Image, Eye and Art in Calvino: Writing Visibility
Edited by Birgitte Grundtvig, Martin McLaughlin and Lene Waage Petersen
Legenda (General Series) •23 February 2007

  • ‘Andrea Battistini's chapter, finally, is one of the most enjoyable; it could be defined as the critical equivalent of Eco’s novel La misteriosa fiamma della regina Loana, in the sense that it shows quite convincingly how the "fantastic iconology of cartoons" and comic books is deeply rooted in Calvino's imagination and how this could be traced in his narrative style, also testifying to the extent of Calvino's engagement with the products of mass culture.’ — Pierpaolo Antonello, Modern Language Review 104.1, January 2009, 210-12 (full text online)
  • ‘These notes give but a hint of the richness of Image, Eye and Art in Calvino. This is a compelling volume for Calvino scholars; it should also have a strong appeal for those more generally interested in the relation between the verbal and the visual.’ — Luca Pocci, Angles on the English-Speaking World 8, 2008, 127-29
  • ‘A vital tool for further research not only into the works of Calvino but also into the contemporary cultural interweaving of literature and the arts.’ — unsigned notice, Forum for Modern Language Studies 47.1, January 2011

Intellectual Life and Literature at Solovki 1923-1930: The Paris of the Northern Concentration Camps
Andrea Gullotta
Legenda (General Series) •15 January 2018

  • ‘Small and remote as it is, Solovki has always been central to Russian culture. Nearly all the central themes of Russian history — the power and schisms of the Orthodox Church and its intimacy with the state; the development of the Gulag — are reflected, or more often anticipated, in its history... The legacy of the Terror remains a battlefield. Books as scrupulously researched as Gullotta’s are invaluable.’ — Robert Chandler, Financial Times 27 April 2018
  • ‘Gullotta’s case study of the SLON camp serves as a model for studies of Gulag writing, and makes a bold statement in favor of a new, synthesizing discourse about Gulag literature... All students of Russian literature and of the human condition owe a debt to Andrea Gullotta, who has tread on virgin snow, following in no one’s footsteps.’ — Lydia Roberts, Los Angeles Review of Books 3 May 2018
  • ‘Gullotta’s scholarly, in-depth but quite readable book primarily examines the content of the printed output of work from Solovki in the early period 1923-30 and also considers the circumstances of its production, including the constantly shifting and always ambivalent relations between prisoners and camp administration.’ — Trevor Pateman, Reading This Book Online, 2018
  • ‘Gullotta’s commendable study opens up a new area of Gulag research and adds considerably to our knowledge of the literature of the Soviet labour camps.’ — Sarah J. Young, Slavonic and East European Review 98.3, July 2020, 563-65 (full text online)
  • ‘An invaluable addition to a growing body of texts dedicated to understanding the multifaceted and complex cultural arena of Soviet labour camps. Gullotta effectively captures the uniqueness and plurality of the Solovki camp experience, preserving the many voices of the camp for future generations of historians and researchers.’ — Julie Draskoczy Zigoris, Modern Language Review 116.3, July 2021, 521-23 (full text online)

Aristophanes in Performance 421 BC-AD 2007: Peace, Birds, and Frogs
Edited by Edith Hall and Amanda Wrigley
Legenda (General Series) •24 August 2007

  • ‘This volume, produced under the auspices of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama, contains an all-encompassing performance history of three plays of Aristophanes' Old Comedy from their first performance to the present day. Aristophanic comedy, despite its highly politicized, sexual, and time-bound humour, is shown to be the touchstone of comedy, influential from the Renaissance onwards.’ — Regine May, Modern Language Review 103.3, July 2008, 807-08 (full text online)
  • ‘This exceptionally handsome and well-produced volume... Its scope, as its title indicates, is very broad, and most of its readers are likely to be selective in the use they make of it. Roughly half of the essays discuss twentieth-century productions of Aristophanes’ plays and there is, inevitably, an emphasis upon the problems involved in translation in both the narrower (linguistic) and the broader (theatrical/cultural) senses of the term.’ — unsigned notice, Forum for Modern Language Studies 45.3 (2009), 351-54
  • ‘There are dozens of plates in this volume, and the visual record of the performances described can be of great interpretative value for the reader. There is a healthy range in the scale of these performances: university productions or small-scale professional (or semi-professional) shows stand alongside much better funded and larger scale endeavours. This is, I feel, essential.’ — C. W. Marshall, Phoenix LXIV.1-2, 2010, 172-75

