Category: Reviews
-
Sarkar, Debapriya, Possible Knowledge: The Literary Forms of Early Modern Science
Debapriya Sarkar, Possible Knowledge: The Literary Forms of Early Modern Science (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023) 265 pp. $65.00 Hb. ISBN: 97815128-2335-6 In Chapter 4 of Possible Knowledge: The literary forms of Early Modern Science, Margaret Cavendish’s lady with an earring remains unknowing as a whole cosmology comes to life and is annihilated within the…
-
Fyfe, Aileen and Kidd, Colin (eds), Beyond the Enlightenment: Scottish Intellectual Life, 1790-1914
Aileen Fyfe and Colin Kidd (eds), Beyond the Enlightenment: Scottish Intellectual Life, 1790-1914 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023) xii + 273 pp. £85.00 Hb. £24.99 Pb. £24.99 Ebook. ISBN: 9781474493031 David Hume, Adam Smith, Joseph Black, Dugald Stewart, Adam Ferguson, John Leslie, James Hutton, William Cullen, James Watt. These very prominent and influential philosophers, economists,…
-
Lehmann, Olga V. and Synnes, Oddgeir (eds), A Poetic Language of Ageing
Olga V. Lehmann and Oddgeir Synnes (eds), A Poetic Language of Ageing (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023) 232 pp. $115.00 Hb, $39.95 Pb. ISBN: 9781350256804 A Poetic Language of Ageing brings together the deeply personal experiences of growing older, as expressed through poetry and other creative writing avenues, with research on ageing. It also highlights that…
-
Livingstone, David N., The Empire of Climate: A History of an Idea
David N. Livingstone, The Empire of Climate: A History of an Idea (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024) 552 pp. £32.00 Hb. £22.40 ebook. ISBN: 9780691236704 David Noel Livingstone’s The Empire of Climate: A History of an Idea offers to his readers an examination of how the concept of climate has shaped human thought, society, and…
-
Estreich, George, Fables and Futures: Biotechnology, Disability, and the Stories We Tell Ourselves
George Estreich, Fables and Futures: Biotechnology, Disability, and the Stories We Tell Ourselves (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2019) 240 pp. $27.95 Hb. ISBN: 9780262039567 Across ten chapters of Fables and Futures: Biotechnology, Disability, and the Stories We Tell Ourselves, George Estreich applies a rhetorical lens to expose the tactics of persuasion and exclusion employed by…
-
Hall, Kersten T., Insulin – The Crooked Timber: A History from Thick Brown Muck to Wall Street Gold
Kersten T. Hall, Insulin – The Crooked Timber: A History from Thick Brown Muck to Wall Street Gold (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022) 480 pp. £31.49 Hb. ISBN: 9780192855381 Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made. — Immanuel Kant Whether you interpret Kant’s famous quote in a moral sense,…
-
Vigarello, Georges, Le Sentiment de Soi. Histoire de la Perception du Corps
Georges Vigarello, Le Sentiment de soi. Histoire de la perception du corps (Éditions du Seuil, 2014) 336 pp. €.23.00 ISBN: 2020898942 Building upon his life-long corpus of work on the history of the body, Georges Vigarello’s Le Sentiment de soi offers a captivating historical account of the evolving perception of the human body from the…
-
Welch, Tana Jean, Advancing Medical Posthumanism through Twenty-First Century American Poetry
Tana Jean Welch, Advancing Medical Posthumanism through Twenty-First Century American Poetry (Palgrave MacMillan, 2024) xv + 200 pp. £99.99. Hb: ISBN 978-3-031-49887-9 Tana Jean Welch inhabits a space where poetry, posthumanism, and medicine converge to show how poetry can provide a posthumanist perspective that activates an ethical understanding of what it means to be ‘human’…
-
Bailes, Melissa, Regenerating Romanticism: Botany, Sensibility, and Originality in British Literature, 1750-1830
Melissa Bailes, Regenerating Romanticism: Botany, Sensibility, and Originality in British Literature, 1750-1830 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2023) 282 pp. $115.00 Hb. $32.50 Pb. ISBN: 9780813949406 Melissa Bailes’s Regenerating Romanticism: Botany, Sensibility, and Originality in British Literature, 1750-1830 makes an important intervention in Romantic studies by calling into question the truism that Romantic poets rejected…
-
Abbott, Steve, The Proof Stage: How Theatre Reveals the Human Truth of Mathematics
Steve Abbott, The Proof Stage: How Theatre Reveals the Human Truth of Mathematics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023) 396 pp. $35.00/£30.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780691206080 Near the middle of The Proof Stage, his absorbing new book on mathematics and theatre, Steve Abbott gives an account of Samuel Beckett’s strange, wordless play Quad (1981): ‘…there is no…
