Cosmos and Image in the Renaissance: French Love Lyric and Natural-Philosophical Poetry
Kathryn Banks
Legenda (General Series) •3 October 2008
- ‘A powerful interpretation of the relationship of cosmic and linguistic images... a thoughtful and thought-provoking analysis into sixteenth-century poetry and intellectual history.’ — Michael Randall, Renaissance Quarterly 62, 2009, 1237-38
- ‘Dans cet ouvrage savant, où l'érudition ne nuit jamais à la clarté de l'exposé, l'auteur choisit de réexaminer ce que Lucien Febvre appelait "l'outillage mental" du seizième siècle mais en s'attachant moins à la circulation des idées ... qu'à leur expression linguistique et au jeu auquel les soumet le poète ... Du point de vue méthodologique de nombreuses précautions sont prises, à la fois dans l'introduction et dans le corps de l'analyse ... une stratégie d'exposition qui, loin de ramener le différent au même, entend refuser l'emprise de tout schéma téléologique.’ — Francois Rigolot, French Review 83.4, March 2010, 859
- ‘This is a scholarly and rewarding study based pleasingly on close readings of an interesting combination of texts [...] a detailed and authoritative account of images which goes beyond the purely linguistic, situating its material both within a developing tradition in the history of ideas and against a backdrop of contemporary political, philosophical and theological debates. As such, with its broad and thoroughly researched range of references to writers in different disciplines and genres, it is of as much interest to the general reader as it is to specialists of Scève or Du Bartas.’ — Emma Herdman, Renaissance Studies 24.3, June 2010, 451-52
- ‘Exemplarily lucid explorations of a number of difficult problems in sixteenth-century poetic theory and practice.’ — James Helgeson, French Studies 65.2, April 2011, 239-40
- ‘A rich, persuasive account of some extraordinary poetry and a fascinating period of intellectual and literary history.’ — 'MHG', St Catharine's Magazine 2009, p. 85
The Strange M. Proust
Edited by André Benhaïm
Legenda (General Series) •23 December 2008
- ‘Reminding us again of the importance of close reading in Proust, Malcolm Bowie concludes that ‘it is perhaps in his handling of little local things that he is the most strange’. Certainly, in their attentiveness to detail, all of the articles in this volume provide exciting new insights into a much-studied text.’ — Sarah Tribout-Joseph, Modern Language Review 105.2, 2010, 569-70 (full text online)
- ‘The eminent Proust scholars contribiting to this volume all propose readings of the Search that tease out paradoxes, the uncanny, and the subversive hidden in Proust's text through a variety of critical perspectives. Although the theme of 'strangeness' is broad, the chapters cohere remarkably well and are of a uniformly high caliber.’ — Patrick M. Bray, French Review 85.2, 2012, 168-69
Pre-Histories and Afterlives: Studies in Critical Method
Edited by Anna Holland and Richard Scholar
Legenda (General Series) •23 December 2008
Ovide du remede d'amours
Edited by Tony Hunt
Critical Texts 15•1 February 2008
- ‘This is a most carefully presented and legible edition ... The Notes themselves are rich in linguistic, literary and mythological information and useful commentary on salient translation techniques. A Glossary and Table of Proper Names complete this elegant edition.’ — J. Keith Atkinson, New Zealand Journal of French Studies 30.1, 2009, 45-46
Strands of Utopia: Spaces of Poetic Work in Twentieth-Century France
Michael G. Kelly
Legenda (General Series) •3 October 2008
- ‘In all, Michael Kelly’s study encourages revised understandings of both the poetic and the utopian in the modern French literary context... A well-informed and instructive survey of both utopia and poetry. All this makes Strands of Utopia: Spaces of Poetic Work in Twentieth-Century France an invaluable source.’ — Teresa Louro, Utopian Studies 21.2, 2010, 357-60
- ‘A very careful, reflective, and thought-provoking study, and it more than amply rewards the exertions required of its readers.’ — Margaret Miner, French Studies 64.4, 2010, 513-14
- ‘L'ouvrage de Michael G. Kelly, prolongé par une importante et très utile bibliographie, ouvre donc des voies passionnantes pour explorer la poésie dans la dynamique de sa fabrication au XXe siècle.’ — Michel Blay, Kritikon Litterarum 37, 2010, 168-69
- ‘Offers a thorough and convincing argument for the need to read twentieth-century French poetry from the perspective of utopia... An important resource that should open up new means of addressing the ever-changing "'idea' of poetry".’ — James Petterson, French Review 37, 2010, 156-57
Paradox, Aphorism and Desire in Novalis and Derrida
Clare Kennedy
MHRA Texts and Dissertations 71•1 August 2008
- ‘The study makes subtle and illuminating connections between the two writers, avoiding the simplifications of past decades.’ — James Hodkinson, Modern Language Review 105.1, 2010, 206-08 (full text online)
Proust and Joyce in Dialogue
Sarah Tribout-Joseph
Legenda (General Series) •25 July 2008
Exotic Subversions in Nineteenth-Century French Fiction
Jennifer Yee
Research Monographs in French Studies 25•25 July 2008
- ‘An elegant and thoroughly researched monograph... a valuable reference for future work on exoticism, imperialism and postcolonial France.’ — unsigned, Forum for Modern Language Studies 46.1, January 2010, 120
- ‘A highly effective demonstration of the use of postcolonial perspectives to open up new possibilities for our reading of the nineteenth century.’ — Timothy Unwin, Modern Language Review 105.2, 2010, 561-62 (full text online)
- ‘Yee’s text, stranded between the dogmatic (un)certainties of “1991” and the questions that have opened up in its ongoing aftermath, provides a salutary, if unintended, reminder of what it is that we, as postcolonial critics, have been invested in, and of what is at stake in our ongoing attempts at justifying this investment (the “aesthetic turn”) or contesting it (the “political turn”). Were the praise-songs of “oppositionality,” which once (à la Lowe, Chambers, Scott) dominated our field, simply the epiphenomena of a strategy of containment through which postcolonial studies was bound to a certain vision of “complexity” at odds with the anti-colonial, and unrepentantly non-literary, dynamics of a work like Orientalism, so that its truly radical (and, first and foremost, anti-Zionist) politics could be rendered palatable to an Anglo-American academic audience ever in search of a specious newness but intent on preserving the old, bourgeois order upon which literary studies, and the affect that so intimately at’ — Chris Bongie, Francophone Postcolonial Studies 7.2, 2010, 89-94
- ‘Bongie's review is alarmingly accurate. I do indeed accept 'literature as [my] chosen and delimited field of study' (though I try to see that field as part of a broader history). And he is entirely accurate in saying that I see the subversions offered by nineteenth-century literature as largely falling short of 'true resistance'... Of course the literature of the nineteenth century is racist according to our modern definitions; but racism is so vast and insidious a phenomenon that it is not in itself analytically useful and requires careful historical nuancing. In any case, although I am most interested in an approach that combines aesthetic and political concerns, and would regret such a rigid separation as Bongie appears to think necessary, I also differ from him in my belief in a supple and many-voiced criticism that does not need to dictate one single mode of textual analysis.’ — Jennifer Yee's invited reply to Chris Bongie's FPS review, Bulletin of Francophone Postcolonial Studies 1.1, Spring 2010, 15-17
- ‘In this elegant, lucid, and original study of four ‘exotic’ works by Chateaubriand, Hugo, Flaubert, and Segalen, Jennifer Yee turns her back on Edward Said's negative depiction of nineteenth-century Orientalism in order to read her chosen texts from a post-colonialist perspective... Impressive and admirably comparative.’ — Michael Tilby, French Studies 64.4, 2010, 495-96