Confrontational Readings: Literary Neo-Avant-Gardes in Dutch and German
Edited by Inge Arteel, Lars Bernaerts and Olivier Couder
Germanic Literatures 21•28 September 2020

The Austrian Lyric
Edited by Judith Beniston and Robert Vilain
Austrian Studies 12•1 January 2004

Words and Music
Edited by Judith Beniston, Geoffrey Chew and Robert Vilain
Austrian Studies 17•24 May 2010

Bridal-Quest Epics in Medieval Germany: A Revisionary Approach
Sarah Bowden
Bithell Series of Dissertations 40 / MHRA Texts and Dissertations 85•30 May 2012

  • ‘Bowden’s style is clear, lively, and elegant. As well as making a definitive statement, this book also offers insightful interpretations that are likely to make the texts in question more accessible and appealing to students.’ — Annette Volfing, Modern Language Review 109, 2014, 534-35 (full text online)

Luise Gottsched, Der Lockenraub/Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock
Edited by Hilary Brown
European Translations 2•1 September 2014

  • ‘Her edition also shows the way forward for Translation Studies by returning to a detailed comparison of a translation with the original source text.’ — John Guthrie, Modern Language Review 111, 2016, 578 (full text online)

Performing Medieval Text
Edited by Ardis Butterfield, Henry Hope and Pauline Souleau
Legenda (General Series) •1 November 2017

  • ‘Collectively, these studies effectively demonstrate the necessity for, and advantage of, an understanding of performance that transcends traditional academic boundaries and the volume, overall, serves as a solid exemplar of how to approach doing so.’ — unsigned notice, Forum for Modern Language Studies 55.2, April 2019, 248 (full text online)
  • ‘An ambitious and wide-ranging exploration of performance in medieval European culture. Recognizing the ‘complex terminological web’ spun round the terms performance and performativity, the volume acknowledges and accepts performance as a ‘contested concept’. It also, importantly, recognizes the historical contingency of performance as an idea... The contributing essays illustrate both the ubiquity of performance in medieval culture and the very different ways it manifests in and through text, itself broadly conceived as manuscript, image, written word, and musical note.’ — Clare Wright, Modern Language Review 114.3, July 2019, 525-526 (full text online)
  • ‘This thought-filled and thought-provoking volume offers a polyphony of perspectives on, and examples of, medieval performance.’ — Blake Gutt, French Studies 73.4, October 2019, 622-23 (full text online)
  • ‘While these essays are likely to be read individually by specialists in their various fields, a reader of the whole volume will be rewarded with an enriched and nuanced understanding of the concepts of “performance” and “text,” and of the explanatory reach of the field of performance studies.’ — Anne Stone, Speculum 96.2, 2021, 482-84

Classical Rhetoric and the German Poet: 1620 to the Present
Anna Carrdus
Legenda (General Series) •1 January 1997

  • ‘The tone is confident, the style lucid. Within a few pages the reader senses how purposeful the exposition is, and how well thought out. But what makes Anna Carrdus's performance so assured is her obvious commitment to poetry itself... It concludes with a wish that may sound audacious, yet which the undertaking wholly justifies: 'My findings will, I hope, open up an opportunity for scholarship to revise current perceptions of the history of German poetry.' She has already revised them herself, single-handed.’ — Peter Skrine, Modern Language Review 94.1, 1999, 243-5 (full text online)
  • ‘Die Analysen sind treffich, und die Er≥rterungen zum literarhistorischen und poetologischen Kontext zeugen von groôer Kennerschaft.’ — Joachim Knape, Germanistik 41.2, 2000, 419

History, Fiction, Verisimilitude: Studies in the Poetics of Gottfried's 'Tristan'
Mark Chinca
Bithell Series of Dissertations 18 / MHRA Texts and Dissertations 35•1 January 1993

Paul Celan’s Unfinished Poetics: Readings in the Sous-Oeuvre
Thomas C. Connolly
Germanic Literatures 16•26 February 2018

