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)

Agnès Varda Unlimited: Image, Music, Media
Edited by Marie-Claire Barnet
Moving Image 6•13 February 2017

  • ‘The essays in this important and richly illustrated volume edited by Marie-Claire Barnet focus on the film, installation art, photography, and use of music by the multi-faceted and creative soon-to-be nonagenarian, Agnès Varda... An inspiring and valuable volume.’ — Dervila Cooke, H-France 18, March 2018, no. 51
  • ‘A wide-angle approach highlighting not only Varda’s move towards art installations in the past decades, but also the influence of various creative forms, some of them non-visual – including photography, sculpture, music, architecture, poetry, and even video gaming – on her earlier works. Contributions span an incredibly broad range of artistic and critical perspectives... Inspires the reader to (re-)discover Varda’s work and its ‘unlimited’ potential: not only in that her work resists labels, but also because her imagination and artistic legacy seem to be boundless.’ — Elise Hugueny-Léger, Modern and Contemporary France 26.1, 2018, 99-100 (full text online)
  • ‘The book’s subtitle suggests that it will give attention to the frequently overlooked music employed in (and often written for) Varda’s films, and here it does not disappoint, with Phil Powrie’s essay offering an excellently informed, disciplined, and particularly well-illustrated investigation of L’Une chante, l’autre pas as the ‘feminist musical’ Varda has claimed it to be, and Hannah Mowat’s brilliantly entitled ‘Lara Croft dans un champ de patates: A Ludomusicological Approach to Agnès Varda’ drawing on ‘the emerging discipline of ludomusicology: a field in which soundscape is inseparable from the act of gameplay’. That Mowat’s essay is the single most stimulating contribution to the volume... says much not just about the consistently high quality of its contents, but also about the remarkably enduring spirit of playfulness and invention that has characterized Varda’s entire career, and with which she continues to engage and entertain us.’ — Kate Ince, Modern Language Review 113.3, July 2018, 663-64 (full text online)
  • ‘The authors all speak with palpable enthusiasm about their subjects, making the book thoroughly enjoyable and engaging.’ — unsigned notice, Forum for Modern Language Studies 54.3, July 2018, 371
  • ‘Any student of Varda’s work will find something indispensable in this collection, which enhances, but in no way exhausts, the growing body of research celebrating the variety, the challenge, and the inclusive playfulness of one of France’s greatest artists.’ — Alison Smith, French Studies 72.3, July 2018, 482-83
  • ‘Une contribution riche et éclairante pour celles et ceux qui étudient l’oeuvre de Varda.’ — François Giraud, H-France 19, January 2019, no. 19

The Arts in Victorian Literature
Edited by Stefano Evangelista and Catherine Maxwell
Yearbook of English Studies 40.1/2•1 January 2010

Austria and the Alps
Edited by Judith Beniston and Robert Vilain
Austrian Studies 18•5 September 2011

Configuring Community: Theories of Community Identities in Contemporary Spain
Parvati Nair
MHRA Texts and Dissertations 61•1 January 2004

Decadence and the Senses
Edited by Jane Desmarais and Alice Condé
Legenda (General Series) •17 May 2017

  • ‘I found Maxwell’s discussion of the tuberose, and more speci cally Walter Pater’s conscription of that flower to describe his own rarefied prose style, to be particularly interesting, as Pater’s writing is so often considered the acme of Decadent prose. It seems that the orchid that famously reminded Dorian Gray of the seven deadly sins should, perhaps, have been a tuberose. Equally interesting is Angela Dunstan’s suggestion that Theodore Watts-Dunton’s roman-à-clef Aylwin became for readers a means of owning the celebrity of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, or the notion extended by Liz Renes that John Singer Sargent’s Madame X should be considered a meditation on the white, sculptural body and its changing role in modern art.’ — Jamie Horrocks, English Literature in Translation 61.4, 2018, 525-28
  • ‘It is perhaps fitting that the unity of a book on Decadent literature should be best experienced ‘decomposed’ to give place to the independence of each chapter. There is no doubt, however, that the high quality of its constituent parts forms a significant contribution to Sensory Studies and that the collection is a ‘must-read’ for any student of Decadence at the fin de siècle and beyond.’ — Patricia Pulham, Modern Language Review 114.1, January 2019, 128-29 (full text online)
  • ‘Desmarais and Condé have done an enormous service by opening up this can of repulsive worms.’ — Dennis Denisoff, Victorian Studies 61.2, Winter 2019, 554-56

Diego Rivera and Juan Rulfo: Post-Revolutionary Body Politics 1922-1965
Lucy O’Sullivan
Visual Culture 3•23 February 2022

The Experience of Colour in Lorca's Theatre
Jade Boyd
Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures 54•13 September 2022

  • ‘Boyd is sensitive to what is left out as well as what is explicit. She thus underlines the absence in this tragedy of stage directions regarding lighting. She also reads ‘verbal colour’ into objects, food and animals, so the mention of frogs, chocolate, earth, fire and goldfinches becomes part of an imagined canvas of images, sometimes as potent as what we can see on stage.’ — John London, Bulletin of Spanish Studies 100.6, 2023, 930-32 (full text online)

For the Love of Art
Peter Dayan
Selected Essays 10•20 October 2022

  • ‘Rich and powerful discussions, bursting with invention and life. This is a formidably clever sequence of essays in which major writers and musicians are set in contrast and dialogue with each other.’ — John Batchelor, Modern Language Review 119.2, 2024, 181-88 (full text online)

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)

Fragments, Genius and Madness: Masks and Mask-Making in the fin-de-siècle Imagination
Elisa Segnini
Studies In Comparative Literature 56•26 July 2021