Medea in Performance 1500-2000
Edited by Edith Hall, Fiona Macintosh and Oliver Taplin
Legenda (General Series) •1 December 2000

  • ‘It provides crucial insights into the constantly shifting parameters of performance... Medea in Performance analyses each stage of [Medea's] metamorphosis in theatre, opera and film, and, in a wonderful essay by Margaret Reynolds, makes the important point that the static iconography of Medea is often as dramatically charged as her stage incarnation. The result is an entertaining and informed work.’ — Jane Montgomery, Times Literary Supplement 23 March, 2001, 20
  • ‘Sophisticated and elegantly argued treatments... Fills in many gaps in the performance history. Smethurst brings to her stunning close reading of Yukio Ninagawa's internationally acclaimed performance a scholarly knowledge of both Greek and traditional Japanese drama.’ — Helene P. Foley, Bryn Mawr Classical Review 27 April, 2001
  • ‘While the book's scope is enormous, its overall design had clearly been thought through with care, the result being that one comes away from it with a real sense of having thoroughly reviewed the subject... a highly valuable contribution to the literature on performance.’ — Richard H. Armstrong, American Journal of Philology 123.2, 2002, 289-93
  • ‘This is an important collection, not only as a document in the history of scholarship but also because it touches on themes which demand further exploration.’ — Lorna Hardwick, Classical Review 52, 2002, 357-9
  • ‘Makes a strong contribution to cultural studies... Always admirable.’ — Graham Ley, Prudentia XXXIV.2, 2002, 249-51
  • ‘Absolutely outstanding chapters by Hall and Macintosh approach performance history as a complex series of interrelations between theatrical practice and audience expectations, literary trends and contemporary debates.’ — Astrid Voigt, Journal of Hellenic Studies 123, 2003, 263-5

John Ruskin's Continental Tour 1835: The Written Records and Drawings
Edited by Keith Hanley and Caroline S. Hull
Legenda (General Series) •19 December 2016

  • ‘At a time when scholars often find it difficult to find support for editions of archival and biographical materials relating to significant cultural figures, it is pleasing that this important volume has found its way into print through the endeavours of the editors and the MHRA, whose Legenda imprint makes high-quality editions of such materials available... The edition is perfectly conceived and delivers something approaching perfection. It should be of interest beyond Ruskin Studies, particularly to scholars of Romantic art, poetry, and landscape tourism, nineteenth-century travel, and Victorian science.’ — Mark Frost, Modern Language Review 113.4, October 2018, 863-64 (full text online)
  • ‘The interest of the texts collected in this volume is on the whole remarkable. They represent a variety of literary genres ranging from the prose diary, the letter in verse, the dramatic sketch, the short story narrative, genres through which the same travel matter is shaped and reshaped, demonstrating the precociousness and versatility of Ruskin’s genius, his witty ironic vein, but also his brilliant mastery of prose... The recent interest in emotional labour involved in diary and travel writing will certainly profit from the fresh material unearthed by this critical edition.’ — Emma Sdegno, Review of English Studies 69, September 2018, 803-05 (full text online)

Regarding Lost Time: Photography, Identity, and Affect in Proust, Benjamin, and Barthes
Katja Haustein
Legenda (General Series) •30 January 2012

