Category: Modern and Contemporary

Ritch Calvin, Feminist Science Fiction and Feminist Epistemology: Four Modes (London: Palgrave 2016) £52.99 EPUB, PDF, £66.99 Hb. ISBN: 978-3-319-32469-2 In Feminist Science Fiction and Feminist Epistemology: Four Modes, Ritch Calvin identifies epistemology as ‘the foundation of, and central to, the question of feminist analysis’ (2), and more specifically, as it pertains to feminist science…

Tom Bristow, The Anthropocene Lyric: an Affective Geography of Poetry, Person, Place (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2015) ix + 139 pp., £45.00 Hb. ISBN: 978-1-137-36474-6 ‘The making of place as a dynamic of couplings, as if love and trust are omens, odds in your favour.’              John Kinsella, Jam Tree Gully…

Paul Erickson, The World The Game Theorists Made (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2015) 390pp. $ 35.00 Pb, $105.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780226097176 In Robert Coover’s lamentably obscure 1968 novel, The Universal Baseball Association, J Henry Waugh, Prop., a socially-retiring accountant becomes increasingly absorbed into the private world of his fantasy baseball league. Each night after…

Ulrich Beck, The Metamorphosis of the World: How Climate Change Is Transforming Our Concept of the World (Cambridge: Polity 2016) 200pp. £14.99 Hb.  ISBN: 987-0-7456-9021-6 Ulrich Beck’s study sets out to provide a comprehensive outlook on the nature of the contemporary world. In his The Metamorphosis of the World (2016), Beck explores his mature thoughts…

Tuire Valkeakari, Precarious Passages: The Diasporic Imagination in Contemporary Black Anglophone Fiction (Gainesville: University Press of Florida 2017) 344 pp. $84.95 Hb. ISBN: 978-0-8130-6247-1 Precarious Passages makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the diasporic imagination in post-Second-World-War and contemporary black Anglophone fiction.  The entry point into Valkeakari’s analysis is a selection of contemporary fiction…

Tom Solomon, Roald Dahl’s Marvellous Medicine (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press 2016) 256 pp. £10.00 Pb. ISBN: 9781781383391 In 2016, I had the privilege to participate in a conference at the University of Cardiff commemorating and celebrating the centenary of Roald Dahl’s birth. Not unexpectedly, academic contributions were predominantly dedicated to his stories, their adaptations and…

Matthew Escobar, The Persistence of the Human: Consciousness, Meta-body and Survival in Contemporary Film and Literature (Leiden and Boston: Brill 2016), 218pp.  €95 ebook, Hb. ISBN: 9789004323629 According to Lakoff and Johnson’s Philosophy in the Flesh (1999), the capacity to reason ‘is shaped crucially by the peculiarities of our human bodies, by the remarkable details…

Daniel Cordle, Late Cold War Literature and Culture: The Nuclear 1980s (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2017) 229pp., £52.99 EPUB, PDF, £66.99 Hb. ISBN: 9781137513076 Daniel Cordle’s Late Cold War Literature and Culture: The Nuclear 1980s works to examine the underlying social, political, economic and cultural anxieties during the Cold War era. Cordle moves through the decade’s…

Richard Cleminson, Catholicism, Race and Empire: Eugenics in Portugal, 1900-1950 (Budapest: Central European University Press 2014) 350 pp. $60 Hb. (CEU Press Studies in the History of Medicine, vol 5) ISSN: 2079-1119 A vast amount of research has been done on the twentieth-century eugenic movements that experienced a significant degree of institutionalisation in Germany, the…

Emelyne Godfrey (ed) Utopias and Dystopias in the Fiction of H G Wells and William Morris: Landscape and Space (London: Palgrave 2016) £52.99 EPUB, PDF, £66.99 Hb. ISBN 978-1-137-52340-2 While the literary works of both William Morris and H G Wells are situated within a utopian tradition spanning from Thomas More and Plato’s Republic to…