Category: Reviews
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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…
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Pourciau, Sarah M, The Writing of Spirit: Soul, System, and The Roots of Language Science
Sarah M Pourciau, The Writing of Spirit: Soul, System, and The Roots of Language Science (New York: Fordham University Press 2017) $16.99 EPUB, $25.00 Pb, $90.00 Hb ISBN: 9780823275625 The Writing of Spirit opens up new directions of thinking about the rise of language science from the eighteenth century into the first half of the…
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Whitman, Jon (ed), Romance and History: Imagining Time from the Medieval to the Early Modern Period
Jon Whitman (ed.), Romance and History: Imagining Time from the Medieval to the Early Modern Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2015) 338 pp. $82.00 PDF, £22.99 Pb, £67.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781107042780 In Romance and History: Imagining Time from the Medieval to the Early Modern Period, Jon Whitman brings together experts from different countries to discuss…
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Asher, Kenneth, Literature, Ethics, and the Emotions
Kenneth Asher, Literature, Ethics, and the Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2017) 194 pp. $80 PDF, £75 Hb. ISBN: 9781107185951 In Literature, Ethics, and the Emotions, Kenneth Asher takes further what he describes as the ‘ethical turn’ in literary studies (175). At a time when literary theory was dominated by deconstruction, postmodernism and a scepticism…
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Weatherby, Leif, Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ: German Romanticism between Leibniz and Marx
Leif Weatherby, Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ: German Romanticism between Leibniz and Marx (New York: Fordham University Press 2016) 472 pp. $23.99 Epub, $35.00 Pb, $125 Hb. ISBN: 9780823269402 Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ is an ambitious project in the disciplines of literature, natural philosophy and metaphysics. Weatherby’s ‘Romantic organology’ discusses the organ as ‘the tool for…
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Bradshaw, David and Laura Marcus and Rebecca Roach (eds), Moving Modernisms: Motion, Technology, and Modernity
David Bradshaw, Laura Marcus, Rebecca Roach (eds), Moving Modernisms: Motion, Technology, and Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2016) 336 pp. £55 Hb. ISBN: 9780198714170 The aim of this volume of essays, according to the introduction by Laura Marcus and David Bradshaw, is to ‘open up the many dimensions and arenas of modernist movement and movements:…
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Bailes, Melissa, Questioning Nature. British Women’s Scientific Writing & Literary Originality 1750-1830
Melissa Bailes, Questioning Nature. British Women’s Scientific Writing & Literary Originality 1750-1830, (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press 2017) 272 pp. $45.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780813939766 Melissa Bailes’s Questioning Nature explores prominent female authors’ scientific production in the long eighteenth century in light of the contemporary cultural debate on authorship, plagiarism and copyright laws, which eventually…
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DeShazer, Mary K., Mammographies: The Cultural Discourses of Breast Cancer Narratives
Mary K. DeShazer, Mammographies: The Cultural Discourses of Breast Cancer Narratives (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 2013) 239 pp. $33.95 Pb, $60 Hb. ISBN: 978-0-472-03635-6 In the early part of the twentieth century, breast cancer was a taboo subject, one which often induced hushed tones, superstition, or, most often, silence. In the 1970s, second…
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Winston, Jessica, Lawyers at Play: Literature, Law, and Politics at the Early Modern Inns of Court, 1558-1581
Jessica Winston, Lawyers at Play: Literature, Law, and Politics at the Early Modern Inns of Court, 1558-1581 (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2016) 286 pp. £60 Hb. ISBN: 9780198769422 Jessica Winston is both Professor of English and Chair of Department of History at the University of Idaho. This book provides an interdisciplinary link between these two areas…
