Tag: 2017
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Halpern, Richard, Eclipse of Action: Tragedy and Political Economy
Richard Halpern, Eclipse of Action: Tragedy and Political Economy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017) 313 pp. £34.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780226433653 Halpern begins Eclipse of Action with an argument that modern tragedy reflects a crisis in the political economy, a ‘crisis of action’ rather than a ‘crisis in action’, one that threatens the definition of…
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Hall, Jason D., Nineteenth-Century Verse and Technology: Machines of Meter
Jason D. Hall, Nineteenth-Century Verse and Technology: Machines of Meter (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2017) 288 pp. £80.00 Hb. ISBN: 9783319535012 This book considers the ‘ways in which machine culture impacted on fundamental conceptions of what poetic meter was and how it worked’ (2). Jason Hall moves from the eighteenth century to the twentieth century but…
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Whitehead, James, Madness and the Romantic Poet: A Critical History
James Whitehead, Madness and the Romantic Poet: A Critical History (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2017) 320 pp. £55 Hb. ISBN: 9780198733706 For hundreds of years, scholars, writers, and mental health professionals have debated, discussed, endorsed, rebuked, or reveled in, associations between madness and creativity, specifically between madness and poets. Is the relationship correlational, or causational?…
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Maxwell, Catherine, Scents and Sensibility: Perfume in Victorian Literary Culture
Catherine Maxwell, Scents and Sensibility: Perfume in Victorian Literary Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2017) xviii + 361pp, 13 colour plates. £30 Hb. 9787-0-19-870175-0 Today’s perfume industry is worth millions of pounds, but for all the scientific sophistication of modern fragrances, advertisers still struggle with a fundamental sensory conundrum, namely, how can scent be conveyed…
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West, Anna, Thomas Hardy and Animals
Anna West, Thomas Hardy and Animals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017) 210 pp. $80.00 PDF, £75.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781107179172 Animals play an important role in Thomas Hardy’s work, but, with honourable exceptions, Hardy scholars have tended to overlook them. In Thomas Hardy and Animals, Anna West has at last made Hardy’s literary response to the non-human…
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Finn, Michael R., Figures from the Pre-Freudian Unconscious from Flaubert to Proust
Michael R. Finn, Figures from the Pre-Freudian Unconscious from Flaubert to Proust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017) 250 pp. $80.00 PDF, £75.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781107184565 In Figures from the Pre-Freudian Unconscious from Flaubert to Proust, Michael R. Finn explores the cultural meaning of the unconscious between 1850 and 1920. Framing society as defined by two…
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Griffiths, Matthew, The New Poetics of Climate Change: Modernist Aesthetics for a Warming World
Matthew Griffiths, The New Poetics of Climate Change: Modernist Aesthetics for a Warming World (London: Bloomsbury 2017) 224 pp. £80.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781474282093 Although it is well known that modernist literature did not engage widely in the early days of ecocriticism during the seventies, eighties and nineties, there is now a developed Modernist expression of…
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Goldman, Marlene, Forgotten: Narratives of Age-Related Dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease in Canada
Marlene Goldman, Forgotten: Narratives of Age-Related Dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease in Canada (Montreal and Kingston ON: McGill-Queens University Press 2017) $34.95 Pb, $120 Hb. ISBN: 9780773550926 Deconstructing the myths that have transformed cognitive decline into a corrosive fantasy, Forgotten establishes the pivotal role that fictional and non-fictional narratives play in cultural interpretations of disease, news…
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Chapman, Alison A, The Legal Epic: Paradise Lost and the Early Modern Law
Alison A Chapman, The Legal Epic: Paradise Lost and the Early Modern Law (Chicago: Chicago University Press 2017) 248 pp. $40 Hb. ISBN: 9780226435138 Among the plethora of connections Alison A Chapman makes between the jurisprudential and theological realms in her thoroughly contextualized The Legal Epic: Paradise Lost and The Early Modern Law, is a…
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Goldstein, Amanda Jo, Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism and the New Logics of Life
Amanda Jo Goldstein, Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism and the New Logics of Life (Chicago: Universiity of Chicago Press 2017) 336 pp. $35 PDF, $35 Pb, $100 Hb. ISBN: 9780226458441 In De rerum natura, Lucretius imagines the universe as beginning in rain: atoms fall through the void like raindrops, come into contact with one another, and…
