Category: Reviews
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Axelrod-Sokolov, Mark, Madness in Fiction: Literary Essays from Poe to Fowles
Mark Axelrod-Sokolov, Madness in Fiction: Literary Essays from Poe to Fowles (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) 98 pp. £45.99 Hb. ISBN: 9783319705200 Literature has always been interested in representing Madness. The list of texts dealing with the issue is nearly endless, ranging from Euripides to Chekov, from Don Quixote to The Yellow Wallpaper. This topic has been…
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Barry, Peter and William Welstead (eds), Extending Ecocriticism: Crisis, Collaboration and Challenge in the Environmental Humanities
Peter Barry and William Welstead (eds), Extending Ecocriticism: Crisis, Collaboration and Challenge in the Environmental Humanities (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017) xiv + 273 pp. Hb £75, EPUB £71. ISBN-13: 978-1-7849-94396 (Hb). As Peter Barry and William Welstead explain in their introductory chapter, ‘Ecocriticism extends its boundaries’ (1-13), the aim of this collection of essays…
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Crossland, Rachel, Modernist Physics: Waves, Particles, and Relativities in the Writings of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence
Rachel Crossland, Modernist Physics: Waves, Particles, and Relativities in the Writings of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018) 208 pp. $81.00 ISBN: 9780198815976. Rachel Crossland’s debut monograph, Modernist Physics is a concise and timely examination of the resonances of Albert Einstein’s (1879-1955) seminal papers of 1905 in the writings of…
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Pratt-Smith, Stella, Transformations of Electricity in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Science
Stella Pratt-Smith, Transformations of Electricity in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Science (Farnham: Ashgate, 2016) 176 pp. 9 B&W illustrations. £125.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781472419408 This book considers the literary representations and potential applications of electricity, as explored in British canonical, popular, and scientific works of the nineteenth century. Stella Pratt-Smith analyses the development of various theoretical and…
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Belluc, Sylvain and Valérie Bénéjam (eds), Cognitive Joyce
Sylvain Belluc, and Valérie Bénéjam, eds, Cognitive Joyce. (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) xvi + 285 pp. £83.49 Kindle. £89.99 Hb. ISBN: 9783319719931 While no longer the Next Big Thing, nor a suspicious newcomer to the humanities, cognitive literary criticism (CLS) has still some way to go before it fully establishes itself as a ‘normal science’…
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Adelman, Richard, Idleness and Aesthetic Consciousness, 1815-1900
Richard Adelman, Idleness and Aesthetic Consciousness, 1815–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 248 pp. $84.00 PDF. £75.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781108424134 Richard Adelman’s Idleness and Aesthetic Consciousness, 1815–1900 is the second volume in a project concerned with the fraught relation between the concepts of labour and aesthetic contemplation in British literature, cultural theory, and political economy.…
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Gamer, Michael, Romanticism, Self-Canonization, and the Business of Poetry
Michael Gamer, Romanticism, Self-Canonization, and the Business of Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017) 330 pp. $80.00 PDF. £75.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781107158856 The value of Michael Gamer’s new book is not the novelty of its central argument. Jerome McGann has long since established his post-Althuserian conception of the textual materialities, both bibliographical and economic, which…
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Hesketh, Ian, Victorian Jesus: J.R. Seeley, Religion, and the Cultural Significance of Anonymity
Ian Hesketh, Victorian Jesus: J.R. Seeley, Religion, and the Cultural Significance of Anonymity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017) xiii + 272 pp. 11 B&W illustrations. £36.00 Kindle. £38.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781442645776 To most modern readers, J. R. Seeley is familiar as the author of The Expansion of England (1883). Indeed, it was while researching Seeley’s contribution to…
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Beck, John and Ryan Bishop (eds), Cold War Legacies: Systems, Theory, Aesthetics
John Beck and Ryan Bishop (eds), Cold War Legacies: Systems, Theory, Aesthetics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2016) 320 pp. £75.00 PDF, £24.99 Pb, £75.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781474409483 The historical picture of Cold War Legacies is, as its title suggests, one of continuities and intensifications, rather than dramatic ruptures. The appellations we use to distinguish our present…
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Broglio, Ron, Beasts of Burden: Biopolitics, Labor, and Animal Life in British Romanticism
Ron Broglio, Beasts of Burden: Biopolitics, Labor, and Animal Life in British Romanticism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2017) xiii + 163 pp. $80.00 Hb. ISBN 9781438465678 The latest work from Ron Broglio probes the ways that British “Improvements” of the Romantic era –changes to the Poor Laws, reactions to food crises, labor…