  • ‘Katja Haustein’s monograph charts new territory in the expanding study of autobiographical writing in the light of photography... this volume will no doubt be of great benefit to specialists of these three seminal authors, as well as to those working in comparative studies.’ — Kathrin Yacavone, French Studies 67.2 (April 2013), 271-72
  • ‘Katja Haustein undertakes a titanic task: to bring together three bulwarks of twentieth-century intellect, each one so seminal in their own right that even the thought of combining them in one study would seem quixotic. Haustein not only accomplishes the task, but manages to bring out a genuinely comparative account... it is a very useful book to have read, and one which, I am certain, I will return to again and again.’ — Eleni Papargyriou, Comparative Critical Studies 10, 2013, 407-09
  • ‘This book contains several beautiful, thoughtfully chosen illustrations, and is a useful source of information about scholarship in German on Proust... a significant and stimulating contribution to the scholarship on these three important writers.’ — Áine Larkin, Modern Language Review 110.1, January 2015, 228-29 (full text online)

Architecture, Travellers and Writers: Constructing Histories of Perception 1640-1950
Anne Hultzsch
Studies In Comparative Literature 26•23 April 2014

Louisa Waterford and John Ruskin: 'For you have not Falsely Praised'
Caroline Ings-Chambers
Legenda (General Series) •16 March 2015

  • ‘This book is a valuable revelation of a little-known figure. Lady Waterford is shown both to have been acutely sensitive to the cultural currents of her day and to have been a strong talent in her own right.’ — John Batchelor, Modern Language Review 111.4, October 2016, 1128-29 (full text online)
  • ‘Ings‐Chambers builds a strong case for reintegrating this artist in the wider Pre‐Raphaelite canon. Her writing makes Waterford’s art come across as essential thanks to its charm, vision and social/gender relevance.’ — Nic Peeters, Pre-Raphaelite Society Journal XXIII, 2015, 63-66

Pierre Klossowski: The Persistence of a Name
Ian James
Legenda (General Series) •1 July 2000

  • ‘Klossowski is presented here as a key contributor to post-modern thought and aesthetics.’ — unsigned notice, Forum for Modern Language Studies xxxix/1, 2003, 106
  • Antonella Arrigoni, Studi francesi XLVI, 2002, 2
  • ‘The appearance of the first monograph in English on Klossowski is welcome, all the more so as James's study provides such a scrupulous and thoughtful account of Klossowski's diverse output, its intellectual inheritance and its contemporary resonances.’ — Ian Maclachlan, French Studies LVII.2, 2003, 270-1

The Italian Renaissance: A Zest for Life
Edited by Michel Jeanneret and Nicolas Ducimetière
Legenda (General Series) •15 May 2017

  • ‘This is a Renaissance that triumphantly emerges from the dark ages of medieval Europe, bringing with it the birth of an ideal society guided by beauty and love, thus giving rise to one of the most extraordinary creative seasons of poetry, architecture, and art that the world has ever known... Yves Bonnefoy gives a moving account of his youthful discovery, in a still deserted post-war Florence, of the Brancacci Chapel... The most remarkable pages, however, of these many and memorable contributions are those by Michel Butor, sadly deceased in the same year in which the book was published. Always concerned with ‘micro-événements’ [...] Butor simply fixes his (and our) attention on every tiny detail of Antonello da Messina’s Renaissance image of the Middle Ages in his painting of Saint Jerome in his Study, reading (one presumes) his own historic translation of the Bible. The sense of this descriptive tour de force becomes clear in a final poem in which Butor identifies himself with Antonello.’ — Hilary Gatti, Modern Language Review 113.4, October 2018, 887-89 (full text online)

The Visualization of a Nation: Tàpies and Catalonia
Emily Jenkins
Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures 47•10 September 2021

