Reviews pretty bad fit for the subject matter. ere are not only a great many places to make a start—with Aristotle, with Augustine, with the beginning of the known universe—but these ‘origins’ do not develop in a linear or successive fashion. In many ways there is little difference in the kinds of work done by the essays in the first and second sections of the volume; essays from Part , such as Mark Currie’s delicate, Ricœur-inflected commentary on reading and Tobias Menely’s expansive account of time in ecocriticism, could just as easily have found a place in the ‘Development’ section. ere are other volumes in the Critical Concepts series in which this structure is more natural: Trauma and Literature, edited by J. Roger Kurtz (), is one example that seems to have a more obvious developmental narrative underpinning its narrower critical concept. While I recognize the need for unity across the series and give credit to Allen for bringing creativity to the constraint, the structure does not add much to a collection which could perhaps have developed ideas more usefully between its essays in another order. L H U A B Cyberformalism: Histories of Linguistic Forms in the Digital Archive. By D S. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. . xxii+ pp. $.. ISBN ––––. e central idea of Daniel Shore’s Cyberformalism is that there exist unified or transferable idea-units called ‘linguistic forms’, and that their discovery and study, using advanced search techniques, can bring us to new understandings of literary history. Linguistic forms can, specifically, help to rewrite the history of textual influence. e ‘linguistic form’, explains Shore, is a type of sign-unit: it is an unfilled or partially filled construction. A linguistic form is not empty syntax, nor is it a Saussurean sign, but rather it exists somewhere in between. ese forms persist through time and space but, as with words, they change, adapt, and take on new meaning according to local context. ‘What Would Jesus Do?’ is an example of a filled-in form: Shore explains that while the specific phrase originated in the nineteenth century, it can be traced back to the earliest Christian theology, and he argues that one can detect, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a shi from ‘Imitatio Christi’ to the conditional phrase which eventually became the form we know and use today. Digital archives offer opportunities for the study of the linguistic form, but finding them requires smart tools and researchers. Searching for words or sequences of words does not help to find instances of a linguistic form, because by definition they are lexicographically distinct. To combat this Shore uses advanced search techniques , which he outlines throughout the text. Two underlying technologies allow him to produce results from complex queries: ‘Part of Speech’ tagging and Regular Expressions (computer code developed specifically for matching complicated patterns in text). Using these in tandem enables the detection of forms even through extensive syntactic variation. is is exciting work: Shore’s process of discovery reads, in part, as detective fiction. e forms, we discover, take on multiple roles MLR, ., and change in meaning depending on context: in further case studies Shore traces a network of poetic influence through the phrase ‘Was it for this’, and shows how the form version of ‘act as if [x]’ was used by early advocates in the establishment of a nineteenth-century ‘technology of the self’, and also by Kant to ‘preserve a practical role for the metaphysical ideas that his epistemology places beyond the bounds of knowledge’ (p. ). Perhaps the most important contribution made by this book is to the study of style: Shore’s fascinating work on Milton’s ‘depictives’ (adjectives which form part of the predicate but modify the subject, as in ‘Death | Grinned horrible’ (Paradise Lost, . –)) is followed by a wonderful examination of the ways in which advanced search can move forward our understanding of style, iterability, and the evolution or repurposing of work or ideas. rough the ambiguity inherent in a depictive form we gain a greater understanding of Milton’s work: through detective work Shore discovered from whom Milton appropriated...