R|EVOLUTIONS

Reviews / Votes

"In this excellent collection of essays the editors have assembled an international line-up of contributors to debate the parameters and problems of cultural transformations from the early modern period to postmodernity. Collections of this kind which offer such wide historical coverage can sometimes fall between two stools - neither sufficiently focused to fix the attention of scholars or students working in particular historical periods, nor comprehensive enough to satisfy the general reader. This volume manages to avoid both pitfalls, and for two reasons. First, the quality and precision of the contributions allows readers unfamiliar with debates around a specific historical moment access to the archive in a lucid and lively manner. Second, the theme of the collection - or rather, themes - are so expertly handled by the editors and so thoroughly marshalled by the essayists as to offer something serious at the level of theory, so that the individual historical engagements are supported by a series of meditations on the nature of culture, community and change. That holds a great deal of merit for the non-specialist, and is an example of the sort of clarity and comprehensiveness that the best work in cultural studies aspires to. Effectively, what the collection offers - and the editors are to be commended for maintaining such a strong through-line - is a kind of critical cartography of the modes and measures of cultural change across different periods, never losing sight of the big picture, producing finally the effect of an overview that enables close-ups and sidelights as well as snapshots and highlights. Any book of essays that can range from Ben Jonson to Angela Carter, and examine a wealth of material from Jacobean masque to the Atom Bomb, is not short on ambition. A materialist mapping of mindscapes as well as landscapes, I would certainly recommend this text to students as an engaging and energetic encounter with an open and ongoing debate in literary and cultural studies."Professor Willy Maley, Dept of English Literature, University of Glasgow "'R|Evolutions: Mapping Culture, Community, and Change' represents the best kind of cultural history: theoretically informed, conceptually adventurous, and closely attuned to the various interconnections between texts, disciplines and periods. Taken together the contributions cover a wide expanse of theoretical and literary territory, demonstrating the possibilities for literary studies in the twenty-first century. Rarely has the future of field been so energetically presented under one cover."Dr. Alex Benchimol, Lecturer in English Literature and Cultural History, University of Glasgow