Category: Reviews
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Alberti, Fay Bound, This Mortal Coil: The Human Body in History and Culture
Fay Bound Alberti, This Mortal Coil: The Human Body in History and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2016) 302 pp. £20.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780199599035 This Mortal Coil is an ambitious work that attempts to contextualize representations of the human body through eight metonymical body parts: the spine, the breast, the vagina, the heart, the brain,…
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Goldman, Marlene, Forgotten: Narratives of Age-Related Dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease in Canada
Marlene Goldman, Forgotten: Narratives of Age-Related Dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease in Canada (Montreal and Kingston ON: McGill-Queens University Press 2017) $34.95 Pb, $120 Hb. ISBN: 9780773550926 Deconstructing the myths that have transformed cognitive decline into a corrosive fantasy, Forgotten establishes the pivotal role that fictional and non-fictional narratives play in cultural interpretations of disease, news…
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Craciun, Adriana, Writing Arctic Disaster: Authorship and Exploration
Adriana Craciun, Writing Arctic Disaster: Authorship and Exploration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2016) 326 pp. $40.00 PDF, £31.99 Pb, £96.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781107125544 Adriana Craciun’s Writing Arctic Disaster: Authorship and Exploration is essentially a study on dynamic narratives of discovery and mythmaking. As such, one of its central goals is to examine ‘how changing codes…
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Chapman, Alison A, The Legal Epic: Paradise Lost and the Early Modern Law
Alison A Chapman, The Legal Epic: Paradise Lost and the Early Modern Law (Chicago: Chicago University Press 2017) 248 pp. $40 Hb. ISBN: 9780226435138 Among the plethora of connections Alison A Chapman makes between the jurisprudential and theological realms in her thoroughly contextualized The Legal Epic: Paradise Lost and The Early Modern Law, is a…
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Farrell, Molly, Counting Bodies: Population in Colonial American Writing
Molly Farrell, Counting Bodies: Population in Colonial American Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2016) 296 pp. £48.99 Hb. ISBN: 9780190277314 Until the end of the seventeenth century, the word ‘population’ was defined in dictionaries as the loss of people. As Molly Farrell outlines in the introduction to Counting Bodies: Population in Colonial American , the…
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Goldstein, Amanda Jo, Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism and the New Logics of Life
Amanda Jo Goldstein, Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism and the New Logics of Life (Chicago: Universiity of Chicago Press 2017) 336 pp. $35 PDF, $35 Pb, $100 Hb. ISBN: 9780226458441 In De rerum natura, Lucretius imagines the universe as beginning in rain: atoms fall through the void like raindrops, come into contact with one another, and…
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Hutson, Lorna (ed), The Oxford Handbook of English Law and Literature, 1500-1700
Lorna Hutson (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of English Law and Literature, 1500-1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2017) 832 pp. £95.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780199660889 Constructively posing some of the most challenging questions animating the study of law and literature, The Oxford Handbook of English Law and Literature, 1500-1700 is a critical resource for any scholar of…
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Jr, Robert T Tally (ed), The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space
Robert T Tally Jr (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space (Abingdon: Routledge 2017) 375pp. £175 Hb. ISBN: 978-1-138-81635-0 The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space is a collection of thirty-two essays through which editor Robert T Tally Jr. showcases a variety of approaches to questions of space and place in literature. The Handbook…
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Sudan, Rajani, The Alchemy of Empire: Abject Materials and the Technologies of Colonialism
Rajani Sudan, The Alchemy of Empire: Abject Materials and the Technologies of Colonialism (New York: Fordham University Press 2016) $16.99 EPUB, $25.00 Pb, $85.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780823270675 In The Alchemy of Empire, Rajani Sudan exposes the significant extent to which British Enlightenment science was informed by Indian technology, thus undermining the traditional Orientalist idea that…
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Merchant, Peter and Catherine Waters (eds), Dickens and the Imagined Child
Peter Merchant and Catherine Waters (eds), Dickens and the Imagined Child (Farnham: Ashgate 2015) 226 pp. £70.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781472423818 This book contributes to an already abundant field of criticism of Dickens and his work. It is divided into three parts, with twelve essays focused on various aspects of childhood in Dickens’s life and literature. Part…
