The Cervantean Heritage: Reception and Influence of Cervantes in Britain
Edited by J. A. G. Ardila
Legenda (General Series) •23 December 2008
- ‘Resulta reconfortante para cualquier investigador interesado en los textos de Miguel de Cervantes comprobar que, tras la explosión de estudios surgidos en torno a las celebraciones del año 2005, cuarto centenario de la publicación del Quijote, el cervantismo está más vivo que nunca. De hecho, es precisamente ahora, tras el paso del ciclón de publicaciones que trajo consigo dicho aniversario, cuando surge la oportunidad de realizar análisis nacidos más al calor de la curiosidad real y el rigor y menos de la oportunidad o el oportunismo. Este libro supone una muy valiosa aportación para el campo de los estudios cervantinos pero también para el estudio de la literatura británica, y especialistas de ambos campos encontrarán en él material ineludible y original con el que ganar en conocimiento y sobre todo, una herramienta con la que continuar avanzando en el no siempre bien conocido ni estudiado campo de las relaciones literarias y culturales hispano-británicas.’ — Ana M. Rodríguez-Rodríguez, Iberoamericana IX.36, 2009, 189-91
- ‘Rather than emanating from the Cervantesmania that has informed most of the book-length studies on Cervantes's influence on English-speaking writers [since the 2005 anniversary year], the present volume benefits from the fact that its contributors come from among the pre-2005 generation of critics, who have drawn on their experience of digging out Cervantes's actual influence on British literature.’ — unsigned notice, Forum for Modern Language Studies 47.1, January 2011
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
Proust and Joyce in Dialogue
Sarah Tribout-Joseph
Legenda (General Series) •25 July 2008
Henry James and the Second Empire
Angus Wrenn
Studies In Comparative Literature 14•23 December 2008
- ‘The first sustained account of what are now regarded, fairly, as lesser writers of the Second Empire... and of their significance for James’s developing art. Wrenn offers an excellent analysis of the house journal for these writers, the Revue des deux mondes, a publication enthusiastically read by James.’ — unsigned notice, Forum for Modern Language Studies 47.1, January 2011
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