⌂ See also the home page of the Legenda book series Legenda (General Series)

Adrian Stokes: An Architectonic Eye
Stephen Kite
Legenda (General Series) •23 December 2008

  • ‘This marvelous book, which is focused on Stokes's writings on the Renaissance, provides a full and highly original account of the writer's development. Clearly written and well illustrated, it tells the story accurately... All future readers of Stokes will be indebted to Kite's tactful and comprehensive commentary.’ — David Carrier, caa.reviews 4 February 2009
  • ‘Admirably clear in providing the first account of the architectural basis of Stokes’ journey toward beauty from the ugliness of Edwardian London as he remembered it after the First World War.’ — Janet Sayers, American Imago 68.3, 2011, 561–67

After Bataille: Sacrifice, Exposure, Community
Patrick ffrench
Legenda (General Series) •24 August 2007

  • ‘In pursuing Bataille’s legacy ffrench seeks not simply to see where it has got to but makes an invaluable contribution to it.’ — Patrick Crowley, Modern Language Review 105.1, January 2010, 254-55 (full text online)
  • ‘Patrick ffrench’s outstanding study provides multiple, meticulously drawn contexts in which Bataille’s writing and thought emerge in a new light, in terms both of their own development over some three decades and of their relation to other, key intellectual trajectories before, during and after that period... essential reading not only for those interested in Bataille but also for anyone concerned with the intellectual and literary history of twentieth-century France.’ — unsigned, Forum for Modern Language Studies 46.1, January 2010, 112-13

After Reception Theory: Fedor Dostoevskii in Britain, 1869-1935
Lucia Aiello
Legenda (General Series) •25 September 2013

  • ‘This new study complements a number of existing accounts of Dostoevsky reception in Britain and adds to our understanding of Anglo-Russian cul- tural exchange more generally. It also explores the current state of reception studies in the literary humanities (which it views rather pessimistically), creatively blurring the distinction between ques- tions of individual aesthetic reaction (‘reader response’) and patterns of transmission and cultural exchange.’ — unsigned notice, Forum for Modern Language Studies 51.1, January 2015, 87
  • ‘This book calls attention to the complexity of reception and literary criticism, analyzes temporal and geographic context, and stresses the importance and nuances of the cultural context in which a work and its criticism arise. Aiello's study re-evaluates a familiar theoretical framework, providing a new perspective for scholars in the field.’ — Megan Luttrell, Slavic and East European Journal 58.4, Winter 2014, 722-24
  • ‘Fedor Dostoevskii once wrote in a letter to his brother, ‘Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled.’ Lucia Aiello’s new monograph traces the broad scope of social, psychological, and, most frequently, biographical criticism in Britain that has sought to unravel the mysteries of his major works.’ — Patrick Jeffery, Modern Language Review 111.2, April 2016, 600-601 (full text online)

Algernon Swinburne and Walter Pater: Victorian Aestheticism, Doubt and Secularisation
Sara Lyons
Legenda (General Series) •1 July 2015

  • ‘As British aestheticism continues to enjoy a revival of interest, it becomes ever more urgent to reassess the metaphysical work that Pater and Swinburne have done for us in their search for a way beyond doubt. Algernon Swinburne and Walter Pater is a timely reminder of our intellectual inheritance from this moment of crisis in Western religion.’ — Orla Polten, Essays in Criticism 66.3, July 2016, 390-96
  • ‘Sara Lyons’s admirable monograph will prove a cornerstone in Victorian studies and will soon become invaluable to students and scholars alike working on 19th-century literature and culture.’ — Charlotte Ribeyrol, Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens 83, Printemps 2016
  • ‘Lyons’s rethinking of Swinburne’s and Pater’s relationship to religion is absolutely necessary in light of recent revisions of the secularization thesis. She productively complicates the oversimplified binary between belief and unbelief that still too often plagues our readings of Victorian literature, and provocatively asks us to rethink the reasons underlying the Aesthetic Movement’s embrace of an ‘art for art’s sake’ philosophy. Algernon Swinburne and Walter Pater should be read by scholars of aestheticism, nine- teenth-century religion, and Victorian literature more generally.’ — Dustin Friedman, Review of English Studies Advance Access 4 October 2016
  • ‘A valuable addition to scholarship on Swinburne, Pater and aestheticism.’ — Beth Newman, Victorian Studies 60.1, Autumn 2017, 126-28

