Category: Reviews
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Goulet, Andrea, Legacies of the Rue Morgue
Andrea Goulet, Legacies of the Rue Morgue (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2015) 251 pp. $65.00 Hb. ISBN 978-0-8122-4779-4 Legacies of the Rue Morgue takes the renowned Edgar Allan Poe tale ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ as a foundational framework and traces the developing representation of space, violence and state in French crime fiction,…
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Robinson, Douglas, Translationality: Essays in the Translational-Medical Humanities
Douglas Robinson, Translationality: Essays in the Translational-Medical Humanities (London: Routledge 2017) 239pp. £105 Hb. ISBN: 9781138727045 At first glance, the main title of this book seems ordinary to the point of blandness, easily mistaken for the simple word ‘translation’; even if this mistake isn’t made, ‘translational’ is common enough and the suffix ‘-ity’ is readily…
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Redish, A David, The Mind Within the Brain: How We Make Decisions and how those Decisions Go Wrong
A David Redish, The Mind Within the Brain: How We Make Decisions and how those Decisions Go Wrong (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2013) 392 pp. £27.49 Hb. ISBN: 9780199891887 Redish’s book is ambitious in its scope and style; not only does he want to explain how action-selection systems work in the brain, but also how…
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Luck, Chad, The Body of Property: Antebellum American Fiction and the Phenomenology of Possession
Chad Luck, The Body of Property: Antebellum American Fiction and the Phenomenology of Possession (New York: Fordham University Press 2014) 298 pp. $17.99 EPUB, $ 27.00 Pb,, $95.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780823263004 In this book the author touches upon a wealth of interconnected concepts including possession, space and anxiety in relation to the nature of ownership…
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Schaffner, Anna Katharina, Exhaustion: A History
Anna Katharina Schaffner, Exhaustion: A History (New York: Columbia University Press 2016) 304 pp. $24.00 Pb, $30.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780231172301 Anna Katharina Schaffner’s Exhaustion: A History offers a comprehensive overview of exhaustion-related conditions from antiquity until the present day. Tracing exhaustion as a medical diagnosis, a cultural phenomenon, and a vehicle of social critique, Schaffner’s…
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Pietrzak-Franger, Monika, Syphilis in Victorian Literature and Culture: Medicine, Knowledge, and the Spectacle of Invisibility
Monika Pietrzak-Franger, Syphilis in Victorian Literature and Culture: Medicine, Knowledge, and the Spectacle of Invisibility (London: Palgrave 2017) 338 pp. £73.50 PDF EPUB, £92.00 Hb. ISBN: 978-3-319-49534-7 Syphilis in Victorian Literature and Culture is an authoritative survey of the interrelated cultural associations surrounding syphilis in the Victorian period. Part of the impressive Palgrave Studies in…
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Whitehead, Anne and Angela Woods (eds), The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities
Anne Whitehead and Angela Woods (eds), The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2016) 700 pp. £175 EPUB, PDF Hb. ISBN: 9781474400046 The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities is a large and well-structured volume with a great deal of ambition. The idea of the project is to move…
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Crowley, Caroline and Denis Linehan (eds), Spacing Ireland: Place, Society and Culture in a Post-Boom Era
Caroline Crowley and Denis Linehan (eds), Spacing Ireland: Place, Society and Culture in a Post-Boom Era (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2013) 224 pp. £17.99 Pb. £75.00 Hb. ISBN: 978-0-7190-8679-3 The transformation of Ireland from a country with prosperity and rapid development to one undergoing a stark recession is the starting point for Spacing Ireland: Place,…
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Simanowski, Roberto, Data Love: The Seduction and Betrayal of Digital Technologies
Roberto Simanowski, Data Love: The Seduction and Betrayal of Digital Technologies, trans. Brigitte Pichon, John Cayley and Dorian Rydnystsky (New York: Columbia University Press 2016) 176 pp. $30.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780231177269 A notable feature of many recent science fiction novels is that they imagine a future for social media which is very much like its…
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Morris, Daniel, Not Born Digital: Poetics, Print Literacy, New Media
Daniel Morris, Not Born Digital: Poetics, Print Literacy, New Media (London: Bloomsbury 2016) 258pp. £88 Hb. ISBN: 9781501316708 A woman sitting next to me on the subway asked about the book that I was reading: ‘Is it good?’ I nodded. ‘I mean, is it helpful, to people who were not born digital?’ I didn’t quite…
