Category: Reviews
-
Eklund, Hillary (ed), Ground-Work: English Renaissance Literature and Soil Science
Hillary Eklund, ed, Ground-Work: English Renaissance Literature and Soil Science (PIttsburgh: Duquesne University Press 2017) 330 pp. $70.00 Hb. ISBN: 978-0-8207-0499-9 How often do we pay attention to the detritus below our feet? How frequently do we consider the materiality and deep metaphorical reservoirs of the earth upon which we walk? If these questions evoke…
-
Rieder, John, Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System
John Rieder, Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2017) viii + 208 pp. $22.95 Pb, $75.00 Hb. ISBN: 978-0-8195-7715-3 Rieder’s thesis in this innovative approach to the history of what we understand to be science fiction is that ‘it is an organic genre of the mass cultural genre system’…
-
Parens, Erik, Shaping Our Selves: On Technology, Flourishing and a Habit of Thinking
Erik Parens, Shaping Our Selves: On Technology, Flourishing and a Habit of Thinking (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2014) 216pp. £16.99 Pb, £23.49 Hb. ISBN: 9780190211745 In Shaping Our Selves, Erik Parens, senior research scholar at The Hastings Center, urges against polarization in bioethics debates and calls for a truly cooperative and constructive endeavour in contemplating…
-
Zapf, Hubert, Literature as Cultural Ecology: Sustainable Texts
Hubert Zapf, Literature as Cultural Ecology: Sustainable Texts (London: Bloomsbury 2016) ix + 301 pp. £29 Pb, £29 EPUB . £73 Hb. ISBN: 978-1-350-051966 In Literature as Cultural Ecology, Hubert Zapf posits the ‘mutual interdependence between culture and nature’ as a ‘fundamental dimension of literary production and creativity’ (3). Drawing on ‘the paradigm of cultural…
-
Harrison, Graham, The African Presence: Representations of Africa in the construction of Britishness
Graham Harrison, The African Presence: Representations of Africa in the construction of Britishness (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2013) 232 pp. £17.99 Pb, £75.00 Hb. ISBN: 978-0-7190-8885-8 Images such as a starving black child, disaster, poverty and famine in Africa are commonly used by Africa campaign organisations in Britain. Despite these representations of Africa and Africans being…
-
Sloane, Andrew, Vulnerability and Care: Christian Reflections on the Philosophy of Medicine
Andrew Sloane, Vulnerability and Care: Christian Reflections on the Philosophy of Medicine (London: Bloomsbury T & T Clark 2016) 224 pp. £84.99 PDF, EPUB , £85.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780567316776 Andrew Sloane’s Vulnerability and Care: Christian Reflections on the Philosophy of Medicine is a brave attempt to redefine our approach to one of civilisation’s most enduring…
-
Jasanoff, Sheila and Sang-Hyun Kim (eds), Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power
Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim, eds, Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2015) 360 pp. $105.00 Hb. $35.00 Pb. ISBN: 9780226276496 Visions of the future, such as those contained within science fiction, involve depictions of social and technological change as closely related processes. Despite these familiar…
-
Beer, Gillian, Alice in Space: The Sideways Victorian World of Lewis Carroll
Gillian Beer, Alice in Space: The Sideways Victorian World of Lewis Carroll (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press 2016) 296 pp. $35.00 Hb. ISBN 978-0-226-04150-6 Serious Lewis Carroll scholars have long since abandoned the simplistic image of Charles Dodgson as an unworldly eccentric who isolated himself by retreating into a world of childhood and, specifically,…
-
Morton, Timothy, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence
Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (New York: Columbia University Press) 2016) xii + 191 pp. $30.00 Hb. ISBN 978-0-231-17752-8 Drawn from his 2015 series of Wellek lectures, Timothy Morton’s new work by turns fascinates, mystifies, stuns, confuses, and excites. Readers who seek new vocabularies for thinking about the Anthropocene and…
-
Ford, Jane and Kim Edwards Keates and Patricia Pulham (eds), Economies of Desire at the Victorian Fin de Siècle: Libidinal Lives
Jane Ford, Kim Edwards Keates, and Patricia Pulham (eds), Economies of Desire at the Victorian Fin de Siècle: Libidinal Lives (Oxford: Routledge 2016) 214 pp. £110.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781138826342 This invigorating collection asserts itself as ‘the first sustained study to interrogate how and why issues of sexuality, desire, and economic processes intersect in the literature…
