Our new books display shelf at the EFL is getting busier and busier! We’re finally daring to put out more than ten books for the first time since the library first closed at the onset of the pandemic. We hope you’re enjoying the expanded selection – and to help you enjoy it, we’ve picked five new titles from the last month to discuss here in our blog. As always, you can see our full collection over on LibraryThing.

Roger Luckhurst. Gothic: An Illustrated History. 2021.

An unsettlingly gripping book even from the first flick-through, Luckhurst’s Gothic delivers chilling illustrations throughout the pages of a satisfyingly weighty hardback. This book breaks the gothic genre down to it’s core components and recurring tropes, examining each of them like a slice of history. Enticing examples include ‘Labyrinth’ (Architecture and Form), ‘Edgelands’ (The Lie of the Land), Planetary and Cosmic Horror (The Gothic Compass) and Formless (Monsters). Maybe don’t read this one just before bed…

Caleb Femi. Poor. 2020.

This poetry collection could boast a glittering array of prizes, short-listings, and long-listings, from the Forward Prize for the Best First Collection (winner!) to the Rathbones Folio Prize (shortlisted) to book of the year (according to the Guardian, the Observer, and the BBC). The book is in fact more than poetry; it’s a poetry collection meets photography folio that explores Peckham through the eyes of the young black boys that live there and crucially, that love their “troubled and enchanted world” (blurb). It is both honest and romantic, grief-ridden and spiritually ascending.

Purchased through the Drue Heinz Fund.

Alex Mermikides & Gianna Bouchard. Performance and the Medical Body. 2016.

In an intersection between science and the arts, Mermikides and Bouchard use this edited collection to examine the ways in which the performing arts explore medical and biomedical sciences, starting with the ‘biologization’ of theatre (Roger Kneebone asks you to consider, for example, the phrases ‘operating theatre’ or ‘performing surgery’). Thematic focuses include “patient narratives, identity, embodiment, agency, medical ethics, health and illness” (blurb). Crucially, this book also explores the capacity of performance practice to influence key debates around biomedical practice.

Jeremy Colangelo. Diaphanous Bodies: Ability, Disability, and Modernist Irish Literature. 2021.

Writing in the expanding field of literary disability studies, Colangelo uses this book to explore what he calls “the myth of the diaphanous abled body” (blurb). He unravels the concept of the binary of ‘abled’ and ‘disabled’ and places these as points on a fluid continuum. These ideas are explored through close examination of work by a handful of modernist Irish writers (Joyce, Beckett, Egerton, and Bowen) first focusing on the somatic experiences of the body, and then the question of how this overlaps with broader social trends.

Stella Panayotova. The Art & Science of Illuminated Manuscripts: A Handbook. 2020.

Written for “historians of art, culture and society, as well as conservators and manuscript scholars” (blurb), this gorgeous handbook is a delight to even just leaf through. It’s filled with pictures (830 illustrations, to be exact!) taken from various manuscripts to detail a variety of topics, from pigments to optical instruments to bindings. This gorgeous book is lovingly put together, and even has over 300 pages set aside just for case studies: detailed deep dives into the specifics of individual manuscripts.