Check out some recent reviews of Bloomsbury books and find your next read!
Black Comics: Politics of Race and Representation
“The long-anticipated “Black Panther” film debuted in theaters on Feb. 17, and the response from critics and fans has been overwhelmingly positive. The movie earned $387 million in its opening weekend, which makes it the highest-grossing film of all time by a black director. If you want to dive deeper into the world of black comics, here are three books to start you off … Howard, who wrote “Encyclopedia of Black Comics,” presents a collection of analytical essays that explore the historical and vast contributions of black artists to the graphic book genre, including comic strips, political cartoons, manga and graphic novels. One essay, “Brief History of the Black Comic Strip: Past and Present,” chronicles the work of black creators starting in the 1920s, while other contributors contextualize the work of black creators, explaining how they tackled themes such as the intersection of gender and race and incorporated political and social commentary in their comics.” –The New York Times
The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature
“Tabbi (English, Univ. of Illinois, Chicago) has organized his foundational handbook in four parts that provide a needed framework for the work in this field. The first two sections—”Ends, Beginnings,” “Poetics, Polemics”—work their way through the key insights and concepts developed since the inception of the field. The other two sections—”Materialities, Ontologies,” “Economies, Precarities”—provide key essays on how electronic literature’s formats have helped to define contemporary digital life. Including an annotated bibliography of major texts in this field, this is an invaluable resource for those interested in where literature is going. Summing Up: Essential.” –CHOICE
“Insightful, ingenious, and compelling, the book should be a welcome addition to the library of anyone interested in the intersection of religion and aesthetics…Hurley discovers, or rediscovers, poems that have been covered up by generalities, whether the generalities of literary history or of various ideologies. Wiping clean the fogged mirror and dusting the lamp, he allows us to see again, or for the first time, the brilliance of poems dimmed by decades of accumulated opinion. In doing so, he returns us to the poets he has chosen – Blake, Tennyson, Christina Rossetti and T. S. Eliot – with fresh interest in their poems, and this certainly numbers among the highest accomplishments of literary criticism.” –The New Criterion
Danish Literature as World Literature
“This is an impressive collection of articles on Danish literature of a very high scholarly quality, and a must for everyone interest in Danish literary history, whether they live, teach or study in Denmark or abroad. The authors are all leading experts in the their field, the book is very well written … It should be on everyone’s bookshelves.” –Scandinavica
Pentecostal Modernism: Lovecraft, Los Angeles, and World-Systems Culture
“This book … makes a carefully constructed, powerful intervention suggestive of much potential for future scholarship drawing on its principles of approach … The ideas here will be useful to scholars working on other related fields linked to both Modernism and the Weird, from postmodernism to the New Weird and beyond. In particular, Shapiro and Barnard’s construction of the experience-system of modernity seems useful in reevaluating the relative positions of less centric Modernists, or the concept of Intermodernism in the study and understanding of twentieth-century literature systemically, in the context of cultural fields, such as religion, from which it might otherwise be separated.” –American Literary History