Category: Reviews
-
Cassata, Francesco, Building the New Man: Eugenics, Racial Science and Genetics in Twentieth-Century Italy
Francesco Cassata, Building the New Man: Eugenics, Racial Science and Genetics in Twentieth-Century Italy, trans Erin O’Loughlin (Budapest: Central European University Press 2011) 438 pp. €44.95 Hb. ISBN: 978-963-9776-83-8 Cassata’s study of the national specificity of Italian eugenics is an elegant, original, and well-researched contribution to the ongoing transnational mapping of European and international eugenics.…
-
Murray, Alex, Landscapes of Decadence: Literature and Place at the Fin de Siècle
Alex Murray, Landscapes of Decadence: Literature and Place at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2016) 235 pp. $80.00 PDF, £75.00 Hb. ISBN: 978-1-107-16966-1 Alex Murray’s Landscapes of Decadence considers the intersection between landscape, location and identity in the Decadent fin de siècle. Beginning with a reading of Arthur Symons’s impressionistic poem ‘At…
-
Daly, Nicholas, The Demographic Imagination and the Nineteenth-Century City : Paris, London, New York
Nicholas Daly, The Demographic Imagination and the Nineteenth-Century City : Paris, London, New York (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press 2015) 272 pp. £22.99 Pb., $78.00 PDF, £62.00 Hb. ISBN : 978-1-107-09559-5 While the significance of nineteenth-century urbanization is well recognized, Nicholas Daly’s new book explores the larger, though related, issue of demographic change over the…
-
Ryan, Marie-Laure, Narrative as Virtual Reality 2: Revisiting Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media
Marie-Laure Ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality 2: Revisiting Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 2015) 291pp. $34.95 Pb. ISBN: 978-1-4241-1797-4 Narrative as Virtual Reality was first published in 2001, the same year as the original Xbox console, three years before Facebook, and well before the Oculus Rift finally…
-
Rylance, Rick, Literature and the Public Good
Rick Rylance, Literature and the Public Good (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2016) 240pp. £14.99 Pb. ISBN: 9780199654390 Rick Rylance’s Literature and the Public Good is a monograph in Oxford’s The Literary Agenda series which seeks to investigate the state of literary studies in education and demonstrate the worth of studying literature within the wider world.…
-
Ghosh, Amitav, The Great Derangement. Climate Change and the Unthinkable
Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement. Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press 2016) 196 pp. $15.00 Pb, $22.00 Hb. ISBN: 978-0226323039 Considering current political and scientific debates, the topic of the latest book by acclaimed Indian writer Amitav Ghosh could not be timelier. The Great Derangement, a relatively small volume…
-
Kline, Ronald R, The Cybernetics Moment: Or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age
Ronald R Kline The Cybernetics Moment: Or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press 2015) $24.95 Pb, $54.95 EPUB, MOBI, PDF, $54.95 Hb. ISBN: 9781421416717 With The Cybernetics Moment Ronald R Kline presents a comprehensive and compelling intervention into the history of science that highlights the period from the…
-
Redman, Samuel J., Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums
Samuel J Redman, Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press 2016) 373 pp. $29.95 Hb. ISBN: 978-0-674-66041-0 Samuel J Redman’s Bone Rooms chronicles the growth of collection of human remains in American museums from the time of the Civil War through to the twentieth century. Redman aims…
-
Morgan, Luke, The Monster in the Garden: The Grotesque and the Gigantic in Renaissance Landscape Design
Luke Morgan, The Monster in the Garden: The Grotesque and the Gigantic in Renaissance Landscape Design (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2016) 256 pp. $ 65.00 Hb. . ISBN: 9780812247558 In The Monster in the Garden Luke Morgan postulates that the historical place-spaces represented by Renaissance landscapes should be understood as in Foucauldian terms as…
-
Selisker, Scott, Human Programming: Brainwashing, Automatons and American Unfreedom
Scott Selisker, Human Programming: Brainwashing, Automatons and American Unfreedom (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2016) 272 pp. $26.00 Pb, $91.00 Hb. ISBN: 978-0-8166-9987-2 Human Programming is a focused analysis of the history of the trope of the human automaton, starting with its early use as cold war American propaganda and rising to the contemporary treatment…