  • ‘This monograph provides a clear and well-pondered approach to Tàpies’ work and analyses some of its key characteristics in a concise and approachable manner. Of particular interest are Jenkins’ enlightening insights into the ways Catalan democratic institutions co-opted Tàpies’ work for their own political interests... Jenkins offers a solid, insightful and positive appraisal of the artist’s work, and her book will certainly spark further interest in Tàpies’ paintings.’ — Jordi Cornellà-Detrell, Bulletin of Spanish Visual Studies 7.1, 143-45 (full text online)

Théophile Gautier, Orator to the Artists: Art Journalism of the Second Republic
James Kearns
Legenda (General Series) •14 November 2007

  • ‘In this first ever study of all of Théophile Gautier’s art criticism produced during the Second Republic, James Kearns brings us a much-needed reassessment of the art critic’s role in the history of French art... this is a highly accomplished study, which should be essential reading both for the scholar researching the Salon during this period and for the Gautier specialist. The material is well structured and the writing style engaging, making it equally accessible to the student or more seasoned researcher.’ — Catherine Hewitt, French Studies 64.2, April 2010
  • ‘This highly informed and informative study exposes a breadth of sources that should serve to prompt new enquiries in Gautier scholarship... Analyses [in this book] suggest the role this fine study may play in releasing Gautier’s art journalism ‘from the simplistic art-for-art’s-sake commonplaces to which it has been for so long reduced’ and in reasserting Gautier’s importance in the visual culture of nineteenth-century France.’ — Greg Kerr, Modern Language Review 105.2, 2010, 567-68 (full text online)
  • ‘Focusing on the period of the Second Republic which spans the 1848 Revolution and the 1851 coup d’état, this meticulously researched and engaging study follows Gautier’s reactions to developments in the organisation of the salon and to the artists themselves through a series of 49 articles published in La Presse... Gautier emerges in Kearns’s study not only as a prolific and idiosyncratic critic but also as one who challenges the label of 'art for art’s sake', embracing an overtly Republican artistic agenda.’ — unsigned notice, Forum for Modern Language Studies 46.2, 2010, 247

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)

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

Balzac and the Model of Painting: Artist Stories in La Comédie humaine
Diana Knight
Research Monographs in French Studies 24•14 December 2007

  • ‘Carefully focused, tightly written, and well-presented, this volume of close readings of Balzac’s artist stories is a solid and valuable addition to the Research Monographs in the Legenda series.’ — Marja Warehime, Nineteenth-Century French Studies 38, Fall-Winter 2009-10, 119-20
  • ‘Are painting and sculpture equally liable to distort lived experience, or is sculpture capable of securing a closer approximation of material truth? This is just one of the intriguing questions suggested by Balzac and the Model of Painting.’ — Elizabeth C. Mansfield, caa.reviews 2 December 2009

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

Spanish Culture from Romanticism to the Present: Structures of Feeling
Jo Labanyi
Selected Essays 11•23 September 2019

  • ‘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)

Proust Writing Photography: Fixing the Fugitive in À la recherche du temps perdu
Áine Larkin
Legenda (General Series) •26 August 2011

  • ‘Throughout the volume, Larkin’s close readings often provide fresh insights by situating themselves at a tangent to existing interpretations. In this way they form an individual trajectory, turning the study into a valuable source of orientation and stimulation for experts and newcomers to the field alike.’ — Katja Haustein, French Studies 67.1 (January 2013), 115-16
  • ‘Áine Larkin makes an excellent contribution to this already well established field of study with this systematic analysis of the manifold ways in which Proust appropriates photography for both thematic and stylistic purposes.’ — Marion Schmid, Modern and Contemporary France 20.4 (September 2012), 514-16

The Art of Ana Clavel: Ghosts, Urinals, Dolls, Shadows and Outlaw Desires
Jane Elizabeth Lavery
Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures 6•16 March 2015