  • ‘It would exceed the limits of this review to enter further into the many merits of Connolly’s monograph, from his impressive discoveries within an “oeuvre” so thoroughly examined as Celan’s, to the judiciousness of his writing... The “sous-oeuvre” that Connolly broaches can “never” be entirely disclosed: every disclosure leaves traces to be read otherwise. It is for this reason that Paul Celan’s Un nished Poetics: Readings in the Sous-Oeuvre calls for further readings, in every sense.’ — Kristina Mendicino, German Studies Review 42.2, May 2019, 402-404 (full text online)
  • ‘This book constitutes a refreshing approach to the work of Paul Celan... constitutes a sharp and compelling update to Celan criticism.’ — unsigned notice, Forum for Modern Language Studies 55.3, July 2019, 355
  • ‘Paul Celan’s Unfinished Poetics is highly recommended, as it demonstrates that a sous-œuvre opens up a fabulous new source of interest for poetry lovers. This goes far beyond Celan’s writings.’ — Gerrit-Jan Berendse, Modern Language Review 114.4, October 2019, 894-96 (full text online)

The Significance of Locality in the Poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin
David J. Constantine
MHRA Texts and Dissertations 12•1 January 1979

Laughter and Narrative in the Later Middle Ages: German Comic Tales c. 1350-1525
Sebastian Coxon
Legenda (General Series) •25 July 2008

  • ‘This is the first sustained study of the German branch of the genre of comic verse narratives (maeren) which was hugely popular across Europe in the late Middle Ages... an impressively learned study, based on a huge corpus of primary and secondary texts. A wealth of information on laughter, humour and the reception of late-medieval literature is waiting to be unearthed here.’ — unsigned, Forum for Modern Language Studies 46.1, January 2010, 110
  • ‘An excellent study that undoubtedly advances our understanding of laughter and its functions in the past.’ — Sophia Menache, The Medieval Review September 2009
  • ‘Copious footnotes and an extensive bibliography document the author's mastery of the critical literature, and summaries of the German-language scholarship, as well as English translations of textual passages, make this study easily accessible to those with no knowledge of German. Coxon's volume offers a detailed and subtle analysis of a limited corpus that provides a significant context for future scholarship on the culture of laughter in the middle ages.’ — Thomas Kerth, Monatshefte 101.3, 2009, 410-12
  • ‘This is the fullest study of the German comic maere to have appeared in a long time, and is based on an impressively wide corpus of sources as well as background reading. There is a wealth of intriguing new information here that deserves further exploration - how the Church’s suspicion of laughter (Jesus never laughed!) was negotiated in these stories; that face and hair were the most frequently attacked body parts here; or that the best jokes were on millers and charcoal-burners.’ — Bettina Bildhauer, Modern Language Review 105.2, 2010, 583-84 (full text online)
  • ‘Si accennna poi al rapporto fra riso e letteratura, sottolineando il fatto che la letteratura medievale è, nel suo complesso, una fonte di enorme importanza per la storia del riso.’ — unsigned notice, Medioevo Latino XXXI, 2010, 535-36
  • ‘Unsigned notice’ — Germanistik 51.1-2, 2010, 234)
  • ‘As the first comprehensive study of late-medieval German comic tales, this study is a useful resource for medievalists... Scholars will appreciate the comprehensive references to key studies by other Germanists, and less adept readers of Middle High German will value the excellent translations.’ — Lisa Perfetti, Speculum 85.3, 2010, 658-60
  • ‘Gerade dort, wo er tatsächlich eng entlang seiner Referenztexte argumentiert, gelingen Coxon zahlreiche aufschlussreiche Beobachtungen. An diese Ergebnisse Coxons werden bei der Erforschung deutschsprachiger Versnovellen des Spätmittelalters wohl noch viele Untersuchungen (aus hoffentlich diversen Fachdisziplinen) anschließen können.’ — Matthias Kirchhoff, Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch 2010, 422-24

