Tag: 2025
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Durham, Rebecca A., Be Still Mere Molecule
Rebecca A. Durham, Be Still Mere Molecule (Raleigh, NC, USA: Broken Tribe Press, 2025) 120 pp. $14.95 Pb. ISBN: 9781965412107 How does a poet witness the world? How does a scientist? What if a person were to be both at once? Would that experience of the in-betweenness of both worlds aid them in finding, perhaps…
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Endersby, Jim, The Arrival of the Fittest: Biology’s Imaginary Futures 1900–1935
Jim Endersby, The Arrival of the Fittest: Biology’s Imaginary Futures 1900–1935, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2025) 400 pp. $37.50 Pb. ISBN: 9780226837567 Jim Endersby’s The Arrival of the Fittest: Biology’s Imaginary Futures, 1900-1935 intervenes in histories of evolution by unearthing the popularity of a largely dismissed theory: mutation. Tracing the diffusion of Hugo de…
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Berry, Chelsea, Poisoned Relations: Healing, Power, and Contested Knowledge in the Atlantic World
Chelsea Berry, Poisoned Relations: Healing, Power, and Contested Knowledge in the Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025) 273 pp. $49.95 Hb. ISBN: 9781512826494 Chelsea Berry’s work Poisoned Relations: Healing, Power, and Contested Knowledge in the Atlantic World is a deeply interdisciplinary study that reimagines how we understand poison, healing, and power in the context…
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Hayles, N. Katherine, Bacteria to AI: Futures with our Nonhuman Symbionts
N. Katherine Hayles, Bacteria to AI: Futures with our Nonhuman Symbionts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2025) 304 pp. $27.50 Pb. ISBN: 9780226837475 As a species, we Homo sapiens often take it for granted that humanity is separate from, and superior to, the rest of existence. It’s a view that has permeated much of our…
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Martin, Meredith, Poetry’s Data: Digital Humanities and the History of Prosody
Meredith Martin, Poetry’s Data: Digital Humanities and the History of Prosody (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025) 224 pp. £84 Hb. £30 Pb. ISBN: 9780691254678 Meredith Martin’s Poetry’s Data is a large-scale attempt to bring together literary studies, linguistics, digital humanities, and critical archives studies. It presents a compelling case on why we should critically examine…
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Markovits, Stefanie, The Number Sense of Nineteenth-Century British Literature
Stefanie Markovits, The Number Sense of Nineteenth-Century British Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025) 240 pp. $100 Hb. ISBN: 9780198937791 ‘Number sense’ is the term Stefanie Markovits uses to describe the numerical thinking that permeates the lines and pages of nineteenth-century novels and poems, crafting patterns across the tapestry of poetic imagery and narrative arcs. As she…
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Klinger, Sebastian P., Sleep Works: Experiments in Science and Literature, 1899-1929
Sebastian P. Klinger, Sleep Works: Experiments in Science and Literature, 1899-1929 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025) 255 pp. £45.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781421450803 In Sleep Works, historian and literary scholar Sebastian P. Klinger sets out to provide a ‘comprehensive account’ of early twentieth-century scientific, pharmaceutical and literary understandings of sleep (134). By examining developments in…
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Christensen, Joel P., Storylife: On Epic, Narrative, and Living Things
Joel P. Christensen, Storylife: On Epic, Narrative, and Living Things (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2025) x+234 pp. £20.00 Hb. ISBN: 9780300269239 Fifteen years ago I wrote a review for the BSLS of three books that sought to make profound claims about epic, narrative and living things. Two of them – Jonathan Gottschall’s The Rape…