Aloysius Bertrand's Gaspard de la Nuit: Beyond the Prose Poem
Valentina Gosetti
Legenda (General Series) •1 September 2016

  • ‘It is Baudelaire that dubs [Bertrand] the pioneer of the prose-poem and out of this well-meaning act springs the genie of subsequent critical depreciation. Gosetti’s absorbing and hugely valuable historical recontextualization of Bertrand gives us just the tools we need to do Gaspard altogether better justice.’ — Clive Scott, Journal of European Studies 47.1, 2017, 82-83
  • ‘In her informative and thoroughly researched monograph, Valentina Gosetti contends that developing a fuller understanding of Bertrand’s Gaspard de la Nuit is contingent upon a wider appreciation of the historical, social, cultural, and literary contexts in which the collection was produced... This study, which includes an appendix containing four beautiful English translations by Gian Lombardo, is a valuable contribution to the scholarship on Bertrand in the Anglophone world. It will be of great interest to historians and literary scholars of French Romanticism.’ — Catherine Witt, H-France 17, 2017
  • ‘In clear and eloquent prose, Gosetti presents a lively and thoroughly interesting account of Gaspard that illuminates a creative experimental work deserving of its proper spot in the canon of French Romantic literature... Gosetti convinces the reader many times over that Gaspard de la Nuit is an audacious nexus of literary and artistic motifs that emerge once the portrait of the artist is allowed to share the Romantic limelight.’ — Karen F. Quandt, Nineteenth-Century French Studies 46.1-2, 2017
  • ‘This elegant and beautifully written monograph seeks to offer new insights into Gaspard de la nuit, by returning to the literary and cultural context in which it was written, and approaching it on its own terms... Gosetti’s book richly deserves to achieve its aim of encouraging readers to pick up Bertrand, but it also offers an enormously rewarding read for anyone interested more generally in prose poetry, provincial literature, and the role of the fantastic in nineteenth-century France.’ — Fiona Cox, French Studies 71.4, October 2017, 585-86 (full text online)
  • ‘«Fascinating work» que ce Gaspard de la Nuit, écrit-elle dans les dernières lignes de sa conclusion: le lecteur en est toujours plus convaincu après avoir lu ce brillant essai.’ — Christine Marcandier, Revue Bertrand No. 1, 2018, 256-59

Anglo-German Interactions in the Literature of the 1890s
Patrick Bridgwater
Legenda (General Series) •1 August 1999

  • ‘The author is to be congratulated for shedding new light on a wide range of Anglo-German cross-currents... His study weaves a multi-faceted web of historical and inter-personal connections, and is at its best when it forges links between the approaches of different authors and diverse forms of art.’ — Susanne Stark, Modern Language Review 97.2, 2002, 523-4 (full text online)
  • ‘This well-documented volume provides new insights into the key social and cultural issues of the 1890s, including the truth and morality of artistic writing.’ — Crocker and Womack, The Year's Work in English Studies 2000, 532

The Artificial Self: The Psychology of Hippolyte Taine
Hilary Nias
Legenda (General Series) •1 October 1999

  • ‘Given the relative dearth of serious work on the writers who formed the philosophical backbone to nineteenth-century literary France, a study of any one of them is welcome, a study of this quality of scholarship, insight and precision a real feast.’ — David C. J. Lee, Modern Language Review 96.3, 2001, 830-1 (full text online)
  • ‘This authoritative study of Taine's indirectness and inconclusiveness will be an indispensable foundation.’ — unsigned notice, Forum for Modern Language Studies 37.3, 2001, 347
  • ‘A probing and stimulating contribution to Tainian studies.’ — Thomas H. Goetz, Nineteenth-Century French Studies 29.3-4, 2001, 370-1

Assuming the Light: The Parisian Literary Apprenticeship of Miguel Angel Asturias
Stephen Henighan
Legenda (General Series) •1 December 1999

