Category: Modern and Contemporary

John Holmes (ed.), Science and Modern Poetry: New Directions (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012). 248 pp. £65 hb. ISBN 9781846318092 ‘Science’ and ‘poetry’ are often seen as two poles, an instance of the oppositions of ‘science’ and ‘art’, or ‘science and ‘the humanities’. There has been a long and indecisive skirmish between the two categories…

Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint, The Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction (London: Routledge, 2011), xi + 247pp. £15.99 pb. ISBN 9780415435710 If Literature and Science may be said to have such a thing as a ‘project’, then Science Fiction’s place in it remains unclear: on the one hand, the very name ‘Science Fiction’ seems…

Ulrika Maude, Beckett, Technology and the Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 209pp. £50 hb. ISBN 9780521515375./£25.99 pb. ISBN 9780521181501. In Beckett, Technology and the Body, Ulrika Maude offers a remarkable re-evaluation of the role of the body – in terms of both embodiment and  disembodiment – in Beckett’s oeuvre. By masterfully combining close readings…

Michael Golston, Rhythm and Race in Modernist Poetry and Science (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), pp. 272. £38.00. ISBN 978-0-231-14276-2. Different climates and different bloods have different needs, different spontaneities, different reluctances, different ratios between different groups of impulses and unwillingness, different constrictions of throat, and all these leave trace in the language, and…

Robert Crossley, Imagining Mars: A Literary History (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011). xvii + 353 pp. £34.95. ISBN 978-0-8195-6927-1. Robert Crossley begins his literary history of Mars with a trip to the Clark telescope at Wellesley College during the opposition of 2003. At a time when our neighbouring planet was closer to Earth than…

Elizabeth Leane, Reading Popular Physics: Disciplinary Skirmishes and Textual Strategies (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 208 pp. £55 hb. ISBN 978-0-7546-5850-4. (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) A critical consideration of the literary, scientific, and cultural contexts in which popular physics writing intervenes, Elizabeth Leane’s Reading Popular Physics: Disciplinary Skirmishes and Textual Strategies establishes surveyors’…

Harry W. Paul, Henri de Rothschild, 1872-1947: Medicine and Theater (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 322 pp. £70 hb. ISBN 978-1-4094-0515-3. (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) As the subtitle of this meticulously researched biography indicates, there was much more to the Rothschilds than wine and banking. Henri de Rothschild, the great-grandson of the…

Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin (eds), The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 343pp. £48.50 hb, ISBN 9780226657414; £18.00 pb, ISBN 9780226657431. As I was finishing Majorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin’s edited collection my one year old daughter was playing with a noisy toy of the type that regularly…