Category: Reviews
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Miller, Hugh, The Old Red Sandstone, or New Walks in an Old Field, edited with a critical study and notes by Michael A. Taylor and Ralph O’Connor
Hugh Miller, The Old Red Sandstone, or New Walks in an Old Field, edited with a critical study and notes by Michael A. Taylor and Ralph O’Connor (Edinburgh: National Museums Scotland, 2023), 2 vols: 684 pp. £30.00. Sb. ISBN: 9781910682258 The most well-known nineteenth-century British palaeontologist is probably Mary Anning, the working-class Lyme Regis collector…
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Clayton, Jay, Literature, Science, and Public Policy: From Darwin to Genomics
Jay Clayton, Literature, Science, and Public Policy: From Darwin to Genomics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023) 290 pp. £85.00 Hb. Open Access via Cambridge Core. ISBN: 9781009263528 Jay Clayton’s valuable book takes a range of texts that may seem familiar to BSLS readers and remakes them as the foundations for a new set of approaches…
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Wong, Amy R., Refiguring Speech: Late Victorian Fictions of Empire and the Poetics of Talk
Amy R. Wong, Refiguring Speech: Late Victorian Fictions of Empire and the Poetics of Talk (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2023) xii+228 pp. $70.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781503635173 Amy R. Wong’s Refiguring Speech: Late Victorian Fictions of Empire and the Poetics of Talk is a provocative and ambitious intervention in Victorian studies, postcolonial theory, and literary…
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Evens, Aden, The Digital and Its Discontents
Aden Evens, The Digital and Its Discontents (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2024) 264 pp. $116.00 Hb. $29.00 Pb. ISBN: 9781517916329 Changing one’s laptop can be likened to moving into a new house. The rooms would be located differently, and walls would not immediately have the frames one is so used to seeing. One’s body feels…
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Langbein, Julia, Fuchs, Anne and Cosgrove, Mary (eds) Framing Aging: Interdisciplinary Perspectives for Humanities and Social Sciences Research
Julia Langbein, Anne Fuchs and Mary Cosgrove (eds) Framing Aging: Interdisciplinary Perspectives for Humanities and Social Sciences Research (London: Bloomsbury, 2024) 264 pp. £76.50 Hb. ISBN: 9781350341418 Framing Aging is the latest in Bloomsbury’s Studies in the Humanities, Ageing and Later Life series, boasting an interdisciplinary response to the rising field of gerontology, or the…
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Barr, Philippa Nicole, Uncertainty and Emotion in the 1900 Sydney Plague
Philippa Nicole Barr, Uncertainty and Emotion in the 1900 Sydney Plague (Cambridge Elements: Histories of Emotions and the Senses: Cambridge University Press, 2024) 71 pp. £17.00 Pb. £49.99 Hb. ISBN: 9781108821063 In late 2019 Philippa Barr from the Australian National University signed the contract to write a book about how a pandemic affected the city…
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Gil-Fournier, Abelardo and Parikka, Jussi, Images, Plants and Environments of Media: Living Surfaces
Abelardo Gil-Fournier and Jussi Parikka, Images, Plants and Environments of Media: Living Surfaces (The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA: 2024) 328 pp. $45.00 Pb. $44.99 eBook. ISBN: 9780262547956 This complex but engaging work conducts a media archaeological analysis of the aesthetics of planetary surfaces, exploring the technological, artistic and cultural practices that respond to, but also…
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Farzin, Sina, Gaines, Susan M. and Haynes, Roslynn D., Under the Literary Microscope: Science and Society in the Contemporary Novel
Sina Farzin, Susan M. Gaines and Roslynn D. Haynes, Under the Literary Microscope: Science and Society in the Contemporary Novel (Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 2021) 220 pp. $99.95 Hb. $34.95 Pb. ISBN: 9780271089782 Under the Literary Microscope: Science and Society in the Contemporary Novel is a new collection of essays by Farzin, Gaines and…
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de Groot, Jerome, Double Helix History: Genetics and the Past
Jerome de Groot, Double Helix History: Genetics and the Past (Abingdon: Routledge, 2023) 222 pp. £29.59 Pb. £108.00 Hb. £29.59 eBook ISBN: 9780367512354 Considering the ways in which genetic science has begun to inflect not only what we make of the past but especially how historians investigate the past and what they envision this science…
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Sarkar, Debapriya, Possible Knowledge: The Literary Forms of Early Modern Science
Debapriya Sarkar, Possible Knowledge: The Literary Forms of Early Modern Science (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023) 265 pp. $65.00 Hb. ISBN: 97815128-2335-6 In Chapter 4 of Possible Knowledge: The literary forms of Early Modern Science, Margaret Cavendish’s lady with an earring remains unknowing as a whole cosmology comes to life and is annihilated within the…