Category: Reviews
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Reid, Robert Lanier, Renaissance Psychologies: Spenser and Shakespeare
Robert Lanier Reid, Renaissance Psychologies: Spenser and Shakespeare (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2017) xiii + 368 pp. £80 Hb. ISBN: 978-1-5261-0917-0 Renaissance Psychologies: Spenser and Shakespeare is a work of comparative literature on an ambitious and impressive scale. This publication is avowedly multidisciplinary, in line with the mission statement for the ‘Manchester Spenser series in…
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Zon, Bennett, Evolution and Victorian Musical Culture
Bennett Zon, Evolution and Victorian Musical Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017) 374 pp. $96.00 PDF, £90.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781107020443 It is the ever raging ‘cheesecake wars’ that Evolution and Victorian Musical Culture takes as its starting pistol. Broadly speaking, these wars – begun with Rousseau and re-igniting in the twentieth century – have revolved…
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Stephens, Paul, The Poetics of Information Overload: From Gertrude Stein to Conceptual Writing
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…
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Carlson, Julia S., Romantic Marks and Measures: Wordsworth’s Poetry in Fields of Print
Julia S. Carlson, Romantic Marks and Measures: Wordsworth’s Poetry in Fields of Print (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) xiv + 354 pp. £50.00 Hb. ISBN 9780812247879 In this ambitious, important book, Julia Carlson sets out to reassess two of the most fundamental elements of Wordsworth’s poetry. Claiming in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads that…
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Isaacson, Nathaniel, Celestial Empire: the Emergence of Chinese Science Fiction
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…
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Heise, Ursula K., Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species
Ursula K. Heise, Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), xiii + 280 pp. £21.00 Pb. and ebook. £62.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780226358024 There have been five naturally occurring mass extinctions since the beginning of life on Earth. We are now, largely unwittingly, perpetrating the sixth. But who are ‘we’?…
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Wilson, D. Harlan, J.G. Ballard
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…
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Hawhee, Debra, Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw: Animals, Language, Sensation
Debra Hawhee, Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw: Animals, Language, Sensation (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2016) 444 pp. 3 halftones. $45.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780226398174 From the start, Debra Hawhee (1970-) is clear about three major elements in her exemplary and pioneering study, Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw: Animals, Language, Sensation: 1) Nonhuman animals pervade premodern, medieval, and early…
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Bowler, Peter J., A History of the Future: Prophets of Progress from H. G. Wells to Isaac Asimov
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…
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Haynes, Roslynn D., From Madman to Crime Fighter: The Scientist in Western Culture
Roslynn D. Haynes, From Madman to Crime Fighter: The Scientist in Western Culture (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017) 424 pp. 23 halftones. $34.95 Pb. ISBN: 9781421423043 From Madman to Crime Fighter is actually a version of a book that first appeared in 1994 under the title From Faust to Strangelove: Representations of the Scientist in Western Literature.…