Alfred Döblin: Monsters, Cyborgs and Berliners 1900-1933
Robert Craig
Germanic Literatures 20•10 September 2021

Horace's 'Epistles', Wieland and the Reader: A Three-Way Relationship
Jane V. Curran
Bithell Series of Dissertations 19 / MHRA Texts and Dissertations 38•1 January 1995

Byron, Shelley, and Goethe’s Faust: An Epic Connection
Ben Hewitt
Studies In Comparative Literature 33•16 March 2015

  • ‘This is not the first study of the relationship of Goethe's Faust to English Romantic writing, but it is an original contribution in its own right by virtue of the particular texts it focuses on and the wide-ranging, complex picture that emerges... the material is carefully assembled, and the twists and turns of the discussion are full of valuable insights.’ — David Hill, British Association for Romantic Studies Review 47, 2016, 32
  • ‘Hewitt’s study is a thoughtful and fascinating discussion of the complex interconnections between the three authors... this thoughtful and knowledgeable study which successfully brings together a wealth of theories and innovative ideas.’ — Dagmar Paulus, Comparative Critical Studies 13.3, October 2016, 397-400
  • ‘Hewitt’s approach to the relationship between these three writers is certainly speculative, not least about what Byron and Shelley knew of Faust I and how they read it. But its speculations are interesting and persuasive, and allow Hewitt to achieve something exciting and original: a comparative study of ‘similar aspects’ in the work of three major Romantic-period thinkers that has ‘nothing to do with the palpable influence of one writer upon another’ but does have ‘real significance for our understanding’ of the international ‘Romantic heritage’ handed down to our own time and especially its ‘struggle for the soul [...] not just of a modernity emergent, as it was, during our writers’ lifetimes, but of our modern world also’.’ — Alan Rawes, The Byron Journal 45.1, 2017, 97-99
  • ‘A wide-ranging and stimulating account of Anglo-German Romantic literary exchange... Hewitt’s study generates a number of perceptive readings that shed new light on its primary texts. Covering an epic range of topics itself, Byron, Shelley, and Goethe’s ‘Faust’ demonstrates the potential of an approach that, taking the idea of influence as its point of departure, uses a more ‘conjectural’ or ‘suggestive’ (1) method to read texts comparatively and thus discover ‘epic connections’ where none were seen before.’ — Tim Sommer, Romanticism 23.2, July 2017, 196-98

From the Enlightenment to Modernism: Three Centuries of German Literature
Edited by Carolin Duttlinger, Kevin Hilliard, and Charlie Louth
Legenda (General Series) •20 December 2021

Rilke's Poetics of Becoming
Ben Hutchinson
Legenda (General Series) •5 September 2006

  • ‘Eine sorgfältige und konzentrierte Analyse der Dichtungen des jungen Rilke... Die sehr gut lesbare und Beachtung verdienende Studie von Ben Hutchinson hat hier einen bemerkenswerten Schritt auf dem Weg zu einem umfassenden Rilke-Verständnis getan.’ — Sascha Löwenstein, IASLonline online
  • ‘Overall this is a well-written book, offering both a coherent original thesis and perceptive analyses of individual poems.’ — Helen Bridge, Modern Language Review 103.1, January 2008, 282-83 (full text online)
  • ‘A judicious study of impressive scope.’ — unsigned notice, Forum for Modern Language Studies 47.4, 2011, 480

Scenographies of Perception: Sensuousness in Hegel, Novalis, Rilke, and Proust
Christian Jany
Studies In Comparative Literature 45•14 May 2019

  • ‘Christian Jany’s Scenographies of Perception situates itself on well-traversed philosophical territory, but with a freshness unusual in a volume devoted to longstanding issues in the history of philosophy and theories of poetry and literature... A thought-provoking, cross-disciplinary account of the relationship between thought and perception that ought to appeal to students of German idealism and ro- manticism and their aftermath in the 20th century, and in a way that stays admirably close to the relevant texts and the concerns that animate them.’ — James D. Reid, Monatshefte 112.3, 2020, 555-57