  • ‘The combination of close textual analysis of Asturias's own work, both fictional and journalistic, with that of other discourses, including the work of his contemporaries as well as his critics, is, in my view, one of the many strengths of Assuming the Light. Frequently provocative and meticulously researched, this book will be of interest therefore not only to Asturias specialists but also more generally to scholars engaged in Latin American cultural studies, particularly those interested in questions of cultural identity.’ — Claire Lindsay, Modern Language Review 97.3, 2002, 742-3 (full text online)
  • ‘Lucid, sophisticated, beautifully written, it provides a valuable and thought-provoking introduction to the writer's extraordinary sojourn in Paris... Stephen Henighan seems destined to make an outstanding contribution to Asturias studies.’ — Gerald Martin, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 79, 2002
  • ‘Valuable, problematic insights for those conversant with Asturias's work and its criticism.’ — Paul Jordan, Bulletin of Spanish Studies LXXIX, 2002, 826-8

Bakhtin between East and West: Cross-Cultural Transmission
Karine Zbinden
Legenda (General Series) •7 December 2006

  • ‘Zbinden exhibits considerable theoretical insight and a capacity for nuanced analysis throughout the work.’ — R. Coates, Slavonic and East European Review 87.2, 2009, 344-46 (full text online)
  • ‘Exceptional new work being produced on the Russian polymath, some of the most interesting of which was coming out of the University of Sheffield, whose Bakhtin Centre supports the work of an outstanding group of language theorists... Karine Zbinden and Alastair Renfrew are two of the excellent younger scholars from the Bakhtin Centre.’ — Michael Bernard-Donals, Slavic Review 68.1, Spring 2009, 193-95

Baudelaire: Individualism, Dandyism and the Philosophy of History
Bernard Howells
Legenda (General Series) •1 June 1996

  • ‘This is Baudelaire as iceberg, in Claude Pichois's term, the writer whose reading lurks like a huge submerged mass... Baudelaireans will be pleased to have these essays in so convenient a form, and graduate students focusing on the nineteenth century will find them both challenging and informing.’ — Rosemary Lloyd, Nineteenth-Century French Studies 30.3-4, 2002, 417-19
  • ‘Le lecteur estimera surtout dans l'oeurage de Howells la richesse et la subtilité de parallèles, surtout avec Emerson et Carlyle, fondés sur des relations de fait et la mise en situation et en perspective de textes de Baudelaire qu'une critique fran°aise parfois étroitement nationale a pu appréhender de manière trop isolée.’ — Claude de Grève, Revue de littérature comparée 3, 1997, 391-3
  • ‘The great advantage of Howells's unflappable approach to Baudelaire's flower-pot philosophising is its corrosive effect on commonplaces of Baudelaire criticism... A valuable contribution to the art of defining a poet's philosophy.’ — Graham Robb, Times Literary Supplement 24 January, 1997
  • ‘Howells has undertaken an admirable close re-reading of Baudelaire's work by paying attention to its allusive intellectual density and to the contexts into which it should be placed.’ — Dudley M. Marchi, Comparatist 22, 1998, 208-9

The Burgtheater and Austrian Identity: Theatre and Cultural Politics in Vienna, 1918-38
Robert Pyrah
Legenda (General Series) •5 July 2007

  • ‘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)

Chicago of the Balkans: Budapest in Hungarian Literature 1900-1939
Gwen Jones
Legenda (General Series) •4 March 2013

  • ‘Based on a historical contextualization of the social background of writers and the ideological debates of the time, a good knowledge of the secondary literature, a detailed discussion of the content and plots of relevant literary works and ample quotations in Hungarian (consistently translated in English) from a representative sample of novels and short stories, Jones’s book is a social history of Budapest literature.’ — Alexander Vari, Slavonic and East European Review 93.2, April 2015, 352-55 (full text online)

Childhood as Memory, Myth and Metaphor: Proust, Beckett, and Bourgeois
Catherine Crimp
Legenda (General Series) •21 December 2012

  • ‘Challenging and original, this is a study that will appeal not just to specialists of these three creative figures but also to everyone interested in narrative, metaphors, and the ways in which the image of the child simultaneously enables and challenges creativity.’ — Rosemary Lloyd, French Studies 67.4, October 2013, 584-85
  • ‘The study is informed by a wide array of philosophical and theoretical points of reference and relies especially on Maurice Blanchot’s writing to make a convincing case for the importance of childhood in the oeuvres of Proust, Beckett and Bourgeois.’ — unsigned notice, Forum for Modern Language Studies 50.4, October 2014, 504

