Category: Reviews
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Lewens, Tim, Cultural Evolution: Conceptual Challenges
Tim Lewens, Cultural Evolution: Conceptual Challenges (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) 224 pp. £25.00 Hb. ISBN: 9870199674183 As a leading Darwin scholar, Tim Lewens is admirably qualified to produce a useful work on the knotty problems of cultural evolution. In this book Lewens guides us through the various arguments on evolutionary approaches to cultural change,…
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Monnet, Agnieszka Soltysik, The Poetics and Politics of the American Gothic
Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet, The Poetics and Politics of the American Gothic (Farnham: Ashgate 2010) 174 pp. £95.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781409400561 The cover art for Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet’s study elucidates her topic with striking precision. Grant Wood’s American Gothic is an starting point for Monnet’s discussion of the American gothic literary tradition. Much of the introduction maps…
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Yale, Elizabeth, Sociable Knowledge: Natural History and the Nation in Early Modern Britain
Elizabeth Yale, Sociable Knowledge: Natural History and the Nation in Early Modern Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2016) 384pp. Hb, PDF $69.95. ISBN: 978-0-8122-4781-7 Tracing the networks of correspondence, authorship, and print in early modern natural history, Elizabeth Yale describes the field’s project of delineating Britain topographically and thus as a political object. Sociable Knowledge…
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Phegley, Jennifer et. al. (eds), Transatlantic Sensations
Jennifer Phegley, John Cyril Barton and Kristin N. Huston, eds, pref by David S Reynolds, Transatlantic Sensations (Oxford: Routledge 2012) 302 pp. Hb, £95.00. ISBN: 9781409427155 This book sets out to examine narrative and artistic representations of sensation. Choosing and using diverse approaches to the subject matter, this collection of essays demonstrates the strongly interdependent relationship between…
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Solomonescu, Yasmin, John Thelwall and the Materialist Imagination
Yasmin Solomonescu, John Thelwall and the Materialist Imagination (Basingstoke: Palgrave 2014) xii, 226 pp. Hb, £58.00. ISBN: 978-1-137-42613-0 In July 2014, the John Thelwall Society and the University of Notre Dame in London celebrated Thelwall, the poet, elocutionist, and political agitator, at 250. The event was triumphant in spirit, and the organisers and attendees relished…
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Keen, Suzanne, Thomas Hardy’s Brains: Psychology, Neurology, and Hardy’s Imagination
Suzanne Keen, Thomas Hardy’s Brains: Psychology, Neurology, and Hardy’s Imagination (Columbus: Ohio State University Press 2014) xiii + 236 pp. Hb $64.95 , Pb $25.95 , CD $14.95. ISBN: 978-0-8142-1249-3 Suzanne Keen begins her book by discussing the sexologist Havelock Ellis’s review of ‘Hardy’s Novels’ from 1883.1 She highlights his observation that when anonymously published some nine…
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Frevert, Ute et al., Emotional Lexicons: Continuity and Change in the Vocabulary of Feeling 1700-2000
Ute Frevert, Christian Bailey, Pascal Eitler, Benno Gammerl, Bettina Hitzer, Margrit Pernau, Monique Scheer, Anne Schmidt, and Nina Verheyen, Emotional Lexicons: Continuity and Change in the Vocabulary of Feeling 1700-2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) x + 287 pp. Hb £68.00. ISBN: 9780199655731 In the opening chapter of this ambitious collaborative book, Ute Frevert acknowledges…
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Eggert, Katherine, Disknowledge: Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England
Katherine Eggert, Disknowledge: Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) 368 pp. Hb, EPUB, PDF $55.00. ISBN: 978-0-8122-4751-0 Katherine Eggert’s examination of early modern alchemy and epistemic practices begins with a seemingly irrational proposition; namely, it is “possible not to know what one knows” (2). As…
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Pietsch, B. M., Dispensational Modernism
B. M. Pietsch, Dispensational Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015) 262 pp. Hb £47.99. ISBN: 978-0-19-024408-8 This book explores the origins of dispensationalism within early American fundamentalism, calling attention to scientific rhetoric and engineering methods utilised by dispensationalists for interpreting the Bible and understanding the nature of time. The author offers a thought-provoking re-evaluation…
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Raines, Melissa Anne, George Eliot’s Grammar of Being
Melissa Anne Raines, George Eliot’s Grammar of Being (London: Anthem Press, 2011), xxiv + 208 pp. Hb £60.00, Pb £25.00. ISBN: 9781783080748 Melissa Anne Raines’s George Eliot’s Grammar of Being emulates, if not exceeds, Eliot’s famously careful attention to phrasing and grammar. Raines takes her cue from a line in Eliot’s introduction to Felix…
