Category: Reviews
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Beck, Ulrich, The Metamorphosis of the World: How Climate Change Is Transforming Our Concept of the World
Ulrich Beck, The Metamorphosis of the World: How Climate Change Is Transforming Our Concept of the World (Cambridge: Polity 2016) 200pp. £14.99 Hb. ISBN: 987-0-7456-9021-6 Ulrich Beck’s study sets out to provide a comprehensive outlook on the nature of the contemporary world. In his The Metamorphosis of the World (2016), Beck explores his mature thoughts…
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Peakman, Julie, Amatory Pleasures: Explorations in Eighteenth-Century Sexual Culture
Julie Peakman, Amatory Pleasures: Explorations in Eighteenth-Century Sexual Culture (London: Bloomsbury 2016) 240 pp. £21.99 Pb. ISBN: 9781474226448 Amatory Pleasures is a collection of articles written by Julie Peakman, which seeks to investigate how sex and the sexualised body were constructed in the eighteenth-century imagination. Using samples of the written word (as well as illustration…
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Valkeakari, Tuire, Precarious Passages: The Diasporic Imagination in Contemporary Black Anglophone Fiction
Tuire Valkeakari, Precarious Passages: The Diasporic Imagination in Contemporary Black Anglophone Fiction (Gainesville: University Press of Florida 2017) 344 pp. $84.95 Hb. ISBN: 978-0-8130-6247-1 Precarious Passages makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the diasporic imagination in post-Second-World-War and contemporary black Anglophone fiction. The entry point into Valkeakari’s analysis is a selection of contemporary fiction…
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Solomon, Tom, Roald Dahl’s Marvellous Medicine
Tom Solomon, Roald Dahl’s Marvellous Medicine (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press 2016) 256 pp. £10.00 Pb. ISBN: 9781781383391 In 2016, I had the privilege to participate in a conference at the University of Cardiff commemorating and celebrating the centenary of Roald Dahl’s birth. Not unexpectedly, academic contributions were predominantly dedicated to his stories, their adaptations and…
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Sutil, Nicolás Salazar and Sita Popat (eds), Digital Movement: Essays in Motion Technology and Performance
Nicolás Salazar Sutil and Sita Popat (eds.) Digital Movement: Essays in Motion Technology and Performance (London: Palgrave 2015) xx + 317 pp. £55 Hb. ISBN: 978-1-137-43040-3 The study of digital movement, as propounded by the editors of this volume, treats the space between those monadic instances (specific times or places) in which alone humans can…
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Koehler, Karin, Thomas Hardy and Victorian Communication: Letters, Telegrams and Postal Systems
Karin Koehler, Thomas Hardy and Victorian Communication: Letters, Telegrams and Postal Systems (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2016) xii + 246 pp. £58.00 Hb. ISBN: 978-3-319-29101-7 Thomas Hardy was a prolific writer of letters. Although his correspondence was seemingly exhausted with the seven volume collection of 1978-88, a further volume of the author’s letters was released in…
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Escobar, Matthew, The Persistence of the Human: Consciousness, Meta-body and Survival in Contemporary Film and Literature
Matthew Escobar, The Persistence of the Human: Consciousness, Meta-body and Survival in Contemporary Film and Literature (Leiden and Boston: Brill 2016), 218pp. €95 ebook, Hb. ISBN: 9789004323629 According to Lakoff and Johnson’s Philosophy in the Flesh (1999), the capacity to reason ‘is shaped crucially by the peculiarities of our human bodies, by the remarkable details…
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White, Laura, The Alice Books and the Contested Ground of the Natural World
Laura White, The Alice Books and the Contested Ground of the Natural World(Oxford: Routledge 2017) xvi + 250 pp. £105 Hb. ISBN: 9781138630826 The application of scholarly detective work to the life and literature of Lewis Carroll has resulted in an influx of research on his exploration of science. The idea that Alice’s Adventures in…
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Dor, Daniel, The Instruction of Imagination: Language as a Social Communication Technology
Daniel Dor, The Instruction of Imagination: Language as a Social Communication Technology (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2015) 280 pp. £56 Hb. ISBN: 978-0-19-025662-3 For anyone interested in language and how it works in modern day society, Dor offers a compelling account of competing positions in discourse linguistics. This text offers a socio-linguistic perspective on the…
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Kandel, Eric R, Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures
Eric R Kandel, Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures (New York: Columbia University Press 2016) 226 pp. $29.95 Hb. ISBN 978-0-231-179962-1. Reductionism in Art and Brain Science, as the name suggests, is a comprehensive synthesis of two schools of thought previously considered at best tenuously linked, at worst mutually exclusive. Kandel…
