Category: Reviews
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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…
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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…
