👤 Gender and sexuality

Published January 1990

Sexuality and the Sense of Self in the Works of Georg Trakl and Robert Musil
Andrew Webber
Bithell Series of Dissertations 15 / MHRA Texts and Dissertations 30

Published May 1996

Gender and Politics in Austrian Fiction
Edited by Edward Timms and Ritchie Robertson
Austrian Studies 7

Published June 1996

Privileged Anonymity: The Writings of Madame de Lafayette
Anne Green
Research Monographs in French Studies 1

  • ‘Produces many fresh insights, and demonstrates admirably that La Fayette's writing repays detailed scrutiny... Readable, instructive and accessible: valuable for specialists and illuminating for the general reader.’ — Maya Slater, Times Literary Supplement 1996
  • ‘This thought-provoking study inaugurates a major new series of critical monographs... Offers many fresh insights into these important texts, and it is to be warmly welcomed.’ — Jonathan Mallinson, French Studies LIV.2, 2000, 215-6
  • Luisa Benatti, Studi francesi 124, 1998, 135

Published January 2000

Another Country: Sexuality and National Identity in Catalan Gay Fiction
Josep-Anton Fernàndez
MHRA Texts and Dissertations 50

Published November 2000

Speculative Identities: Contemporary Italian Women’s Narrative
Rita Wilson
Italian Perspectives 3

Published October 2002

Closer to the Wild Heart: Essays on Clarice Lispector
Edited by Cláudia Pazos Alonso and Claire Williams
Legenda (General Series)

  • ‘Given the relative paucity of work in English on Clarice Lispector, Pazo's and William's collection of English-language writing on this author is welcome, not just for its mere presence, but especially for its attention to newer critical thinking on race, gender and nation. Most especially welcome is the turn indicated in this volume toward an examination of the several kind of writing in which Lispector engaged - letters, cronicas, semi-autobiography, fiction - a turn that indicates a more comprehensive way of thinking both about her fiction and about her life-work as a whole.’ — Tace Hedrick, Luso-Brazilian Review 41:1, 2004, 203-5
  • ‘From the start Clarice Lispector, despite the South American sun, lives in the clouds and in cloudiness. She was to the public a charismatic obscurity, a witch, a recluse, a mystery - the Brazilian sphinx.’ — Lorrie Moore, The New York Review of Books 26 September 2009, 2-3

Published January 2003

Troubling Maternity: Mothering, Agency, and Ethics in Women's Writing in German of the 1970s and 1980s
Emily Jeremiah
Bithell Series of Dissertations 26 / MHRA Texts and Dissertations 58

Published June 2003

Desiring the Dead: Necrophilia and Nineteenth-Century French Literature
Lisa Downing
Legenda (General Series)

  • ‘Downing is working outside the scope of any simple discourse of pathology, and perhaps outside the queer undoing of pathology as such. ...this is an impressive first book, striking without being facile, theoretically complex without being unruly, and attentive to literary qualities in the chosen texts while sustaining its thematic argument.’ — Peter Cryle, Modern Language Review 100.2, 2005, 505-6 (full text online)
  • ‘This is a successful, richly structured, and thought-provoking exploration of 'the cultural fantasy of necrophilia'.’ — Carol Rifelj, Nineteenth-Century French Studies 33, n. 1 and 2, Fall-Winter 2004-2005
  • ‘Downing's approach throughout is essentially post-Faucauldian and psychoanalitic. Her style, at once sober and engaging, is a model for academic prose in general. ... The work also indicates a new direction for death studies, and despite its omissions deserves consideration in this regard.’ — Jason Hartford, The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association Spring 2004, 119-21

Published December 2003

Artful Seduction: Homosexuality and the Problematics of Exile
Karl Posso
Legenda (General Series)

Published February 2005

The Feminine in the Prose of Andrey Platonov
Philip Bullock
Legenda (General Series)