Single Combat and Warfare in German Literature of the High Middle Ages: Stricker's Karl der Grosse and Daniel von dem Blühenden Tal
Rachel E. Kellett
Bithell Series of Dissertations 33 / MHRA Texts and Dissertations 72•1 August 2008

  • ‘The thoroughness of [Kellett's] restudy is a welcome reinforcement of many of the more impressionistic inferences drawn by previous scholars. The work will prove essential reading for those interested in the variegated oeuvre of the man who referred to himself (perhaps rather too modestly) as ‘Der Stricker’.’ — Neil Thomas, Modern Language Review 105, 2010, 270-71 (full text online)

Poetry, Painting, Park: Goethe and Claude Lorrain
Franz R. Kempf
Germanic Literatures 22•7 January 2020

  • ‘Few are the writers who have the competence truly to be interdisciplinary and Franz Kempf is one of them. In Poetry, Painting, Park (Legenda) he carefully lays out the complex intellectual links forged by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe from his life-long considerations of Claude’s landscapes. Kempf fluently ranges over the consequences of Goethe’s encounter with Claude— literature and literary theory, painting and drawing, horticulture and garden design, philosophy, natural science and optics, reality and spirituality—to arrive at striking a double portrait.’ — Donald Lee, The Art Newspaper Blog Books of the Year, 25 December 2020
  • ‘This long overdue task [of studying Goethe and Claude Lorrain] has been accomplished in a near exemplary monograph by Franz Kempf, in a finely produced volume that does elegant justice to its subject... It will doubtless become a standard work and will open up broad vistas for future research.’ — Jeremy Adler, The Art Newspaper 334, May 2021
  • ‘Franz R. Kempf’s exciting volume titled Poetry, Painting, Park: Goethe and Claude Lorrain is about each of these forms of art and artists listed in the title, separately and taken together... Kempf really is convincing in his aims of guiding us through the densely interwoven patterns of influences around Goethe.’ — Zoltán Somhegyi, British Journal of Aesthetics 20 October 2021 (full text online)
  • ‘Aufgrund seiner rhetorischen Anlage lädt das vorliegende Buch dazu ein, sich darin auf ähnliche Weise zu bewegen, wie wenn man durch eine Landschaft oder, besser noch: durch einen Park spaziert.’ — Karlheinz Lüdeking, Arbitrium 40.3, 2022, 333-37 (full text online)
  • ‘La richesse du travail de Kempf consiste alors dans le refus d’analyser le rapport entre les deux hommes comme un simple rapport d’influence. [...] Cette audace interprétative est couplée à la précision d’un germaniste soucieux de faire droit à la singularité de chaque mot et qui refuse de se contenter de tracer à grands traits une théorie générale de l’ekphrasis.’ — Francis Haselden, Nouvelle revue d’esthétique 30, 2022, 151-54 (full text online)

A Poetics of the Image: Paul Celan and André du Bouchet
Julian J. I. Koch
Studies In Comparative Literature 52•10 December 2021

The Very Late Goethe: Self-Consciousness and the Art of Ageing
Charlotte Lee
Germanic Literatures 5•23 April 2014

  • ‘The major achievement of this study is to show how simplistic it is to distinguish between clarity and chaos as two distinct types of late style. Neither will serve as an adequate descriptor of Goethe’s late-late writing, which is simultaneously highly patterned and controlled, yet ultimately also inchoate and at times bafflingly lacking in transparency.’ — Osman Durrani, Modern Language Review 110.2, April 2015, 587-88 (full text online)
  • ‘A subtle and complex reflection on the distinctive character of Goethe’s writing in various genres during the last ten years of his life, which is characterized by a tendency towards retrospection, seen in the way that he revisits earlier experiences and earlier writing.’ — David Hill, The Year's Work in Modern Language Studies 77, 2017, 272

