Category: Modern and Contemporary

Christina Walter, Optical Impersonality: Science, Images and Literary Modernism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014) 352pp. Hb, EPUB, MOBI , PDF $59.95. ISBN: 9781421413648 Walter’s book sets out to reframe modernist impersonality across three sites of cultural investigation: the history of optical science, the history of image-text relations, and the history of personality. Whilst the…

Victoria Flanagan, Technology and Identity in Young Adult Fiction: The Posthuman Subject (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) viii + 205pp. £58.00 Hb, £43.99 eBook. ISBN 978-1-137-36205-6 Victoria Flanagan’s Technology and Identity in Young Adult Fiction offers an engaging exploration of technology in young adult (henceforth, YA) fiction, including ideas of identity, embodiment, subjectivity and individual agency in…

Johan Höglund, The American Imperial Gothic: Popular Culture, Empire, Violence (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 224pp. Hb, PDF, ePUB £95.00. ISBN: 978-1-4094-4954-6 Reading Höglund’s The American Imperial Gothic in the current political climate is an uncomfortable experience. In his preface he states that ‘the border between good and evil is often absolute in the American imperial gothic.…

Kathryn St. Ours, Where Science and Literature Meet: The Earthy Writing of Jean-Loup Trassard, (Oxford: Trueheart Academic, 2014), 200pp. £50.00 Hb, £7.99 E-Book. ISBN: 978-0-9573017-4-0 Kathryn St. Ours’s study of the work of Jean-Loup Trassard presents a scientifically-informed analysis of his fiction, nonfiction, and photography. This short book ambitiously pursues the receptivity of Trassard’s ‘earthy’…

Paul Youngquist, Cyberfiction: After the Future, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2010), 272 pp. Hb, PDF £68.00. ISBN: 978–0–230–62151–0 Paul Youngquist’s book Cyberfiction: After the Future attempts to describe new methods of creating futures in a world that is now post-future. Locating the end of the future at the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945, Youngquist argues that…

Cecilia Björkén-Nyberg, The Player Piano and the Edwardian Novel (Ashgate, 2015) 222 pp. £60 hb, ebook PDF, ebook ePUB. ISBN: 978-1-4724-3998-7 In a book that showcases the player piano and the Edwardian novel—or ‘the democratisation of music through technology and the storage of musical experience in literature’, as the author, Cecilia Björkén-Nyberg, explains—we are fascinated to…

Aris Mousoutzanis, Fin-de-Siѐcle Fictions, 1890s/1990s: Apocalypse, Technoscience, Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) 258pp. £55.00 Hb.ISBN: 978-1-137-26365-0 In Fin-de-Siѐcle Fictions, 1890s/1990s: Apocalypse, Technoscience, Empire, Aris Mousoutzanis introduces a succinct and passionate examination of the ‘shifts in the relations between power and knowledge’ that register ‘in the popular cultural production’ of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries…

Simon de Bourcier, Pynchon and Relativity: Narrative Time in Thomas Pynchon’s Later Novels. Continuum Literary Studies, (Bloomsbury: London 2013). 240pp. Hb £45.50, Pb £13.99. ISBN: 978-1441130099 Simon de Bourcier’s study sets out to provide a substantial and exhaustive scientific reading of Thomas Pynchon’s late-career novels, in particular Against the Day and Mason & Dixon. Within the active…

Katherine Ebury, Modernism & Cosmology: Absurd Lights, (Palgrave 2014). 224pp. Hb £55.00. EPUB. PDF. ISBN 9781137393746 In her 2014 monograph Modernism and Cosmology, Katherine Ebury presents three case studies from Irish modernism to analyse the influence of cosmology on modernist writing. The engagingly written work offers a close reading that focuses on references to the new physics in…

Xavier Aldana Reyes, Body Gothic: Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horrror Film (Cardiff: University of Wales Press). 272 pp. £95 hb, £95 ebook. ISBN 978-1-78316-1, e-ISSBN 978-1-78316-093-8. Xavier Aldana Reyes’ Body Gothic aims to reclaim the somatic experience of Gothic texts and consider how the body is figured, disfigured and dismantled in horror. “Body…