Category: Reviews
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Hansen, Claire, Shakespeare and Complexity Theory
Claire Hansen, Shakespeare and Complexity Theory (Oxford: Routledge 2017) 222 pp. £105 Hb. ISBN: 9781138291287 Early modern literary studies is witnessing renewed interest in the period’s understanding of knowledge production. From the framework of disknowledge (Katherine Eggert), intuition in the sciences (Mary Thomas Crane), and occult ways of understanding (Mary Floyd-Wilson), scholars are turning to…
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Roe, Nicholas (ed), John Keats and the Medical Imagination
Nicholas Roe (ed.), John Keats and the Medical Imagination (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2017) xviii + 262 pp. EPUB, PDF £56.99, £72 Hb. ISBN: 978-3-319-63810-2 John Keats and the Medical Imagination is a compilation of ten specially commissioned essays based on contributions to the third Keats Bicentenary Conference at Guy’s Hospital, May 2015. The focus of…
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Strom, Kirsten, The Animal Surreal: The Role of Darwin, Animals, and Evolution in Surrealism
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.…
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Wheeler, Wendy, Expecting the Earth: Life, Culture, Biosemiotics
Wendy Wheeler, Expecting the Earth: Life, Culture, Biosemiotics (London: Lawrence and Wishart 2016) 288 pp. £20 Hb. ISBN: 9781910448670 One of the core pursuits of literature and science scholarship is to confidently uncover the mutual entanglements of science and culture. Yet frequently, humanities scholars addressing the sciences assume a tone of self-conscious apology for dabbling…
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Hayles, N. Katherine, Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious
N. Katherine Hayles, Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017) 272 pp. 1 Halftone. $24.00 Pb. $72.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780226447742 N. Katherine Hayles’s latest book offers plenty of food for thought, but this volume’s major contribution is actually her positing of an even greater yet simultaneous abundance of food for unthought.…
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Wickman, Matthew, Literature After Euclid: The Geometric Imagination in the Long Scottish Enlightenment
Matthew Wickman, Literature After Euclid: The Geometric Imagination in the Long Scottish Enlightenment (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) viii + 293 pp. 7 Illustrations. £54.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780812247954 Is the eighteenth-century cultural heritage of Euclid in the Scottish Enlightenment a question for foxes of hedgehogs? For Matthew Wickman, Professor of English at Brigham Young University,…
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Jonik, Michael, Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman
Michael Jonik, Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018) 276 pp. $80.00 ebook, £75.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781108420921 Inhumanity is a rich vein through which to mine the thought of Herman Melville. Michael Jonik’s Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman follows this line through Melville’s work. To Jonik,…
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Pernau, Margrit and Helge Jordhem et al., Civilizing Emotions. Concepts in Nineteenth-Century Asia and Europe
Margrit Pernau, Helge Jordhem et al., Civilizing Emotions. Concepts in Nineteenth-Century Asia and Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2015) £83.00 Hb. ISBN: 978-0-19-874553-2 Civilisation is at the heart of today’s campaigns for increasing social harmony and courtesy in public space. This process, Pernau and Jordheim tell us in their recent edited book, pertains not only…
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Hubbell, J. Andrew, Byron’s Nature: A Romantic Vision of Cultural Ecology
J. Andrew Hubbell, Byron’s Nature: A Romantic Vision of Cultural Ecology (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2018) ix + 289 pp. £76 EPUB, £80 Hb. ISBN: 978-3-319-542379 In Byron’s Nature, J. Andrew Hubbell seeks a ‘full accounting of Byron’s environmental thought’ (1). In so doing, Hubbell sidesteps Heideggerian inflections of oikos – ‘narratives of dwelling’ which have, as he…
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Holledge, Julie and Jonathan Bollenand Frode Helland and Joanne Tompkins, A Global Doll’s House: Ibsen and Distant Visions
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…
