly recent phenomenon of the cult genre. Editors J. P. Telotte and Gerald Duchovnay bring…

Trevor Dodman, Shell Shock, Memory, and the Novel in the Wake of World War I (New York: Cambridge University Press 2015) 256pp. Hb, £64.99, PDF $80. ISBN: 978-1107114203 ‘There is never a single approach to something remembered’, writes John Berger in About Looking (1980). ‘Numerous approaches or stimuli converge upon and lead to it’ (qtd.…

Esther L. Jones, Medicine and Ethics in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2015) x + 190 pp. Hb £55.00, PDF £43.99. ISBN: 978-1-137-52060-9 Framing her discussion of Black Women’s health with the metaphor of eating salt together, taken from Toni Cade Bambara’s 1980 novel The Salt Eaters, Jones explores how black women’s…

Lorraine Ryan, Memory and Spatiality in Post-Millennial Spanish Narrative (Farnham: Ashgate 2014) 248 pp. Hb, £95. ISBN: 9781472435705 During the Spanish civil war, the liberal faction of Spain failed to create a new republic and after the war the country collapsed into oppression. Spain passed through a period of recovery which emphasized memory and was…

Maria Zarimis, Darwin’s Footprint: Cultural Perspectives on Evolution in Greece (1880-1930s) (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press 2015) 333 pp. £38 Hb, £22 Pb. ISBN: 978-963-386-077-9 Although Darwin’s name will conjure up in most readers’ minds a familiar assortment of venerable historic figures, Zarimis immediately indicates in Darwin’s Footprint that her subjects will…

B. M. Pietsch, Dispensational Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015) 262 pp. Hb £47.99. ISBN: 978-0-19-024408-8 This book explores the origins of dispensationalism within early American fundamentalism, calling attention to scientific rhetoric and engineering methods utilised by dispensationalists for interpreting the Bible and understanding the nature of time. The author offers a thought-provoking re-evaluation…