  • ‘The wide-ranging approach of the book, which also engages with recent debates in decadence and early modernist studies, openly challenges the “abrupt separation between authors associated with the ‘half-mock interlude of decadence’ and those considered exponents of symbolism, and thus part of early modernism”... The author keeps steady command of her arguments while navigating and scrutinising several artifacts from different cultures, though of course each case study shows its own fine tuning.’ — Giulio Milone, Synergies 2, 2021, 65-68 (full text online)
  • ‘Elisa Segnini leads her readers on a journey through fin-de-siècle Europe with one extra stop in Japan. The universe unveiled by Segnini is populated by uncanny mask makers, men in drag, grotesque masquerades, deathly plaster casts, gruesome masks of exceptional men, criminals, and deviants... A distinctive contribution to a field that can only benefit from engaging with the anthropological, medical, and legal discourse that underlies the artistic production of the fin de siècle.’ — Alessandra Crotti, Rivista di studi vittoriani 53, 2022, 121-25

Futurism: A Microhistory
Edited by Sascha Bru, Luca Somigli, and Bart Van den Bossche
Italian Perspectives 36•29 September 2017

  • ‘The chapter structure is cleverly designed to replicate a ‘day in the life’ of a Futurist ‘new man’, with chapters focusing on places both large and small from ‘The Skyscraper’ to ‘The Bed’... This book was a pleasure to read and will reward both the serious scholar of Futurism and the more casual reader of twentieth-century Italian culture who may wish to dip in and out of the Futurist day.’ — Selena Daly, Modern Language Review 114.3, July 2019, 577-579 (full text online)

The Integrity of the Avant-Garde: Karel Teige and the Biography of an Ambition
Peter Zusi 
Visual Culture 2•18 March 2024

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)

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)

Lodovico Dolce, Dialogo della instituzion delle donne secondo li tre stati che cadono nella vita umana (1545)
Edited by Helena Sanson
Critical Texts 30•1 June 2015

Minding Borders: Resilient Divisions in Literature, the Body and the Academy
Edited by Nicola Gardini, Adriana X. Jacobs, Ben Morgan, Mohamed-Salah Omri and Matthew Reynolds
Transcript 5•1 November 2017

  • ‘The contributors not only bring to light the long history of border-making, but also the ways in which it is possible to construct a methodological framework by which to interrogate these practices.’ — Fariha Shaikh, Modern Language Review 114.4, October 2019, 845-46 (full text online)

The Modern Culture of Reginald Farrer: Landscape, Literature and Buddhism
Michael Charlesworth
Studies In Comparative Literature 36•26 February 2018

  • ‘The clear strengths of this book are in its lucid prose, historical accuracy, and truly fascinating subject matter... Richly supported in terms of diverse textual materials, the book is also visually stunning and contains a number of wonderful illustrations, photographs, and reproduced artworks... Charlesworth’s book presents a compelling case for a renewed interest in Reginald Farrer’s writings, and will remain the definitive work on this topic for many years to come.’ — Jeffrey Mather, Modern Language Review 115.1, 2020, 164-65 (full text online)

Pascal Quignard: Towards the Vanishing Point
Léa Vuong
Research Monographs in French Studies 48•19 December 2016

  • ‘Léa Vuong’s succinct and insightful book addresses the work of French writer Pascal Quignard through the lenses of absence and disappearance. As Vuong argues, the reception of Quignard in the Anglo-Saxon world remains somewhat limited, while his work within the Hexagon has been the subject of extensive discussions and wide critical recognition. This first thorough study of Quignard’s work in the English language fills a gap while offering a perspective that connects Quignard to a constellation of structuralist and poststructuralist thinkers, in particular with the work of Jacques Lacan and Maurice Blanchot.’ — Étienne Lussier, Modern and Contemporary France 4 Oct 2017 (full text online)
  • ‘A well-written, well-documented analysis that manages to give a good glimpse into a voluminous literary production (Quignard’s publications are now nearing eighty books), while reporting on several important, and less studied, aspects of Quignard’s oeuvre.’ — Jean-Louis Pautrot, H-France 17, December 2017, no. 236
  • ‘Both specialists and those not very familiar with Quignard will find something of value here... the range of texts considered, which help the author trace broad points of commonality across an immense and still growing body of work, and the generally compelling characterization and descriptions of the text, will be helpful to those seeking an introduction to Quignard.’ — Joseph Acquito, Modern Language Review 113.3, July 2018, 664-66 (full text online)
  • ‘Di questo dibattito, l’autrice traccia nella «Conclusio- ne» un lucido bilancio, tra accuse di parisianisme e riconoscimento in patria, moltiplicarsi delle traduzioni e interesse ancora limitato da parte della critica in altre lingue, sottolineando la sotterranea portata sovversiva di una scrittura che ostenta la propria inattualità, che ritorce il fascino esercitato dal linguaggio contro il potere euristico della parola, che ingloba il meta-discorso che suscita, condannando talora il commentatore alla parafrasi o all’imitazione.’ — Stefano Genetti, Studi francesi 185, 2018, 367-68

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

Photographing the Unseen Mexico: Maya Goded’s Socially Engaged Documentaries
Dominika Gasiorowski
Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures 21•25 February 2019

  • ‘By employing innovative, subaltern questioning, Dominika Gasiorowski makes an exceptionally strong case for engaging with this socially committed Mexican documentary filmmaker and photographer and has produced an extremely thorough and impactful study of Maya Goded’s work.’ — Erica Segre, Bulletin of Spanish Visual Studies 5.1, 2021, 186-87 (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

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)

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)

Shades of Grey: 1960s Lisbon in Novel, Film and Photobook
Paul Melo e Castro
MHRA Texts and Dissertations 77•25 March 2011