'Hitler's First Victim'? Memory and Representation in Post-War Austria
Edited by Judith Beniston and Robert Vilain
Austrian Studies 111 January 2003

(Un)veiling Bodies: A Trajectory of Chilean Post-Dictatorship Documentary
Elizabeth Ramírez-Soto
Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures 2023 September 2019

  • ‘Estas reflexiones finales apuntan a que nos en-contramos ante una obra que no solo está llama-da a convertirse en lugar de paso obligado para investigaciones posteriores sobre el documental chileno contemporáneo inserto en el devenir de las políticas del pasado y la memoria, sino que ofrece intersticios para lecturas productivas en otros ámbitos y periodos.’ — María Luisa Ortega, Secuencias 51, 2020, 178-80
  • ‘Impeccably documented and researched... the book works with over 100 films (an impressive corpus) and includes a filmography that will undoubtedly serve as an important resource for students and scholars... The book also rescues for/from the archive a vast group of nearly forgotten directors and films that open the reader’s mind to appreciate the breadth of what Chilean documentary film both has been and is. This is an especially important gesture for international readers... Pushes the conversation on documentary far beyond the stale, though classic debates about objectivity and subjectivity; it shows that documentary film is not only a medium capable of capturing memories but also of actively creating and triggering them through sensory experience.’ — Michael Lazzara, A Contracorriente 18.2, 2021, 271-78
  • ‘Más allá de esto, no cabe duda que (Un)veiling Bodies. A Trajectory of Chilean Post-dictatorship documentary, se trata de un libro importante para futuros estudios sobre cine documental chileno, estableciendo un verdadero “piso” investigativo, que habrá que considerar al momento de acercarse a él.’ — Iván Pinto Veas, Imagofagia 24, 2021, 689-96
  • ‘En la intersección de diversos ámbitos teóricos, la obra de Ramírez-Soto forma parte, al fin, de una tendencia fecunda que busca establecer puentes entre la historia, la ética y los estudios de la imagen. Desmarcándose prudentemente de los trauma studies y prefiriendo situar su reflexión bajo el signo del “giro afectivo”, (Un)veiling Bodies logra dar cuenta exitosamente de un periodo sensible de la producción documental en Chile, otorgando una nueva visibilidad a un corpus a menudo ignorado por los investigadores.’ — Ignacio Albornoz Fariña, Cinémas d'Amérique Latine 28, 2020, 170-71 (full text online)

Across Texts: Essays on Different Forms of French Textuality
Keith Reader
Selected Essays 1310 December 2021

  • ‘An anthology of some of Reader’s most vital essays, all of which demonstrate his careful erudition and distinctive writerly voice, tending towards digression but never lapsing into indulgence... Above all, these essays are humane, and touching when the neutral, analytical voice gives way to Reader’s personal accounts: his anxieties about his masculinity, his fascination for language and, ultimately, his love of France.’ — Russell Williams, Times Literary Supplement 14 October 2022
  • ‘What is all the more remarkable is that a scholar such as Reader masters so many varied discourses and manages to tie them together with his characteristic incisive style and biting wit. As a pioneering figure in French Cultural Studies in the UK, Reader helped open up the study of cinema, of literary theory, and of gender for countless new scholars, yet it would be difficult to find many who can match the breadth of his work or the verve of his writing.’ — Patrick Bray, H-France 23, April 2023, no. 69

Affective Spaces: Migration in Scandinavian and German Transnational Narratives
Anja Tröger
Germanic Literatures 2426 July 2021

  • ‘Anja Tröger’s 2021 monograph Affective Spaces: Migration in Scandinavian and German Transnational Narratives examines twelve novels whose fairly recent publication dates are bookended by Vigdis Hjorth’s Snakk til meg (2011) and Zeshan Shakar’s Tante Ulrikkes vei (2017)... twelve very compelling transnational narratives that are well worth the engagement.’ — Thomas Herold, German Studies Review 46.2, May 2023, 328-30

After Clarice: Reading Lispector’s Legacy in the Twenty-First Century
Edited by Adriana X. Jacobs and Claire Williams
Transcript 1413 September 2022

