Category: Reviews
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Smith, Simon and Jacqueline Watson and Amy Kenny (eds), The Senses in Early Modern England 1558-1660
Simon Smith, Jacqueline Watson and Amy Kenny (eds), The Senses in Early Modern England 1558-1660 (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2015) 256 pp. £75.00 Hb. ISBN: 978-0-7190-9158-2 The theoretical background of the representation of sense perception in art and literature has seen an expansion in recent years as the result of the cognitive turn, and of…
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Coppola, Al, The Theater of Experiment: Staging Natural Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain
Al Coppola, The Theater of Experiment: Staging Natural Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2016), x + 265 pp. £56.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780190269715 ‘All the philosophies that men have learned or devised are, in our opinion, so many plays produced and performed which have created false and fictitious worlds’. This quotation from Lord Bacon’s…
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Billington, Josie, Is Literature Healthy?
Josie Billington, Is Literature Healthy? (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2016) 145pp. £14.99 Pb. ISBN: 9780198724698 In the concluding pages of Is Literature Healthy? Josie Billington states that ‘literature and literary reading are possibly the best forms of thinking that humans in need or trouble will ever have’ (134), and certainly the book offers a very…
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Rosen, Jeff, Julia Margaret Cameron’s ‘Fancy Subjects’: Photographic Allegories of Victorian Identity and Empire
Jeff Rosen, Julia Margaret Cameron’s ‘Fancy Subjects’: Photographic Allegories of Victorian Identity and Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2016) 336 pp. £20.00 Pb, £75.00 Hb. ISBN: 978-1-7849-9317-7 Victorian photography is en vogue. In 2015, to mark the bicentennial of Julia Margaret Cameron’s birth, the Victoria and Albert Museum reminded viewers of the innovation and power…
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Maxwell, Catherine, Scents and Sensibility: Perfume in Victorian Literary Culture
Catherine Maxwell, Scents and Sensibility: Perfume in Victorian Literary Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2017) xviii + 361pp, 13 colour plates. £30 Hb. 9787-0-19-870175-0 Today’s perfume industry is worth millions of pounds, but for all the scientific sophistication of modern fragrances, advertisers still struggle with a fundamental sensory conundrum, namely, how can scent be conveyed…
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Marks, Peter, Imagining Surveillance: Eutopian and Dystopian Literature and Film
Peter Marks, Imagining Surveillance: Eutopian and Dystopian Literature and Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2015) £19.99 Pb, £70.00 PDF & EPUB, £70.00 Hb. ISBN 978-1-474-42655-8 Peter Marks’s Imagining Surveillance is an interdisciplinary attempt to illuminate the manifold connections between the humanities and social sciences, especially literary criticism and surveillance studies. He has a close look…
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West, Anna, Thomas Hardy and Animals
Anna West, Thomas Hardy and Animals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017) 210 pp. $80.00 PDF, £75.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781107179172 Animals play an important role in Thomas Hardy’s work, but, with honourable exceptions, Hardy scholars have tended to overlook them. In Thomas Hardy and Animals, Anna West has at last made Hardy’s literary response to the non-human…
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Finn, Michael R., Figures from the Pre-Freudian Unconscious from Flaubert to Proust
Michael R. Finn, Figures from the Pre-Freudian Unconscious from Flaubert to Proust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017) 250 pp. $80.00 PDF, £75.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781107184565 In Figures from the Pre-Freudian Unconscious from Flaubert to Proust, Michael R. Finn explores the cultural meaning of the unconscious between 1850 and 1920. Framing society as defined by two…
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Scales, Rebecca P., Radio and the Politics of Sound in Interwar France, 1921–1939
Rebecca P. Scales, Radio and the Politics of Sound in Interwar France, 1921–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016) 304 pp. $80.00 PDF, £64.99 Hb., £24.99 Pb. ISBN: 9781107108677 Even though scholarly concerns with auditory developments are still largely marginal when compared with analysis of sight and reading – the sight paradigm continues to maintain an…
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Griffiths, Matthew, The New Poetics of Climate Change: Modernist Aesthetics for a Warming World
Matthew Griffiths, The New Poetics of Climate Change: Modernist Aesthetics for a Warming World (London: Bloomsbury 2017) 224 pp. £80.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781474282093 Although it is well known that modernist literature did not engage widely in the early days of ecocriticism during the seventies, eighties and nineties, there is now a developed Modernist expression of…