  • ‘The author traces with great clarity the development of Platonov's thinking... This appears to be Legenda's first excursion into the Russian field, and the results are impressive. There are long, carefully analysed quotations in Cyrillic, all fully translated in a way which does justice to Platonov's highly idiosyncratic style.’ — Michael Pursglove, Slavonic and East European Review 84.2, 2006, 314-15 (full text online)
  • ‘Interesting... Although Bullock sets out to concentrate on a single topic (gender) from specific points of view (feminism and psychoanalysis), he admits to his "admiration of the paradoxical nature of [Platonov's] prose", and it is exactly this admiration that prevents the monograph from becoming a single-minded study of just one theme in the prose in question.’ — Anat Vernitski, Modern Language Review 103.3, July 2008, 921-23 (full text online)
  • ‘The book is founded on close readings that every scholar of Platonov will want to consult. The formulations are elegant and are likely to be quoted frequently in the scholarly literature... This indispensable book on Platonov is also a compelling study in the value and limits of methodology.’ — Eric Naiman, Russian Review 68.4, 2009, 693-94
  • ‘Philip Bullock’s important new book on Andrei Platonov energetically elaborates what it promises at its outset: a feminist reading of Platonov’s most significant prose works... an eloquent and insightful investigation into a distinctly unsettled element in Platonov’s worldview. Bullock follows earlier studies of gender relations and sexuality in Platonov by Eric Naiman, Eliot Borenstein, and Valerii Podoroga but offers a far more extensive and synthetic account of the oeuvre.’ — Thomas Seifrid, Slavic Review 69.1, Spring 2010, 236-37
  • ‘(notice in Japanese)’ — Susumu Nonaka, Bulletin of the Japanese Association of Russian Scholars 38, 2006, 143-46
  • ‘(notice in Russian)’ — Tat’iana Krasavchenko, Literaturnovedenie 1 (2007), 124-32

Published May 2005

Benedikte Naubert (1765-1819) and her Relations to English Culture
Hilary Brown
Bithell Series of Dissertations 27 / MHRA Texts and Dissertations 63

  • ‘A detailed bibliography [rounds] out this meticulous, scholarly work. Brown’s thorough and perceptive investigation of Naubert’s fiction and English literature makes previous work on the author obsolete. It takes Naubert’s oeuvre out of the niche of gender studies and places it squarely in the mainstream of German literary history and in the rich tradition of Anglo-German literary and cultural cross-currents.’ — Barbara Becker-Cantarino, Modern Language Review 102, 2007, 565 (full text online)

Published September 2005

Women in Russian Literature after Glasnost: Female Alternatives
Carol Adlam
Legenda (General Series)

  • ‘An engaging look at some of the most influential figures in post-Soviet writing.’ — Benjamin Sutcliffe, Modern Language Review 104.1, January 2009, 307-08 (full text online)

Published August 2007

Contemporary Italian Women Writers and Traces of the Fantastic: The Creation of Literary Space
Danielle E. Hipkins
Legenda (General Series)

  • ‘In her captivating first book, Danielle E. Hipkins assumes the challenging task of applying feminist literary theory to a complex form and attendant writing practice.’ — Lynn Makau, Contemporary Women's Writing 2:2, December 2008, 181-82
  • ‘Rimane aperta la discussione, extratestuale, sullo spazio occupato dalle scrittrici contempo- ranee nel canone letterario. Non sono sicura che, come suggerisce Hipkins, la marginalità della Ombres sia legata al fatto che la scrittrice ‘points to a literature beyond a claustrophobic space of epigonality’ (p. 168), e non, semplicemente, a un mercato letterario dai ritmi di produzione e consumo di durata sempre più breve. Ma questa considerazione nulla toglie all’interesse dello studio proposto: abbiamo bisogno di letture puntuali e teoricamente ponder- ate dei percorsi letterari della post-modernità per arrivare a una migliore comprensione delle dinamiche culturali, di genere ma non solo, che attraversano la società in cui viviamo.’ — Gigliola Sulis, Italian Studies 64.1, Spring 2009
  • ‘Plenty of new wine and new research... a new interdisciplinarity in Italian gender and sexuality studies.’ — Carol Lazzaro-Weis, Journal of Romance Studies 10.2, Summer 2010, review article, 97-106