The Law of Poetry: Studies in Hölderlin’s Poetics
Charles Lewis
Germanic Literatures 18•23 September 2019

  • ‘[D]as zweite Kapitel [erschließt] Neuland: Dass Kleanthes’ Hymne an Zeus für die Eigentümlichkeit des anrufenden Gestus der Ode Natur und Kunst formativ gewesen sein könnte, stellt einen eindrücklichen Befund dar (33, 42 f., 55). Aus den produktiven Differenzen zur Hymne leitet Lewis anschaulich jene Kritik her, die Hölderlins poetologische Ode vollzieht, wenn sie die Anbetung Jupiters an dessen Eingedenken seiner Herkunft knüpft (43 f.). ... Lewis’ Studie beleuchtet durch innovative Ansätze die selbstreflexive Gestaltung poetischer Formen, wie Hölderlins Werk sie zeigt, und nähert sich so dem im Titel exponierten ‘poetischen Gesetz’.’ — Lisa Memmeler, Hölderlin-Jahrbuch 42, 2021, 325-328
  • ‘The achievements of the first part of Lewis’s monograph are complemented by a second part consisting of a new translation into English of both Hölderlin’s “Sophocles-Anmerkungen” and his fragment on “[d]ie Bedeutung der Tragödien,” along with extensive notes contextualizing Hölderlin’s interpretive gestures within his broader œuvre as well as within current debates in classical philology. In this respect, Lewis’s translations mediate not only between Hölderlin’s German and modern English, but also between a poetic commentary from the early nineteenth century and contemporary scholarship, continuing the “poetic logic” that he traces in Hölderlin, whose precise formulations also open to other voices before and after “his” time. The proximity of Lewis’s English rendition to Hölderlin’s German, as well as his erudite commentaries, will also make his translations a resource for future scholars and readers of Hölderlin.’ — Kristina Mendicino, Monatshefte 113.4, 2021, 688-691

Hölderlin and the Dynamics of Translation
Charlie Louth
Studies In Comparative Literature 2•1 May 1998

  • ‘An inspiring study that is not only of interest to Hölderlin experts or eighteenth-century scholars but to anyone with a scholarly interest in the interrelation between translation and poetry.’ — Heike Bartel, New Comparison 30, 144-45
  • ‘A closely argued critical assessment of translation... Louth's book is a good piece of work, incisive and perceptive.’ — Emery E. George, Journal of English and Germanic Philology October, 2000, 612-14
  • ‘For those interested in translation, let alone in Hölderlin, these are arguments to read and re-read.’ — unsigned notice, Forum for Modern Language Studies 37.1, 2001, 105
  • notice, Etudes germaniques 4, 1999, 658
  • ‘Hölderlin demeure un auteur difficile; ne l'aborde pas qui veut, quelle que soit la qualité de l'exposition, servie ici par une typographie particulièrement soignée.’ — Jacques Voisine, Revue de littérature comparée 1, 2000, 110-11
  • ‘This study through the perspective of translation is a must for every Hölderlin scholar, carefully argued, well researched, and a pleasure to read.’ — Reinhilde Wiegmann, Monatshefte 93.1, 2001, 121-2
  • ‘The writing is impressive, even inspired... The argument is invariably persuasive, the judgement remarkably sure-footed throughout... supported by readings of often stunning quality.’ — Howard Gaskill, Modern Language Review 96.3, 2001, 886-7 (full text online)

Crossings: Essays on Poetry and Translation from Hölderlin to Jaccottet
Charlie Louth 
Transcript 31•19 February 2024

The Austrian Comic Tradition: Studies in Honour of W. E. Yates
Edited by John R. P. McKenzie and Lesley Sharpe
Austrian Studies 9•3 July 1998