  • ‘El libro de Lavery es una obra necesaria y de actualidad para entender también el pulso de los movimientos literarios en la América de habla hispana. Es un aporte que resarce a la literatura en general y a la visibilidad de las escritoras en particular... En la narrativa de Clavel—según Lavery—, realidad, identidad y cuerpo diluyen sus fronteras dentro y fuera de la ficción, excediendo la literatura para señalar lo propio de la condición humana. Así, el trabajo de Lavery contribuye a establecer un marco teórico, o si se prefiere, el canon del acontecer de la literatura emergente no solo de México, sino de América Latina.’ — Rita Vega Baeza, Bulletin of Spanish Studies 94.10, December 2017, 1830-31

Zola's Painters
Robert Lethbridge
Research Monographs in French Studies 68•7 June 2022

  • ‘In Zola’s Painters, Lethbridge has condensed a detailed textual history of art criticism that ran through the novels and the hundreds of articles that constituted the literary and intellectual agenda Zola pursued. He has mastered the vast scholarship on the major artists, writers, and cultural figures of Zola’s times to provide a comprehensively informed analysis of the critical lens through which the writer viewed his contemporaries’ productions... His rigorous archival and textual investigation combines with an admirable ability to write clearly and convincingly about the complex aesthetic, social, political, and economic interchanges of the second half of nineteenth-century France.’ — Therese Dolan, Nineteenth-Century French Studies 51.3-4, Spring 2023
  • ‘Dans cette étude richement illustrée, où, parmi beaucoup d'autres, les reproductions des tableaux de Corot, Monet et Véronèse accompagnent et prolongent la perspective du texte, la démonstration s'emploie à décomposer le regard et le goût d'un écrivain qui, précisément, compose avec la peinture et ses maîtres : de portraits en paysages, de critiques en repentirs, à rebours de l'idée reçue d'un romancier à la culture visuelle limitée, insensible aux subtilités et aux techniques picturales, et écrivant lui-même au couteau voire à la truelle, se dessine sous la plume de Robert Lethbridge la figure d'un Zola fin connaisseur et amateur des arts, observateur attentif de l'expression et des délicatesses du tempérament artiste d'hier et d'aujourd'hui.’ — Marion Glaumaud-Carbonnier, Les Cahiers naturalistes 97, September 2023, 347-350
  • ‘Zola’s importance as an art critic – his energetic commitment to naturalism as well as his detection of recidivism, his instinctive alliance with artists whose capacities he felt echoed his own – is forcefully assessed in this dense and valuable study.’ — Richard Thomson, Burlington Magazine 165, September 2023, 1042-43
  • ‘Robert Lethbridge’s outstanding study of Zola’s painters brings together the many strands of the naturalist author’s complex engagement with the art and artists of the late nineteenth century. This compelling and persuasive narrative maps the politi- cal and aesthetic valences of the perennial dialogues, disputes, dramas, and doubts between Zola and his (erstwhile) friends, Cézanne, Manet, Monet, and others in the Impressionist circle.’ — Alexandra K. Wettlaufer, French Studies 2023 (full text online)
  • ‘Zola’s Painters offers an excellent example of why scholarly work on the nineteenth century is so important: the myths and half-truths, as well as the political, social, and personal complexities which shaped the art and literature of the period and their reception, need to be fully interrogated, even if we are left with more intriguing questions than satisfying answers.’ — Claire Moran, Modern Language Review 118.4, October 2023, 624-25 (full text online)

Adapting the Canon: Mediation, Visualization, Interpretation
Edited by Ann Lewis and Silke Arnold-de Simine
Transcript 1•28 September 2020

  • ‘A welcome addition to the thriving academic production in the field of adaptation studies; its chapters stimulate reflection on the adaptive process as a phenomenon which has always existed and that we must acknowledge as a main force in the production of new cultural prod- ucts, products that creatively engage with the sources and intermedially reactivate their vital force.’ — Maddalena Pennacchia, Journal of Adaptation in Literature and Performance 14.3, 2021, 345-47 (full text online)
  • ‘An impressively large range of media is examined from a number of theoretical and methodological perspectives, all contributions working hard to move forward the study of adaptation. Their authors share an understanding of what it means to be historical, dialogic, and intermedial. We learn a lot about the artefacts, artists, and phenomena in question, as well as about the shape of adaptation studies in the 2020s.’ — Michael Stewart, Translation and Literature 31, 2022, 136-41 (full text online)