Men of their Words: The Poetics of Masculinity in George Sand's Fiction
Nigel Harkness
Legenda (General Series)

  • ‘This meticulously researched study makes a compelling argument to renegotiate the importance of masculinity in Sand's writing... His persuasive conclusions will therefore be of interest not only to scholars working on nineteenth-century France, but indeed to the wider fields of gender studies and literary criticism.’ — Forum for Modern Language Studies April 2009, 224)
  • ‘Nigel Harkness's aim in this excellent monograph is to liberate George Sand's masculinity from the restrictive autobiographical sphere of cross dressing and male pseudonymity and to situate it rather as the driving force of her literary texts. Drawing on a corpus of fifteen novels, he produces a series of authoritative close readings that demonstrate the extent to which the thinking of masculinity, and its inscription in literary representation, are inextricable for Sand.’ — Diana Knight, French Studies 64.2, April 2010
  • ‘Harkness's focused tracking of Sand's performances of poetic masculinity throughout this book undoubtedly furthers critical understanding of the highly complex and multiple narrative positions adopted in her fiction, especially its meta-discursive dimensions. His sensitive and often provocative close readings of Sand's works, especially Indiana and Lélia (in chapters 2 and 5), will inspire fresh appraisals of established Sand criticism.’ — Mary Orr, Modern and Contemporary France 17.3, August 2009

Published December 2007

Poetry and the Realm of the Public Intellectual: The Alternative Destinies of Gabriela Mistral, Cecília Meireles, and Rosario Castellanos
Karen Peña
Legenda (General Series)

  • ‘By bringing together three of the principal Latin-American authors of the twentieth century, Poetry and the Realm of the Public Intellectual contributes enormously to our understanding of what inspired and motivated them as authors. Peña proves to have a very thorough understanding of poetry, providing a painstakingly close readings of the three poets analysed. She also demonstrates a great deal of familiarity with both Spanish and Portuguese bibliographical sources in her studies of each of the writers... A valuable contribution to the field of Latin-American poetry, especially in its discussion of the question of gender and the place of female intellectuals in Latin America.’ — Vivaldo Santos, Bulletin of Spanish Studies 87.7, 2010, 1020-21
  • ‘Resumiendo, se trata de una contribución valiosa e importante sobre la conflictividad americana mediada por las voces femeninas. Por encima de todo, Peña nos muestra que la poesía es más vital y resonante en sus momentos de rebeldía.’ — Roland Spiller, Iberoamericana 43, 2011, 200-01

Making the Personal Political: Dutch Women Writers 1919-1970
Jane Fenoulhet
Legenda (General Series)

  • ‘Fenoulhet's project is exciting and original. It is a well-researched and informative account of how women writers in the Netherlands shaped the self at a time when self-realization was a male prerogative. And it makes you want to reread Carry van Bruggen, and that is surely a good thing.’ — Henriëtte Louwerse, Modern Language Review 104.3, 2009, 929-31 (full text online)
  • ‘Eight excellent case studies... that explore how through their work individual writers reflect upon and challenge the role of women in society.’ — The Year's Work in Modern Language Studies 69, 2007, 853)

Published July 2009

The Power of Disturbance: Elsa Morante's Aracoeli
Edited by Sara Fortuna and Manuele Gragnolati
Legenda (General Series)

  • ‘The chapters avail themselves of the entire arc of twentieth-century theories and models of subjectivity and sexuality, to try to unravel Manuele's search for freedom from his all-consuming passion for his mother Aracoeli, and include Freud, Jung, Klein, Bowlby, Stern, Sander, Winnicott, Laplanche and Pontalis, Kristeva, Lacan, Cavarero, Muraro, Silverman, (Jessica) Benjamin, and Butler. These theories serve the novel very well, illuminating the many strands and aspects of Manuele's 'condition' and of the novel... An invaluable teaching tool and thus an incentive to include Aracoeli in advanced university courses in Italian and European literature.’ — Adalgisa Giorgio, Italian Studies 66.1, March 2011, 144-46

