Category: Reviews
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Baxter, Jeannette and Valerie Henitiuk and Ben Hutchinson (eds), A Literature of Restitution. Critical Essays on W G Sebald
Jeannette Baxter, Valerie Henitiuk and Ben Hutchinson (eds), A Literature of Restitution. Critical Essays on W G Sebald (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2013) 320 pp. £70.00 Hb, £17.99 Pb. ISBN: 978-0-7190-8852-0 In the last essay of this book, ‘The Question of Genre in W G Sebald’s “Prose” (Towards a Post-Memorial Literature of Restitution)’, Russell Kilbourn…
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Shepherd-Barr, Kirsten E., Theatre and Evolution from Ibsen to Beckett
Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr, Theatre and Evolution from Ibsen to Beckett (New York & Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2015). xiv + 380 pp. £34.50 Hb. ISBN: 9780231164702 In her Preface, Shepherd-Barr recounts wisely rejecting her original name for this book: Darwin and the Dramatists. This admittedly ‘catchy’ title would, as she realised, have totally betrayed her…
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Luczak, Ewa Barbara, Breeding and Eugenics in the American Literary Imagination
Ewa Barbara Luczak, Breeding and Eugenics in the American Literary Imagination: Hereditary Rules in the Twentieth Century (New York: Palgrave 2015) viii + 275 pp. £58.00 Hb, £45.99 PDF. ISBN: 978-1-137-54578-7 Because of its association with Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, the field of eugenics has often been dismissed as an anomaly within the American…
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Hayden, Judy A. (ed), Literature in the Age of Celestial Discovery
Judy A. Hayden, ed, Literature in the Age of Celestial Discovery: From Copernicus to Flamsteed (London and New York: Palgrave 2016) ix + 224 pp. £50.99 PDF, £63.99 Hb. ISBN 978-1-137-58345-1 This collection of nine essays examines literary responses to the astronomical theories debated throughout the Early Modern period. In her introduction, Judy Hayden sets…
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Telotte, J P and Gerald Duchovnay (eds), Science Fiction, Double Feature: The Science Fiction Film as Cult Text
J P Telotte & Gerald Duchovnay, eds, Science Fiction, Double Feature: The Science Fiction Film as Cult Text (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press 2015) 256 pp. £75.00 Hb. ISBN 9781781384640 Science Fiction, Double Feature is a fascinating collection that addresses the fairly recent phenomenon of the cult genre. Editors J. P. Telotte and Gerald Duchovnay bring…
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Slater, John and Maríaluz López-Terrada and José Pardo-Tomás (eds), Medical Cultures of the Early Modern Spanish Empire
John Slater, Maríaluz López-Terrada and José Pardo-Tomás (eds), Medical Cultures of the Early Modern Spanish (Farnham: Ashgate 2014) 326 pp. £70.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781472428134 The Spanish Empire had one of the longest colonial legacies, which spans from the fourteenth through the twentieth centuries.1 Medical Cultures of the Early Modern Spanish Empire is a multifaceted inquiry and a profound…
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Frost, Mark, The Lost Companions and John Ruskin’s Guild of St George: A Revisionary History
Mark Frost, The Lost Companions and John Ruskin’s Guild of St George: A Revisionary History (London: Anthem Press 2014) 264pp. Hb £60.00. ISBN: 9781783082834 In 1871 John Ruskin launched a fund for the establishment of a new society. Ruskin envisaged a utopia based on medieval agrarianism, one which was community-minded and which opposed the advances…
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Preston, Claire, The Poetics of Scientific Investigation in Seventeenth-Century England
Claire Preston, The Poetics of Scientific Investigation in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2015) 320 pp. Hb, £60. ISBN: 9780198704805 The language of early modern scientific inquiry was neither predetermined nor did it elicit consensus among its practitioners regarding the most effective means for conveying information. Instead, as Claire Preston amply demonstrates, the rhetoric…
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Dodman, Trevor, Shell Shock, Memory, and the Novel in the Wake of World War I
Trevor Dodman, Shell Shock, Memory, and the Novel in the Wake of World War I (New York: Cambridge University Press 2015) 256pp. Hb, £64.99, PDF $80. ISBN: 978-1107114203 ‘There is never a single approach to something remembered’, writes John Berger in About Looking (1980). ‘Numerous approaches or stimuli converge upon and lead to it’ (qtd.…
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Jones, Esther L., Medicine and Ethics in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction
Esther L. Jones, Medicine and Ethics in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2015) x + 190 pp. Hb £55.00, PDF £43.99. ISBN: 978-1-137-52060-9 Framing her discussion of Black Women’s health with the metaphor of eating salt together, taken from Toni Cade Bambara’s 1980 novel The Salt Eaters, Jones explores how black women’s…
