Category: Reviews
-
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…
-
Jameson, Conor Mark, Finding W. H. Hudson: The Writer Who Came to Britain to Save the Birds
Conor Mark Jameson, Finding W. H. Hudson: The Writer Who Came to Britain to Save the Birds (London: Pelagic Publishing, 1923), 360 pp. £17.99 Pb. ISBN: 9781784273286 It is almost a given that any review or essay (and there is precious few of either) of the work of W. H. Hudson (1841-1922) will lament the…
-
Powell, Rosalind, Perception and Analogy: Poetry, Science, and Religion in the Eighteenth Century
Rosalind Powell, Perception and Analogy: Poetry, Science, and Religion in the Eighteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021) viii + 296 pp. £85.00 Hb. ISBN: 978-1-5261-5704-1 The eighteenth century witnessed the profound impact of natural philosophy on every facet of cultural expression. Rosalind Powell’s monograph, Perception and Analogy: Poetry, Science, and Religion in the Eighteenth…
-
Campos, Liliane and Pierre-Louis Patoine (eds), Life, Re-Scaled: The Biological Imagination in 21st-Century Literature and Performance
Liliane Campos and Pierre-Louis Patoine (eds.), Life, Re-Scaled: The Biological Imagination in 21st-Century Literature and Performance (Open Book Publishers, 2022) xvi + 402. £31.41 Hb. £22.91 Pb. ISBN: 978-1-80064-750-3 We live in a world whose multiscalar entanglements can no longer be ignored: the climate crisis is more conspicuous than ever, while our agency and indeed…
-
DeFalco, Amelia, Curious Kin in Fictions of Posthuman Care
This book gives all its key terms serious play in service of its exploration of ‘forms of care that resist […] human exceptionalism’ (26). Ranging through curiosity’s interest and strangeness, the biological connections and physical divisions of kin, fictions in several media, and a breathtaking array of posthumanist framings, to the combinations of feeling and…