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

Conceptions of the Absurd: From Surrealism to Chestov's and Fondane's Existential Thought
Ramona Fotiade
Legenda (General Series) •1 December 2001

  • ‘Fotiade argues persuasively that the ideas of Chestov and Fondane form the basis of a tradition of dissident thought in the 1920s and beyond... an original and illuminating contribution to French intellectual history, a clearly organized and closely argued exploration of a neglected field.’ — Douglas Smith, French Studies LVII.3, 2003, 414-15

A Cultural Citizen of the World: Sigmund Freud's Knowledge and Use of British and American Writings
S. S. Prawer
Legenda (General Series) •17 July 2009

  • ‘This magisterial survey of British and American intellectual history from the sixteenth century to the present, as viewed through the lens of the creator of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, confirms once more that Prawer remains one of our discipline’s leading spokesmen and luminaries.’ — Robert K. Weninger, Comparative Critical Studies 7.2–3, 2010, 395-401
  • ‘Based on an intensive study of the original German text of Freud’s writings, letters, and journals. This is the first book to make a full and systematic map of Freud’s use of English literature. Freud was fascinated by writings from many nations and languages, and his use of English shows the great range of his reading... Though he was a reader par excellence, he was also a case study in how world literature can be used by men and women who are not professional literary scholars or critics - and of how much it can come to mean to them, and to their sense of who they are.’ — The Year's Work in English Studies 2011, 691)
  • ‘Shows the remarkable range of reading and the gift for lively and attractive expression that characterized all his work... The result is much the fullest study of Freud’s Anglophilia that has yet been written.’ — Ritchie Robertson, Modern Language Review 108.4, October 2013, 1262-64 (full text online)

Decolonizing Modernism: James Joyce and the Development of Spanish American Fiction
José Luis Venegas
Legenda (General Series) •11 February 2010

  • ‘There is something delightfully Joycean and Cortazarian about the volume which demands our close collaboration and participation as we jump around to consult the original texts, dipping into Ulysses and Rayuela, for example, then back to the study in question, not necessarily in chronological order. In this sense, I felt like the quintessential lector cómplice. This review is the final step in my literary contribution.’ — John Walker, Bulletin of Spanish Studies 88.6, September 2011, 929-30
  • ‘Among the many valuable assets of Venegas's cohesive study are its painstaking research and its suggestive ways of interpreting the presence of Joyce in Latin American fiction... A significant contribution to the critical debate over the nature of modernism.’ — Alberto Lázaro, James Joyce Literary Supplement 26.1, Spring 2012, 5-6
  • ‘An impeccably researched and systematic study which has much to offer to the 'planetary' dimension of Joyce scholarship.’ — Patricia Novillo-Corvalán, James Joyce Broadsheet 88, February 2011
  • ‘An insightful and illuminating intertextual analysis... takes a refreshing approach by rejecting the notion of a cultural or intellectual ‘centre’ informing the periphery, or, in Latin American terms, the civilized educating the barbaric. Instead, both Joyce and those he influenced (directly or indirectly) are seen as the creators of ‘an alternative literary history’.’ — Victoria Carpenter, The Year's Work in Modern Language Studies 72, 2012, 247
  • ‘In this book, José Luis Venegas takes existing debates on James Joyce's influence on modern Spanish American fiction decisively further... Thanks to its balanced focus on theory, criticism and literary analysis, the book is comprehensive in its approach yet highly readable. With quotations given in both English and Spanish, this comparative study is a valuable research tool not only for Hispanists but also for critics of English literature working on Joyce.’ — unsigned notice, Forum for Modern Language Studies 49.2 (2013), 226-27
  • ‘Must be greeted as a new study that further enriches previous critical revisions of monolithic views of 'canonical' modernism... By relocating Joyce as a 'peripheral' modernist writer in the literary map of Latin America, Decolonizing Modernism offers an innovative and alternative reinterpretation of both European and Spanish-American literary histories that eschews the restrictions of national boundaries and canonical readings and opens untrodden paths for the emergence of (even) more revisionary studies of modernism in the future.’ — M. Teresa Caneda Cabrera, James Joyce Quarterly 48.4 (2011), 772-75
  • ‘A concise but eloquent demonstration of the potential of truly non-Eurocentric comparative studies between Latin American and European literatures... At the center of Decolonizing Modernism lies the belief in an intimate relationship between literary form and structure and specific history and geography, a relationship that asks for a critical approach that combines the analysis of formal as well as historical aspects.’ — Paulo Moreira, Hispanófila 168 (May 2013), 174-75