Published September 2010

Voices and Veils: Feminism and Islam in French Women's Writing and Activism
Anna Kemp
Research Monographs in French Studies 29

  • ‘Voices and Veils is an impressive evaluation of the fraught relationship between Islam, Muslim women, and French feminism... invaluable to students, teachers, and activists alike who desire a deeper understanding of postcolonial French society, of Islamic feminism, of colonial constructions of the Muslim woman, and, finally, of neo-imperial constructions which seek to delineate Muslim women living in the West.’ — Sophie Smith, Modern Language Review 106.4, 2011, 1168-69 (full text online)
  • ‘It is often said that we write the books we want to read. Anna Kemp has written a book I would have liked to have written... Both specialists and beginners will learn tremendously from reading this concise and clearly written interdisciplinary study, which should be required reading in courses on French and Francophone literature, migration, world literature, Middle Eastern studies, European studies, and women’s studies. Any serious university library will want to include it in its collection.’ — Anne Donadey, Contemporary Women's Writing 5:3, November 2011, 257-58

Published February 2011

The Libertine’s Nemesis: The Prude in Clarissa and the roman libertin
James Fowler
Legenda (General Series)

  • ‘The beguiling cover of this Legenda volume is well matched by the book’s contents. Fowler’s thesis is an original and well-argued one: the establishment of a symbiotic relationship between the libertine and the prude in a number of key eighteenth-century texts... the argument is persuasive and elegant, and we are swept along by the author’s enthusiasm for his subject.’ — John Phillips, French Studies 66.3, July 2012, 402

Published March 2011

Post-War Jewish Women’s Writing in French
Lucille Cairns
Legenda (General Series)

Published July 2011

Examining Whiteness: Reading Clarice Lispector through Bessie Head and Toni Morrison
Lucia Villares
Legenda (General Series)

  • ‘By enhancing our understanding of Clarice Lispector’s novels with such an original and indispensable study, Villares demonstrates other unexplored ways through which Lispector broke away from the Primitivist vogue and mulattophilia of her generation of modernistas... During those years of intensively nationalist modernizing projects, performing whiteness included the assimilation of an urban ethos, among other bourgeois life standards. Villares’ study highlights the relevance of Lispector’s work for our comprehension of such deep cultural transformations.’ — Sonia Roncador, Ellipsis 12, 2014, 311-13

Published August 2011

German Women's Writing of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: Future Directions in Feminist Criticism
Edited by Helen Fronius and Anna Richards
Legenda (General Series)

  • ‘The volume will be of great use to students and researchers alike, as a source of well-written critical scholarship and of pointers to severe deficits in current research. It offers productive methodologies for taking the enquiry forward in areas vital to a fuller, more nuanced understanding of the place of women writers as part of the whole picture of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cultural history in the German-speaking lands.’ — unsigned notice, Forum for Modern Language Studies 48.4 (October 2012), 489
  • ‘Thus the book’s structure, like its title, ultimately collapses: the future has not yet happened. Yet it is glimpsed here—and it will indeed necessarily entail killing off and reviving the female author and the female reader, undoing and redoing gender, sexuality, and herstory, embracing pluralism and firing the canon. And it will only have been achieved once the gatekeepers become contributors and all critics—including men—are doing feminist criticism.’ — Robert Gillett, Modern Language Review 109.2, April 2014, 547-48 (full text online)

Published June 2012

Women, Genre and Circumstance: Essays in Memory of Elizabeth Fallaize
Edited by Margaret Atack, Diana Holmes, Diana Knight and Judith Still
Legenda (General Series)

