Category: Modern and Contemporary

Kirsten Strom, The Animal Surreal: The Role of Darwin, Animals, and Evolution in Surrealism (Oxford: Routledge 2017) 168 pp. £88 Hb. ISBN: 9781472488213 In The Animal That Therefore I am (2002), Jacques Derrida hypothesises that, with regards to the question of the borders between the human and the animal, there are two types of discourse.…

Julie Holledge, Jonathan Bollen, Frode Helland, and Joanne Tompkins, A Global Doll’s House: Ibsen and Distant Visions (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2016) 234 pp. £55.99 EPUB & PDF, £99.99 Hb. ISBN 978-1-137-43898-0 Nora’s slamming door has led scholars and historians constantly to rethink and interrogate Ibsen’s play and its thousands of production records. Ibsen’s Et dukkehjem…

Paul Stephens, The Poetics of Information Overload: From Gertrude Stein to Conceptual Writing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015) 240 pp. $25.00 Pb. $87.50 Hb. ISBN: 9780816694419 In The Poetics of Information Overload, Paul Stephens offers a cogent history of the debates around information overload, its political, socio-economic, philosophical, and particularly its poetic implications. This is…

Nathaniel Isaacson, Celestial Empire: the Emergence of Chinese Science Fiction (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2017) 240 pp. $19.99 EPUB, $80.00 Hb. $24.95 Pb. ISBN: 9780819576682 Celestial Empire: The Emergence of Chinese Science Fiction, in its simultaneous engagement with global science fiction studies and early twentieth-century Chinese intellectual and cultural history, offers a novel approach to Chinese…

D. Harlan Wilson, J.G. Ballard (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017) 214 pp. $22.00 Pb. ISBN: 9780252082955 D. Harlan Wilson’s J.G. Ballard is the first dedicated monograph on J.G. Ballard (1930–2009) since the British novelist’s death to encompass the entirety of Ballard’s literary output, from the early short fiction through to his late autobiography Miracles of…

Peter J. Bowler, A History of the Future: Prophets of Progress from H. G. Wells to Isaac Asimov (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017) 298 p. $20.00 PDF, £59.99 Hb. £19.99 Pb. ISBN: 9781107148734 Peter Bowler starts A History of the Future by making two key arguments in the opening two chapters. Firstly, that it is…

Bronwen Calvert, Being Bionic: The World of TV Cyborgs (London: I. B. Tauris 2017 ) £14.99 Pb. ISBN 978-1-78453-648-0 In Being Bionic, Bronwen Calvert, an associate lecturer with the Open University, begins by introducing us to a famous cyborg example, that of the Borg in the long-running TV series Star Trek. They were first introduced…

Lana Lin, Freud’s Jaw and Other Lost Objects: Fractured Subjectivity in the Face of Cancer (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017) 224 pp. £22.00 Pb. ISBN:  9780823277728 For years after its surgical removal, the literary theorist Roland Barthes retained a piece of his own rib in a drawer alongside other items of sentimental value (e.g., an…

Susan L. Trollinger and William Vance Trollinger, Jr., Righting America at the Creation Museum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016) 344 pp. £20 Hb. ISBN: 9781421419510 In Righting America at the Creation Museum, Susan L. Trollinger and William Vance Trollinger, Jr. give crucial insights into an American cultural as well as political phenomenon, namely Conservative Christian…

Chris Pak, Terraforming: Ecopolitical Transformations and Environmentalism in Science Fiction (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press 2016) 256 pp. £80 Hb. ISBN: 9781781382844 Terraforming, or Earth-shaping, is a hypothetical process is by which a plant, moon, or other body undergoes substantive changes in atmosphere, temperature, topography, and ecology, to render it fit for human habitation. Martyn Fogg has…