Category: Modern and Contemporary

This book gives all its key terms serious play in service of its exploration of ‘forms of care that resist […] human exceptionalism’ (26). Ranging through curiosity’s interest and strangeness, the biological connections and physical divisions of kin, fictions in several media, and a breathtaking array of posthumanist framings, to the combinations of feeling and…

Paul Matthews, Transparent Minds in Science Fiction: An Introduction to Alien, AI and Post-Human Consciousness (Open Book Publishers, 2023), 144 pp. £28.95 Hb. £16.95 Pb. ISBN: 978-1-80511-046-0 (Hb) This short book will be useful to those wanting to know more about non-human consciousnesses in Science Fiction novels. Written by a Computer Science lecturer, there are…

D. Graham Burnett and Justin E. H. Smith (eds), Scenes of Attention: Essays on Mind, Time, and the Senses (New York: Columbia University Press, 2023), 376 pp. £109.00 Hb. £28.00 Pb. £28 ebook. ISBN: 9780231211185 In Scenes of Attention: Essays on Mind, Time, and the Senses, editors D. Graham Burnett and Justin E. H. Smith…

Marie Allitt, Medical Caregiving Narratives of the First World War: Geographies of Care (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023), 264 pp. £85 Hb. Open Access Ebook. ISBN: 9781474489928 Marie Allitt’s Medical Caregiving Narratives of the First World War makes a significant contribution to critical medical humanities and First World War studies by offering the first extensive…

Lafcadio Hearn, Insect Literature (Dublin: Swan River Press, 2023) xiv+272 pp. €40.00 Hb. €20.00 Pb. ISBN: 9781783800094 Insect Literature’s unique gathering of Lafcadio Hearn’s insect texts feels authentic and intensely personal: a labour of love for writer, editor, and publisher alike. It is a new edition of a posthumous collection of essays and stories by…

Alice Hall (ed.), Contemporary Literature and the Body: A Critical Introduction (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023) x+264pp. £16.99 Pb. $90.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781350180222 In her introduction to Contemporary Literature and the Body: A Critical Introduction (2023), Alice Hall draws on the irony presented by Joanna Stawnicka’s artwork ‘Self -Portrait in Autumn and Self-Portrait in Winter 2021’,…