Residual Figuration in Samuel Beckett and Alberto Giacometti
Lin Li
Studies In Comparative Literature 53•7 June 2022

  • ‘In this ambitious yet focused study of the relationship between certain formal characteristics in Samuel Beckett’s dramatic works and Alberto Giacometti’s art, Lin Li not only clarifies these two artists’ shared milieu, but also sheds light on new ways to understand both subjecthood and reading more generally.’ — Charlie Clements, Modern Language Review 2024, 119.1, 139-41 (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

The Foreign Connection: Writings on Poetry, Art and Translation
Jamie McKendrick
Transcript 17•28 September 2020

  • ‘This book might have been written for my pleasure. Many readers of this journal will surely feel the same.’ — Chris Miller, PN Review 28.3, January/February 2022
  • ‘There is a natural clemency at work, throughout the entire volume, which has nothing to do with fuzzy-mindedness – quite the contrary, but it means that McKendrick will never deliver the frenzied hatchet-job some poets (whom he admires) can execute, apparently with sangfroid. This intelligence – by definition an ironic intelligence in that it can simultaneously entertain different positions – is what makes him such a trustworthy guide. One feels also that humour, that saving resource, is always within reach... His astute use of quotation to illustrate a point is a fiduciary of sound judgement. Above all, Jamie McKendrick reminds us that there is no substitute for patient looking and listening. This close attention, this authentic love of the art, is rare in our day. These writings are to be prized.’ — Stephen Romer, The London Magazine February/March 2022, 77-84
  • ‘A welcome marker to remind us, if we needed reminding, of how much human beings need, and gain from, dialogue with other cultures and languages. The apparently foreign, as Jamie McKendrick demonstrates so well here, in fact shows us a threshold, a door.’ — Hilary Davies, Times Literary Supplement 19 May 2023, p. 8
  • ‘What Jamie McKendrick so finely details about Tom Lubbock’s English Graphic is an entirely apt description for his own collection of brief reviews, introductions, and essays, on literature and art: ‘The constraints of the form proved exceptionally viable and liberating for his procedures. Providing a “wiry outline”, the form itself allowed for wit, aperçu, mental calisthenics, provocation, aphorism, meditation and surprisingly sustained argument’.’ — George Kalogeris, Essays in Criticism 73.1, 2023, 130-31 (full text online)

Britain and Italy from Romanticism to Modernism: A Festschrift for Peter Brand
Edited by Martin McLaughlin
Legenda (General Series) •1 November 2000

  • ‘The book concludes with a useful bibliography of Peter Brand's work and offers a valuable résumé of work in the field since Brand's pioneering study.’ — unsigned notice, Forum for Modern Language Studies xxxix/1, 2003, 91
  • ‘This rich and varied collection of essays... a worthy homage to Peter Brand.’ — Carmine G. di Biase, Italica 79.4, 2002, 568-72
  • ‘A volume that, with its interlacing strands, very effectively offers a picture of the complex relationship between two cultures reciprocally illuminating each other in often unpredictable ways.’ — Laura Lepschy, Modern Language Review 98.2, 2003, 482-3 (full text online)
  • ‘Une présentation très claire, dans laquelle toutefois le titre peut paraïtre trompeur, car il resterait à explorer, pendant cette même période, ce qu'apporte précisément cet autre aspect de la culture moderne italienne qu'est par exemple sa production romanesque. On songe à Manzoni (1785-1873) dont l'èuvre reflète à bien des égards le passage du Romantisme au Modernisme.’ — Annie Dubernard Laurent, Revue de littérature comparée 3, 2002, 381-3