  • ‘Like the woman to whom it pays tribute, and whose haunting gaze looks out at us from its cover, this volume of essays combines intellectual rigour with humanity, serious purpose with humour, depth of insight with lightness of touch.’ — Julia Waters, Modern and Contemporary France 20.4 (November 2012), 505-06
  • ‘A powerful and moving reminder of the lineaments and achievements of [Elizabeth Fallaize's] scholarly work. Equally, as critical explorations of a variety of nineteenth- and twentieth-century narrative artefacts and practices, [these essays] are a pleasure to read, combining to create a collection that is an academic delight and would certainly have delighted the woman to whom it is dedicated.’ — Alex Hughes, French Studies 67.2 (April 2013), 294-95
  • ‘The chapters which form this scholarly homage... keep the dialogue open with a scholar, teacher, feminist and mentor who spent her life engaging with French literature. Yet, each contribution, particularly those of Michèle le Doeuff, Ursula Tidd and Diana Holmes, offers intellectual stimulation in its own right.’ — France Grenaudier-Klign, New Zealand Journal of French Studies 34.2, 2014, 130-32

Published February 2013

French Divorce Fiction from the Revolution to the First World War
Nicholas White
Legenda (General Series)

  • ‘Impeccably researched and well-written... Developing White's earlier survey of the family novel (1999), grounded in historical knowledge, guided by sociological readings, and underpinned by a massive amount of reading from the past two centuries, this ambitious study concludes with a meditation on contemporary images of relationships, in ways that hint at a welcome third volume of the triptych.’ — Rosemary Lloyd, Times Literary Supplement 27 September 2013
  • ‘Fortunately for nineteenth-century French readers, the advent of divorce did not signal an untimely end to the marriage of familial and plot structures... And just as fortunately for contemporary readers, Nicholas White has provided the first study of these distinctively modern tales, deftly weaving long-forgotten divorce novels, many of them quite popular in their time, into a complex and insightful broader sociocultural but also deeply literary and historical narrative.’ — Rachel Mesch, Romanic Review 2014, 104.1-2, 172-74
  • ‘A persuasive study of a society, and its literature, exploring the implications of new ideas of personal freedom.’ — unsigned notice, Forum for Modern Language Studies 50.2, April 2014, 232
  • ‘The originality of this important study is clear: it is the first book in English or French to focus on the divorce fiction that surrounds the Loi Naquet. The monograph’s ambitious breadth is reflected in the range of authors discussed: in addition to references to canonical figures such as Maupassant and Bourget, renewed consideration is afforded to the ‘Great Unread’, or what is termed ‘“minor” women writers and unfashionable patriarchs’ (p. 145), including André Léo, Claire Vautier, Marie-Anne de Bovet, and Camille Pert, and Anatole France, Alphonse Daudet, and Edouard Rod.’ — Steven Wilson, French Studies 68.2, April 2014, 257
  • ‘Nicholas White has considered a series of important questions about nineteenth- and twentieth-century French novels... His work opens the way for interested readers in fields as various as history, literature, sociology and gender studies to ask and answer new questions of their own about these novels now.’ — Jean Elisabeth Pedersen, French History 28.2, June 2014, 277-78
  • ‘An important contribution to the study of nineteenth-century French literature and the family. The authors covered are an exciting selection of, as White puts it, ‘unknown women and forgotten men’. He displays tremendous knowledge of the corpus and authors, but also of the eras and literary movements discussed. His inspired choice to conclude with American novelist Diane Johnson’s 1997 Le Divorce brings his story to the present, but also contributes to his broader argument about the literary value of texts beyond the canon.’ — Phoebe Maltz Bovy, Modern Language Review 109.4, October 2014, 1086-87 (full text online)
  • ‘Témoignant d’une profonde érudition, apportant une grande attention aux contextes idéologiques et biographiques, cet essai sans équivalent, aux analyses perspicaces, aux enjeux précis, à l’écriture claire et non départie d’humour, offre une lecture aussi enrichissante qu’agréable.’ — Claudie Bernard, French Review 89.1, 2015, 288

Published June 2013

Taboo: Corporeal Secrets in Nineteenth-Century France
Hannah Thompson
Legenda (General Series)

