Category: Reviews
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Bach, Susanne and Folkert Degenring (eds), Dark Nights, Bright Lights: Night, Darkness, and Illumination in Literature
Susanne Bach and Folkert Degenring (eds), Dark Nights, Bright Lights: Night, Darkness, and Illumination in Literature (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter 2015) viii + 233 pp. £90.99 Hb. ISBN 978-3-11-041510-0 In an essay entitled ‘From Shakespearean Nights to Light Pollution’ in the collection Urban Lighting, Light Pollution and Society (ed. Josiane Meier, Ute Hasenöhrl, Katharina Krause,…
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Coyer, Megan, Literature, Medicine and the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press: Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 1817–1858
Megan Coyer, Literature, Medicine and the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press: Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 1817–1858 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2017) 246 pp. £70 Hb. ISBN: 978–1–4744–0562 Megan Coyer’s Literature, Medicine and the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press: Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 1817–1858 examines the relationship between medical culture and the periodical press in the early nineteenth century, focusing on the…
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Danta, Chris and Helen Groth (eds), Mindful Aesthetics: Literature and Science of the Mind
Chris Danta and Helen Groth (eds), Mindful Aesthetics: Literature and Science of the Mind 224 pp. (London: Bloomsbury 2014) £27.00 PDF. ISBN: 9781441102867 What is the current state of the cognitive turn in literary studies? Mindful Aesthetics: Literature and the Science of the Mind is a good example of an eclectic collection of essays about…
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Wånggren, Lena, Gender, Technology and the New Woman
Lena Wånggren, Gender, Technology and the New Woman (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2017) xi + 218 pp. £75 Hb. ISBN: 978-1-474-416269 Wånggren’s book opens with a quote that perfectly embodies its focus. In Olive Schreiner’s short story ‘Three Dreams in a Desert’ (1890), the narrator comes across the figure of a woman weighed down with…
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Thorley, David, Writing Illness and Identity in Seventeenth-Century Britain
David Thorley, Writing Illness and Identity in Seventeenth-Century Britain (London: Palgrave 2016) x + 231 pp. £45.99 PDF, EPUB, £58.00 Hb. ISBN: 978-1-137-59311-5 The title of this book immediately recalled to mind a favourite course on Early Modern autobiography from the halcyon first years of graduate school. But a quick glace at its meticulously researched,…
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Ablow, Rachel, Victorian Pain
Rachel Ablow, Victorian Pain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2016) 208 pp. $39.95 Hb. ISBN: 9780691174464 Victorian Pain explores the ways in which nineteenth-century thinkers tried to reconcile the deeply personal nature of pain, with its unavoidably social manifestations. From the outset Rachel Ablow asserts that her focus is not on representations and constructions of…
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Burke, Michael and Emily T Troscianko (eds), Cognitive Literary Science: Dialogues between Literature and Cognition
Michael Burke and Emily T Troscianko (eds), Cognitive Literary Science: Dialogues between Literature and Cognition (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2017) 368pp. £56 Hb. ISBN: 9780190496869 Early work in the field of cognitive science held to the faith of a unified model grounded in a supposed correspondence between the mind and the computer which has been…
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Budra, Paul and Clifford Werier (eds), Shakespeare and Consciousness
Paul Budra and Clifford Werier (eds), Shakespeare and Consciousness (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2016) xiv +307 pp. £45.99 PDF, EPUB, £58.00 Hb. ISBN 978-1-137-59671-0 Shakespeare and Consciousness, as the title suggests, explores issues pertaining to the works of William Shakespeare – his dramatic works, in this case – and consciousness, conceived in this study primarily through scientific…
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Tuthill, Maureen, Health and Sickness in the Early American Novel: Social Affection and Eighteenth-Century Medicine
Maureen Tuthill, Health and Sickness in the Early American Novel: Social Affection and Eighteenth-Century Medicine (London: Palgrave Macmillian 2016) 253pp. £45.99 PDF, EPUB, £58.00 Hb. ISBN: 978-1-137-59714-4 What makes a person healthy or sick? What makes a person worthy of healing? Does the responsibility for healing lie with the individual or with the community to…
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Lundblad, Michael (ed), Animalities: Literary and Cultural Studies Beyond the Human
Michael Lundblad (ed.), Animalities: Literary and Cultural Studies Beyond the Human, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017) vii + 256 pp. £80 EPUB, PDF, £80 Hb. ISBN: 9781474400022 Michael Lundblad’s edited collection, Animalities, is a timely intervention in literary and cultural criticism, appearing at a moment when, as Lundblad points out, the burgeoning interdisciplinary fields of…
