Tag: 2016
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Peakman, Julie, Amatory Pleasures: Explorations in Eighteenth-Century Sexual Culture
Julie Peakman, Amatory Pleasures: Explorations in Eighteenth-Century Sexual Culture (London: Bloomsbury 2016) 240 pp. £21.99 Pb. ISBN: 9781474226448 Amatory Pleasures is a collection of articles written by Julie Peakman, which seeks to investigate how sex and the sexualised body were constructed in the eighteenth-century imagination. Using samples of the written word (as well as illustration…
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Solomon, Tom, Roald Dahl’s Marvellous Medicine
Tom Solomon, Roald Dahl’s Marvellous Medicine (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press 2016) 256 pp. £10.00 Pb. ISBN: 9781781383391 In 2016, I had the privilege to participate in a conference at the University of Cardiff commemorating and celebrating the centenary of Roald Dahl’s birth. Not unexpectedly, academic contributions were predominantly dedicated to his stories, their adaptations and…
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Koehler, Karin, Thomas Hardy and Victorian Communication: Letters, Telegrams and Postal Systems
Karin Koehler, Thomas Hardy and Victorian Communication: Letters, Telegrams and Postal Systems (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2016) xii + 246 pp. £58.00 Hb. ISBN: 978-3-319-29101-7 Thomas Hardy was a prolific writer of letters. Although his correspondence was seemingly exhausted with the seven volume collection of 1978-88, a further volume of the author’s letters was released in…
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Escobar, Matthew, The Persistence of the Human: Consciousness, Meta-body and Survival in Contemporary Film and Literature
Matthew Escobar, The Persistence of the Human: Consciousness, Meta-body and Survival in Contemporary Film and Literature (Leiden and Boston: Brill 2016), 218pp. €95 ebook, Hb. ISBN: 9789004323629 According to Lakoff and Johnson’s Philosophy in the Flesh (1999), the capacity to reason ‘is shaped crucially by the peculiarities of our human bodies, by the remarkable details…
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Kandel, Eric R, Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures
Eric R Kandel, Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures (New York: Columbia University Press 2016) 226 pp. $29.95 Hb. ISBN 978-0-231-179962-1. Reductionism in Art and Brain Science, as the name suggests, is a comprehensive synthesis of two schools of thought previously considered at best tenuously linked, at worst mutually exclusive. Kandel…
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Kistler, Jordan, Arthur O’Shaughnessy, A Pre-Raphaelite Poet in the British Museum
Jordan Kistler, Arthur O’Shaughnessy, A Pre-Raphaelite Poet in the British Museum (Oxford: Routledge 2016) 199pp. £110.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781472467355 I approached this book (as I suspect many readers will) with a keen interest in interactions between Victorian science and literature, but little knowledge of Arthur O’Shaughnessy (1844-81). As such, I was at first intrigued by…
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Godfrey, Emelyne (ed), Utopias and Dystopias in the Fiction of H G Wells and William Morris: Landscape and Space
Emelyne Godfrey (ed) Utopias and Dystopias in the Fiction of H G Wells and William Morris: Landscape and Space (London: Palgrave 2016) £52.99 EPUB, PDF, £66.99 Hb. ISBN 978-1-137-52340-2 While the literary works of both William Morris and H G Wells are situated within a utopian tradition spanning from Thomas More and Plato’s Republic to…
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Cole, Lucinda, Imperfect Creatures: Vermin, Literature and the Sciences of Life, 1600-1740
Lucinda Cole, Imperfect Creatures: Vermin, Literature and the Sciences of Life, 1600-1740 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 2016) 240 pp. Open access here, $39.00 Pb, $75.00 Hb. ISBN: 978-0-472-05295-0 The true merit of Lucinda Cole’s study lies in its ability to unravel some of the quite subtle constituents of how ‘the human’ is defined.…
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Ingram, Allan and Leigh Wetherall Dickson (eds), Disease and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture: Fashioning the Unfashionable
Allan Ingram and Leigh Wetherall Dickson, eds, Disease and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture: Fashioning the Unfashionable (London: Palgrave 2016) 290pp. £66.99 Hb. ISBN: 9781137597182 Based on the findings of their Leverhulme Trust-funded ‘Fashionable Diseases’ research project, the editors of and contributors to Disease and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture explore the fascinating…
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Zapf, Hubert, Literature as Cultural Ecology: Sustainable Texts
Hubert Zapf, Literature as Cultural Ecology: Sustainable Texts (London: Bloomsbury 2016) ix + 301 pp. £29 Pb, £29 EPUB . £73 Hb. ISBN: 978-1-350-051966 In Literature as Cultural Ecology, Hubert Zapf posits the ‘mutual interdependence between culture and nature’ as a ‘fundamental dimension of literary production and creativity’ (3). Drawing on ‘the paradigm of cultural…