Desiring the Dead: Necrophilia and Nineteenth-Century French Literature
Lisa Downing
Legenda (General Series) •1 June 2003

  • ‘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

Dostoevsky and the Epileptic Mode of Being
Paul Fung
Legenda (General Series) •10 December 2014

  • ‘Fung avoids the trap of a simplistic focus on Dostoevsky’s own real-life epilepsy. While noting the author's terror at the illness [...], he remains wisely off-trend by withholding any cod-scientific correlation between epilepsy and literary creativity. Fung’s interest is, rather, in what Dostoevsky wrote, more than the fact that his slow periods of recovery meant that he often could not write anything at all. And by focusing on ‘moments of caesuras and breaks’, Fung also sets himself apart from the myriad critics drawn to the famous scenes where verbal, and sometimes physical, arguments erupt with astonishing force... A Dostoevsky scholar to watch.’ — Andre van Loon, Review 31 online
  • ‘It’s a great philosophical read, which squeezes Dostoevsky and his characters in and out of the minds of any number of puissant Western thinkers. It deserves a welcome and respected place up on the bookshelves of Academia, next to the many fascinating books on the life and works of that perverse and talented genius of Russian literature: Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky.’ — U. R. Bowie, classical-russian-literature.blogspot.co.uk 7 July 2015
  • ‘This book continues the philosophical discussion of Fedor Dostoevskii started by Friedrich Nietzsche, Lev Shestov, Alex de Jonge, and many others. Paul Fung de- scribes existential experiences of caesura (suspension), timelessness, and anticipation of death, which he attributes to some of Dostoevskii’s characters and, possibly, to the writer himself.’ — Irina Sirotkina, Slavic Review 75.1, Spring 2016, 210-11
  • ‘Paul Fung opens new perspectives onto Dostoevsky's post-Siberian novels by focusing on their preoccupation, at once morbid and exalted, with the moment, whose ineffable paradoxes congeal metaphorically around the epileptic attack.’ — Mark R. Pettiss, Russian Review 75.1, 2016, 140-42

Dream Cities: Utopia and Prose by Poets in Nineteenth-Century France
Greg Kerr
Legenda (General Series) •21 December 2012

  • ‘This is a valuable and ambitious study which operates deftly on the edge of cultural and intellectual history and successfully inflects our understanding of the emergence, and the evolution, of a literary form.’ — Claire White, Journal of European Studies 43, 2013, 378-79
  • ‘An ambitious inquiry into key structural and thematic aspects of poetic prose in nineteenth-century France, Greg Kerr’s Dream Cities combines a diverse array of primary sources and theoretical frameworks... Of particular interest in this book is Kerr’s attention to textual innovations pursued by several Saint-Simonian writers, including Barthélémy-Prosper Enfantin, Michel Chevalier, Charles Duveyrier, and Emile Barrault.’ — Suzanne F. Braswell, H-France 13, November 2013, 175
  • ‘In this study Greg Kerr intriguingly argues that the contemporaneous development of the prose poem is closely associated with utopian dreaming, as if Baudelaire’s dream of a prose poétique, sufficiently supple and abrupt to adapt itself to the ‘mouvements lyriques de l’âme, aux ondulations de la rêverie, aux soubresauts de la conscience’ ... could alone do justice to these new social and physical structures.’ — Rosemary Lloyd, French Studies 68.1, January 2014, 118
  • ‘This work is a fascinating study of the ways in which the modern metropolis altered not only the content, but also the formal innovations of several nineteenth-century French writers... An innovative and valuable contribution to both urban and literary studies.’ — unsigned notice, Forum for Modern Language Studies 50.1, January 2014, 128
  • ‘A significant contribution to our understanding of the ways that utopian and journalistic writing can be juxtaposed alongside the prose poem and other visual and architectural projections of urban futurity. Kerr convincingly shows how this set of disparate phenomena collectively reflects the dynamic, uncertain, and ultimately unfulfilled desires of a society en quête de forme.’ — Daniel Sipe, Nineteenth-Century French Studies 43.1-2, 2014
  • ‘Investigations of the ‘poème en prose’ as a hybrid form are multiple, and Kerr’s arguments add to them. His aims, however, are distinctive. Rather than seek to explain such hybridity by tracing the form’s identity or development within a specific historical tradition, he presents a more fluid and open kind of contextualization, in which new awareness of unfamiliar utopian rhetoric contributes to our understanding of the urban prose poem. Notions of hybridity are thereby extended and enriched.’ — Richard Hobbs, Modern Language Review 110.3, July 2015, 870-71 (full text online)