  • ‘One of the principal merits of the book is that it is a study of how the ‘unspeakable’ manages to find a voice and how taboo excesses can be represented in language. It provides a reflective and stimulating commentary on the ways in which what is not usually talked about signifies and matters.’ — Françoise Grauby, Modern Language Review 109.3, July 2014, 809-10 (full text online)
  • ‘With such an array of taboo subjects, it struck me that it would have been hard to know where to begin, but one of the things I like best about this book is its craftsmanship... I think scholars and students will find much to discuss in Taboo.’ — Holly Christine Woodson, H-France 14.101, June 2014
  • ‘Throughout, Thompson identifies a variety of critical perspectives that throw those taboos into sharper focus, from seminal reference points such as Freud, Sontag and Butler to the emerging field of Disability Studies, resulting in a thought-provoking exploration.’ — unsigned notice, Forum for Modern Language Studies 50.4, October 2014, 510
  • ‘This monograph is an incisive study of representations of the unspeakable taboo body... Thompson’s lucid work argues that analysis of the form and function of the taboo encourages readers to re-examine their own values and preconceived notions towards the body. This study is especially useful to scholars of nineteenth-century French literature, gender studies, and disability studies.’ — Karen Humphreys, French Studies 69.3, July 2015, 403-04
  • ‘This is a valuable contribution to the growing field of studies investigating the literary body.’ — Bernadette Lintz, French Review 89.1, 2015, 282
  • ‘This examination of some of the best-known prose in nineteenth-century French literature is especially masterful for the thoughtful – sometimes stunning – deployment of the readings and the overall structure of the study... In its sweeping consideration of the body in disarray, Thompson’s study places itself squarely within studies of the body while also relying upon the tenets of newer arenas of inquiry such as disability studies.’ — Tammy Berberi, Disability and Society 31.3, 2016, 431-33

Published July 2014

Exile and Nomadism in French and Hispanic Women's Writing
Kate Averis
Studies In Comparative Literature 31

  • ‘Averis skilfully negotiates a corpus that encompasses six writers, two languages, and several nations in an engaging style and with careful structuring, which unfailingly maintains her reader’s engagement. This study offers a very welcome re-evaluation of exile as a linguistic, psychological, gendered, and existential site.’ — Trudy Agar, French Studies 69.4, October 2015, 560-61
  • ‘The originality and importance of this study in the field of Comparative Literature lies in the fact not only that it analyses exiled women writers (instead of exiled men writers) but also that these writers’ homelands are different, making the research findings more valid as they are extremely representative of women who write away from their birth countries... Averis’ analysis is extremely comprehensive, clearly exposed and well supported with a solid and respected bibliography.’ — Verónica Añover, Modern and Contemporary France 23.3, 2015, 410-11
  • ‘This book draws a new and original path within the analysis of contemporary women’s exilic writing and the nomadic configuration of identity. Not only does it develop key notions of exile and women’s writing, applying them to illustrative cases, it also articulates connections that overturn preconceived arguments, such as the exilic stereotyped figures still in use in Euro-American theorizations, or the negative connotations of exile, which are replaced by the idea of exile as a productive and creative site in which more fluid identities are rebuilt.’ — Marianna Deganutti, OCCT Review online, October 2015

Published November 2014

Women, Emancipation and the German Novel 1871-1910: Protest Fiction in its Cultural Context
Charlotte Woodford
Germanic Literatures 6

  • ‘This substantial, illuminating, and crisply written study looks once again at women’s writing in Germany and Austria in the period of its major impact on a wide reading public between the Franco-Prussian and First World Wars... The book is not only a nuanced contribution to feminist scholarship but also a significant intervention in the wider debate about committed literature. Woodford argues unambiguously for literature’s capacity to function as a driver of social change.’ — Helen Chambers, Modern Language Review 110.4, October 2015, 1161-62 (full text online)
  • ‘It has been estimated that women constituted one-third of the authors of the century. However, women’s protest writing encountered a backlash around the time of World War I: it was viewed as contrary to the true German attitude to gender relations, despised as a foreign implant from France and Scandinavia, and somehow Jewish. The women writers disappeared from the literary histories, and most of them remained invisible until the time I was a student... Woodford’s book is recommendable to teachers and students working in this period because it is full of indicators of how one might enrich the fabric of literary life of the time.’ — Jeffrey L. Sammons, Monatshefte 107.4, December 2015, 673-76

