MHRA Publication

‘What emerges from Connon’s analyses is the sheer vitality of Piron’s production, its sometimes "anarchic" inventiveness, and its propensity to question hierarchies and cross boundaries of genre... I recommend this book highly.’ — Mark Darlow, Modern Language Review 103.3, July 2008, 855-56 (full text online)
‘This is a particularly good-looking book, with attractive hardcover, smart format, quality white paper and lovely typesetting. It boasts the kind of finish that just makes reading particularly pleasant, and all the more so when its content inspires one to return to a relatively forgotten playwright who clearly deserves more attention than his Villon-like epitaph irreverently suggests: ‘Ci-gît Piron, qui ne fut rien,/Pas même académicien’.’ — Síofra Pierse, French Studies 477-78

‘This volume, produced under the auspices of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama, contains an all-encompassing performance history of three plays of Aristophanes' Old Comedy from their first performance to the present day. Aristophanic comedy, despite its highly politicized, sexual, and time-bound humour, is shown to be the touchstone of comedy, influential from the Renaissance onwards.’ — Regine May, Modern Language Review 103.3, July 2008, 807-08 (full text online)
‘This exceptionally handsome and well-produced volume... Its scope, as its title indicates, is very broad, and most of its readers are likely to be selective in the use they make of it. Roughly half of the essays discuss twentieth-century productions of Aristophanes’ plays and there is, inevitably, an emphasis upon the problems involved in translation in both the narrower (linguistic) and the broader (theatrical/cultural) senses of the term.’ — unsigned notice, Forum for Modern Language Studies 45.3 (2009), 351-54
‘There are dozens of plates in this volume, and the visual record of the performances described can be of great interpretative value for the reader. There is a healthy range in the scale of these performances: university productions or small-scale professional (or semi-professional) shows stand alongside much better funded and larger scale endeavours. This is, I feel, essential.’ — C. W. Marshall, Phoenix LXIV.1-2, 2010, 172-75

‘In his witty, deeply learned and humane "Last Word", Nuttall reminds us that the famous principle of economy in explanation, Ockham's Razor, when applied to Shakespeare's plays, should be renamed "Ockham's Beard", which prompts us to ask of any of Shakespeare's plays, "What else is going on?"... What makes this collection distinctive is that nearly all of these essays focus centrally on genre.’ — Paul Cefalu, Shakespeare Quarterly 59.3, Fall 2008, 345-48
‘Frank Kermode once referred to Nuttall (who died in 2007) as "probably the most philosophically-minded of modern literary critics", and the volume reflects this emphasis... A stimulating collection of pieces, of relevance not just to Shakespeareans but also to anyone with an interest in questions of the nature of literary value.’ — unsigned, Forum for Modern Language Studies 46.1, January 2010, 118-19

‘This excellent volume provides an invaluable extra dimension to previous publications on Austrian theatre between the wars through the rigorous use of archival material, reinforcing and enhancingwork based mainly on texts, reports, and reviews in the Viennese press and journals. This is a work which will be important not only to literary historians, particularly of the theatre, but also to political historians, demonstrating as it does how the history of that troubled period in Austria directly affected the theatre.’ — John Warren, Modern Language Review 103.4, October 2008, 1164-65 (full text online)
‘A significant and welcome contribution to the slowly expanding body of work examining the interface of culture and politics in the First Austrian Republic... Original and well-researched.’ — Forum for Modern Language Studies 231)

La Devineresse ou les faux enchantemens
Édition présentée, établie, et annotée par Julia Prest
Critical Texts 12•1 November 2007