Emile Zola and the Artistry of Adaptation
Kate Griffiths
Legenda (General Series) •17 July 2009

  • ‘This book could be grandly defined as an essay in intertextuality, intergenericity and transmodality... Such forbidding terminology should not by any means discourage the more general reader familiar with Zola’s works from engaging with, and almost certainly from enjoying, Kate Griffiths’s splendid study.’ — David Baguley, Bulletin of the Emile Zola Society 2010
  • ‘This is a book that refreshingly refuses to subscribe to clichés about Zola’s ‘pre-cinematic technique’. And in reading adaptations (both forward and back) against her selected texts, Griffiths provides for each of them an intelligent contribution to the thinking of students and specialists alike.’ — Robert Lethbridge, French Studies 65.3, July 2011, 398-99
  • ‘One of the most significant new books to be published concerning a major literary ‘canonical’ figure—Émile Zola—and the adaptations his prose generated... In particular, Griffiths’s work on La Terre is one of the best discussions of Antoine’s silent masterpiece I have read in years. Her scholarly text is readable, intellectually cogent, and illuminating for the student of Zola’s naturalist, experimental methodology, as formulated in his ‘scientific’ prose, and the ensuing, often multiple, film interpretations it generated. This is a superior study of literary–film interrelations, excellent and timely scholarship.’ — Robert Singer, Modern Language Review 106.4, 2011, 1160-61 (full text online)

English Responses to French Poetry 1880-1940: Translation and Mediation
Jennifer Higgins
Legenda (General Series) •12 May 2011

  • ‘The account of Huxley’s version of Rimbaud’s ‘Les Chercheuses de poux’ is particularly fine, and laurels awarded to Beckett’s ‘Drunken Boat’ are shown to be well deserved. In this respect, Higgins’s readings are consonant with some of her own general arguments, for she frequently conveys the sense of a critical mind finding out more about the original text, as well as testing the qualities of the translation. In her hands, both French and English texts are made to speak to and of each other.’ — Matthew Creasy, Translation and Literature 21, 2012, 255-61
  • ‘This rewarding book deftly handles — and illuminates — a wide range of sources... a tantalizing taste of a fascinating area for further research.’ — Adam Watt, Modern Language Review 107.3, July 2012, 897-98 (full text online)
  • ‘In the years preceding the Second World War [...] a diminution in the quantity of translated material is compensated for by a greater acknowledgement of the centrality of translation to the development of national — and transnational — literary cultures. This study is to be commended for its consistent advocacy and demonstration of that centrality.’ — Michael G. Kelly, French Studies 66.4 (October 2012), 572

Examining Whiteness: Reading Clarice Lispector through Bessie Head and Toni Morrison
Lucia Villares
Legenda (General Series) •6 July 2011

  • ‘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

The Extreme In-Between: Jean Paulhan's Place in the Twentieth Century
Anna-Louise Milne
Legenda (General Series) •24 May 2006

  • ‘Lights up the firmament of scholarship on Paulhan with brilliance... With wit, exuberance and theoretical sure-footedness, Milne takes us through a series of close readings. Not only does The Extreme In-Between reveal the astonishing reach and depth of Paulhan’s thinking, but it paves the way for a new conception of the relationship of language to political action and historical event, one that has a remarkably contemporary (twenty-first century?) resonance to it.’ — Michael Syrotinski, French Studies 491-92
  • ‘Tout bien considéré, l'ouvrage dense et méticuleusement relu de Milne vient ajouter de nouvelles perspectives aux réévaluations actuelles de Paulhan.’ — Stephen Steele, French Review 81.5, 2008, 1007-08

The Feminine in the Prose of Andrey Platonov
Philip Bullock
Legenda (General Series) •4 February 2005

  • ‘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