Published December 2016

Structures of Subjugation in Dutch Literature
Judit Gera
Germanic Literatures 12

  • ‘This informative, insightful, confident, and provocative account of Dutch literature, which focuses on the complex ways in which it embodies and embeds subjugation, deserves to be read by any scholar of European literature interested in an intersectional approach to reading literature. To those teaching and studying Dutch literature, Structures of Subjugation in Dutch Literature provides a worthwhile and lively addition to the literary histories available in English.’ — Jane Fenoulhet, Modern Language Review 113.3, July 2018, 675-77 (full text online)
  • ‘Above all, Gera’s analyses are impressive examples of the development and use of new reading strategies. Her analyses gave me a sense of liberation. The fact that messages can be so hidden in the language of social and literary reality gives an explanation of the persistence of the established order in gender and race-biased inequalities. With a growing awareness of our literary heritage, a critical attitude towards ingrained ideas and their wording becomes possible. We enter a new era.’ — Den Haag Agnes Sneller, Dutch Crossing Online, 2018 (full text online)

Published September 2018

Erotic Literature in Adaptation and Translation
Edited by Johannes D. Kaminski
Transcript 7

  • ‘Each chapter is conceptually challenging and theoretically rigorous. Indebted to the ‘cultural turn’ of translation studies, ... the contributors are sensitive to the vicissitudes of cultural values and sexual mores, and to the disfigurement that translation precipitates... This volume unleashes a network of exciting discursive tributaries, primed for further navigation.’ — Victoria Carroll, Modern Language Review 115.3, July 2020, 694-95 (full text online)
  • ‘In spite of the fact that the publishing industry has been flooded with erotic literatures since the old times and that translation studies has newly witnessed a felicitous avalanche in the academic publication of our time, erotic literatures and translation studies have by far remained two sufficiently wide and wild parallels in contemporary academia. Erotic Literature in Adaption and Translation edited by Johannes D. Kaminski hence boasts a brave and brilliant contribution, a contribution that not only makes such two distant parallels meet in one single volume but also conjures up a happiest convergence of the estranging twain—erotic literature in the West and its counterpart in the farthest East, by the medium of both multilingual translation and, above all, universal humanity, wherein reigns Eros, the Greek god of erotic love.’ — Min-Hua Wu, The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture 12.2, June 2019, 223-31 (full text online)

No Country for Nonconforming Women: Feminine Conceptions of Lusophone Africa
Maria Tavares
Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures 32

  • ‘An excellent scholarly contribution that is both clear and accessible. It must be critically addressed byprofessors, students, and researchers both in and beyond the Lusophone academic sphere.’ — Sandra I. Sousa, Journal of Lusophone Studies 4.1, 2019, 328-30 (full text online)

Published April 2019

Women and Nationhood in Restoration Spain 1874-1931: The State as Family
Rocío Rødtjer
Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures 34

  • ‘This is a fine and important book that will hopefully convince those critics prone to discounting the contributions of conservative women writers (Asensi and de los Ríos) to make the effort to read them, keeping in mind Rødtjer’s suggestive arguments.’ — Alda Blanco, Bulletin of Spanish Studies 97.3, March 2020, 440-41

Published September 2019

Spanish Culture from Romanticism to the Present: Structures of Feeling
Jo Labanyi
Selected Essays 11

