Category: Reviews
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Binfield, Kevin (ed), Writings of the Luddites
Kevin Binfield, ed, Writings of the Luddites (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 2015) xxviii + 279pp. $29.95 Pb, $55.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780801876127 The 2015 paperback edition of this 2004 collection testifies to the fascinations of Luddism – and to Writings of the Luddites’s continuing appeal and utility. It is the first collection of texts written…
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de Bolla, Peter, The Architecture of Concepts: The Historical Formation of Human Rights
Peter de Bolla, The Architecture of Concepts: The Historical Formation of Human Rights (New York: Fordham University Press 2013) x+298 pp. $40.00 Pb, $130.00 Hb. ISBN: 978-0-8232-5439-2 Peter de Bolla’s ambitious The Architecture of Concepts essentially offers three books in one. As its subtitle suggests, it aims to contribute to an understanding of the historical origins…
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Shirilan, Stephanie, Robert Burton and the Transformative Powers of Melancholy
Stephanie Shirilan, Robert Burton and the Transformative Powers of Melancholy (London: Routledge 2015) 230 pp. £60.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781472417015 Stephanie Shirilan’s Robert Burton and the Transformative Powers of Melancholy argues that Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy seeks to transform the idea of melancholy from a disease to a beneficent spiritual state. Instead of a cure what…
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Golinski, Jan, The Experimental Self: Humphry Davy and the Making of a Man of Science
Jan Golinski, The Experimental Self: Humphry Davy and the Making of a Man of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2016) 256 pp. $30.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780226351360 One of the early biographies of Humphry Davy (1778–1829) was entitled The Mercurial Chemist; mercurial being a not inappropriate description of his personality. In this latest biographical study…
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Seeber, Barbara K., Jane Austen and Animals
Barbara K. Seeber, Jane Austen and Animals (London: Routledge 2013) 162 pp. £95.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781409456049 In 1792, Thomas Taylor, the Platonist (1758-1835), unconvinced by contemporary tracts advocating greater equality among humans, and alarmed by the violence and disorder similar views were producing in France, published A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes (1792). It…
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Bell, Karl, The Magical Imagination: Magic and Modernity in Urban England 1780-1914
Karl Bell, The Magical Imagination: Magic and Modernity in Urban England 1780-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2012) 308 pp. £68.40 PDF/EPUB, £72.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781107002005 The relationship between magic, in all its diverse forms, and modernity, in its equally diverse forms, has become the subject of an ever-growing field of research. Magic itself is no…
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Bauman, Zygmunt and Riccardo Mazzeo, In Praise of Literature
Zygmunt Bauman and Riccardo Mazzeo, In Praise of Literature (Cambridge: Polity 2016) 180pp. £14.99 Pb., £50 Hb. ISBN: 9781509502684 Writing this review in April 2017, one ought to respectfully note the death of featured co-author Zygmunt Bauman in January of this year. This long-time sociology professor at the University of Leeds, who emigrated from Poland…
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Marder, Elissa, The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Psychoanalysis, Photography, Deconstruction
Elissa Marder, The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Psychoanalysis, Photography, Deconstruction (New York: Fordham University Press 2012) 320 pp. $35.00 Pb., $90.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780823240555 Since the nineteenth century, the prevailing discourse concerning mechanical reproduction has been bound to the question of labour: William Morris, the Art and Crafts Movement, and later Walter…
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Keen, Paul, Literature, Commerce, and the Spectacle of Modernity, 1750-1800
Paul Keen, Literature, Commerce, and the Spectacle of Modernity, 1750-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2012) 268 pp. £20.99 Pb, $25.00 PDF, £62.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781107016675 Paul Keen is Professor of English at Carleton University, with interests in the role of literature in society in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The book under review…
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Phillips, Natalie M, Distraction: Problems of Attention in Eighteenth-Century Literature
Natalie M Phillips, Distraction: Problems of Attention in Eighteenth-Century Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 2016) 304 pp. $50.00 EPUB, MOBI, PDF, $50.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781421420127 Natalie M. Phillips’s Distraction ventures with ease and lucidity into the fields of cognitive historicism and literary criticism, offering an intellectual history of distraction and novel perspectives into literary…
