Category: Reviews
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Strauss, Jonathan, Human Remains: Medicine, Death and Desire in Nineteenth-Century Paris
Jonathan Strauss, Human Remains: Medicine, Death and Desire in Nineteenth-Century Paris (New York: Fordham University Press 2012) 410 pp. $40.00 Pb, $105.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780823233793 Human Remains is an intimately gory book that chronicles the dramatically dynamic relationship that nineteenth-century Parisians had with the dead. In an expertly detailed investigation of multiple levels of Parisian…
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Griffiths, Devin, The Age of Analogy: Science and Literature between the Darwins
Devin Griffiths, The Age of Analogy: Science and Literature between the Darwins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 2016) xii + 339 pp. $55 EPUB, MOBI, PDF, $55 Hb. ISBN: 978-1-4214-2076-9 In The Age of Analogy, Devin Griffiths sets out to achieve several things at once. Firstly, he proposes a history of interactions between science and…
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Trower, Shelley, Rocks of Nation: The Imagination of Celtic Cornwall
Shelley Trower, Rocks of Nation: The Imagination of Celtic Cornwall (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2015) vii + 258 pp. £70.00 Hb. ISBN: 978-0-7190-9096-7 Does the land beneath our feet define us? Do places have inherent meaning, and if so where do those meanings come from? Shelley Trower’s exciting new study, Rocks of Nation, brings together…
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Wagner, Corinna and Andy Brown (eds), A Body of Work: An Anthology of Poetry and Medicine
Corinna Wagner and Andy Brown (eds), A Body of Work: An Anthology of Poetry and Medicine (London: Bloomsbury 2016) 532pp. £28.99 Pb , £95.00 Hb. ISBN: 978-1472511812 Beginning with Wilfred Eastwood’s A Book of Science Verse (Macmillan 1961), there have been several anthologies of poetry and science, most notably Poems of Science, ed. John Heath-Stubbs and…
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Lupton, Deborah, The Quantified Self
Deborah Lupton, The Quantified Self (Cambridge: Polity Press 2016) 183 pp. £15.99 Pb, £50.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781509500598 Deborah Lupton’s timely sociological survey of the latest trends in technologically assisted self-tracking cultures focuses on both voluntary and coercive forms of personalized data gathering. In contrast to older forms of collecting and reflecting on information about oneself…
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Marcus, Laura, Dreams of Modernity: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Cinema
Laura Marcus, Dreams of Modernity: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Cinema (New York: Cambridge University Press 2014) 263 pp. £19.99 Pb, £52.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781107622951 This book provides a comprehensive and readable introduction to Modernism by covering the literary, artistic and scientific achievements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Examining Modernism as a movement emerging around…
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Bourrier, Karen, The Measure of Manliness: Disability and Masculinity in the Mid-Victorian Novel
Karen Bourrier, The Measure of Manliness: Disability and Masculinity in the Mid-Victorian Novel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 2015) 174pp. $35.00 Pb, $65.00 Hb. ISBN: 978-0-472-07248-4 Karen Bourrier makes a bold and somewhat unexpected argument in The Measure of Manliness: Disability and Masculinity in the Mid-Victorian Novel. She reveals how the disabled man was…
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Ridley, Rosalind, Peter Pan and the Mind of J M Barrie: An Exploration of Cognition and Consciousness
Rosalind Ridley, Peter Pan and the Mind of J M Barrie: An Exploration of Cognition and Consciousness (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2016) 191 pp. £47.99 Hb. ISBN: 978-1-4438-9107-3 When the theatre manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree read a draft of J M Barrie’s play Peter Pan in 1904,1 he looked at the large cast, the exuberant…
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Menely, Tobias, The Animal Claim: Sensibility and the Creaturely Voice
Tobias Menely, The Animal Claim: Sensibility and the Creaturely Voice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2015) 267 pp. $30.00 Pb. $90.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780226239392 In The Animal Claim, Tobias Menely does something unusual: he shows that eighteenth-century high poetry is a matter of imminent relevance beyond the rarefied field of eighteenth-century studies. This is impressive…
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Seamon, John, Memory and Movies: What Films Can Teach Us about Memory
John Seamon, Memory and Movies: What Films Can Teach Us about Memory (Cambridge MA: MIT Press 2015) 272 pp. $21.95 ePub, PDF, $30.95 Hb. ISBN: 9780262029711 From psychoanalysis to ecocriticism, commentators of various theoretical hues have attempted to marry scientific discourse and film studies. However, critical discussions that use neuroscience and cinema in concert are…