  • ‘There is much in this book to celebrate—multiple topics, angles, issues and theories addressed in order to focus us on ‘ways of thinking about Spanish culture’, where ‘culture’ means literature, cinema, painting and photography, with (perhaps) history, historical memory, feminism, gender, race, nation formation, modernity and politics added to the mix.... Some of these essays are already classic studies that have influenced the way we think about certain literary periods or texts. Labanyi combines theory with specificity, details from the works studied inserted (or viewed through) various theoretical constructs. She claims to search for ‘moments of contradiction or incoherence’ in literature that often point to ‘something important’ (6), a claim fully realized in this book.’ — David T. Gies, Bulletin of Spanish Studies 98.3, 2021, 485-87
  • ‘The essays in Spanish Culture from Romanticism to the Present are suggestive in their individual approaches; the book as a whole is nevertheless unique as a window into the thought of one of the most influential scholars of Spanish culture in recent decades. Whether or not one always agrees with Labanyi, it is impossible not to be in awe of her mind and method, and how she has carried the profession forward.’ — Wadda C. Rios-Font, Studies in XXth and XXIst Century Literature 46.1, 2022
  • ‘Las páginas que abren el volumen son un brillante ejercicio de egohistoria donde Labanyi reflexiona tam- bién sobre la labor de re-archivo que acomete para este proyecto... Como Labanyi asevera desde las primeras páginas de Spanish Culture from Ro- manticism to the Present, lo que realmente cuenta son los momentos no esperados, de tensión, que el crítico logra desentrañar en el artefacto cultural objeto de estudio, “the contradictions and incoherence that, perhaps even more than areas of consensus, put us in touch with the pulse of the time” (4). Quizá sea este crucial precepto metodológico, aplicado de manera consistente a esta variedad de estudios realizados desde mediados de los noventa, adoptando diversos ángulos críticos y considerando distintos medios, lo que trasluce con mayor fuerza en Spanish Culture from Romanticism to the Present. Structures of Feeling: la tentativa generosa de motivarnos a releer a contracorriente para deshacer, o cuando menos problematizar, asunciones culturales que también atrav’ — Patricia López-Gay, Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 25, 2021, 310-12
  • ‘A key contribution to Spanish Cultural and Literary Studies. Running through the collection is the author’s attention to ‘structures of feeling’, drawing on Raymond Williams’s notion, as a driver and explanatory resource for the comprehension of a diverse array of cultural production primarily from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.’ — Richard Cleminson, Modern Language Review 118.2, 2023, 269-71 (full text online)

Published December 2019

Queer Genealogies in Transnational Barcelona: Maria-Mercè Marçal, Cristina Peri Rossi, and Flavia Company
Natasha Tanna
Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures 37

Women, Men and Books: Issues of Gender in Yiddish Discourse
Edited by Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov
Studies In Yiddish 16

  • ‘The book presents the most recent research on the subject of gender in Yiddish literature and culture and paints a far more complex picture of gender roles in Eastern European Jewish life than is portrayed in traditional sources... As gender and sexuality are increasingly being understood as fluid, rather than determined categories, this kind of research is extremely significant for those of us who still speak, write and create in Yiddish, and want to hold on to it as a living language, capable of expressing all of our experiences.’ — Annabel Cohen, Forward 23 November 2020

Published January 2020

Naturalism Against Nature: Kinship and Degeneracy in Fin-de-siècle Portugal and Brazil
David J. Bailey
Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures 48

  • ‘Naturalism against Nature considerably expands our understanding of how the international literary movement known as Naturalism manifested itself in selected but fully representative writers in Portugal and Brazil... A very useful study and one that should be regarded as required reading for all students and scholars interested in Naturalism and its importance to the Lusophone world.’ — Earl E. Fitz, Bulletin of Spanish Studies 97.9, October 2020, 1559-1560 (full text online)
  • ‘The transnational dimensions of literary Naturalism operating between Brazil and Portugal are explored in this excellently written book by David Bailey.’ — Richard Cleminson, Modern Language Review 116.4, October 2021, 667-68 (full text online)
  • ‘Contribui o estudo, portanto, para uma melhor compreensão da particularidade da expressão literária naturalista em Portugal e no Brasil.’ — Patrícia H. Baialuna de Andrade, Journal of Lusophone Studies 6.1, Spring 2021