  • ‘Hefty tomes such as After Clarice are becoming ever rarer... This expansive collection of essays on the life and works of Clarice Lispector is a welcome exception. Readers wishing to know just a little more about Lispector, or any of her works, as well as those curious to learn more about a particular intricacy regarding the critical reception of her work, are equally well served. Others, of course, might opt to read the book cover to cover. If they do, they will receive a comprehensive education on one of the most fascinating writers of the twentieth century.’ — Paulo de Medeiros, Modern Language Review 119.2, 2024, 283-84 (full text online)

Agnès Varda Unlimited: Image, Music, Media
Edited by Marie-Claire Barnet
Moving Image 613 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

Arthur Symons: Poet, Critic, Vagabond
Edited by Elisa Bizzotto and Stefano Evangelista
Studies In Comparative Literature 4425 May 2018

  • ‘The MHRA's recent commitment to publishing works by or on Arthur Symons was sus=tained in 2017 with selections edited by Nicholas Freeman and by Jane Desmarais and Chris Baldick. That commitment continues with a volume of essays on Symons’s life and work, many of which discuss his personal, intellectual, and artistic relations with aspects of European culture... In their short but excellent introduction, Bizzotto and Evangelista argue that their collection, “the first ... entirely dedicated to Symons[,] ... aims to project a new, nuanced view of Symons into the twenty-first century.”’ — Ian Small, English Literature in Transition 1880-1920 62.3, 2019, 599-606
  • ‘Once consecrated by Pater as a successor to Browning, Symons ranged far beyond poetry to practise literary and art criticism, aesthetic theory, drama, travel writing and translation; and he wrote prolifically, if self-cannibalistically, until his death in 1945.’ — Ellen Crowell, Times Literary Supplement 7 June 2019, 35
  • ‘A book devoted to the work of Arthur Symons is timely and much needed; and this carefully fashioned and integrated collection of essays offers an excellent response to that need... This is a well-crafted collection; a thoughtful and integrated multi- authored study of a writer, and one that has been put together both to confirm his significance to many of our current scholarly preoccupations while simultaneously unsettling what it might mean to think of a writer as ‘central’ to any of those debates.’ — Marion Thain, Comparative Critical Studies 17.1, 2020, 161-64 (full text online)
  • ‘The book is clearly a timely contribution to our knowledge of Symons and represents a significant milestone in his ongoing critical retrieval.’ — Rob Harris, Studies in Walter Pater and Aestheticism 5, 2020, 140-44
  • ‘Gives Symons the meticulous attention that such a pivotal cultural figure deserves. One of the most insightful aspects... is its analysis of the wandering obliqueness of his Decadent perspective as it reflects his philosophical commitment to freedom of expression, experience, and lifestyle.’ — Dennis Denisoff, Victorian Studies 62.4, 2020, 686-88 (full text online)

The Austrian Noughties: Texts, Films, Debates
Edited by Allyson Fiddler, Jon Hughes and Florian Krobb
Austrian Studies 1910 December 2011

Autobiographical Reenactment in French and Belgian Film: Repetition, Memory, Self
Tom Cuthbertson
Moving Image 1228 April 2022

Blanchot and the Moving Image: Fascination and Spectatorship
Calum Watt
Moving Image 829 September 2017

  • ‘Watt’s study is exemplary in the impressive range of texts and references that it draws on, and in the intensive seriousness of its discussions. It will be an inevitable reference for anyone venturing into this uncanny territory.’ — Jeff Fort, H-France 18.143, 2018
  • ‘One of the striking things to emerge from Calum Watt’s impressive study is the extent to which contemporary discussion of the art of film draws on Maurice Blanchot’s thought... [This book] does justice independently to each of its subjects.’ — Michael Holland, French Studies 72.4, October 2018, 632-33 (full text online)
  • ‘Exhaustive scholarship abetted by meticulous referencing, and a keen eye for the specificities of a certain mode of exposure (one which is remarked upon in the author’s Introduction) to the cinematographic as work (and unworking), are all commendable traits of the latest addition to a significant series.’ — Garin Dowd, Modern Language Review 114.3, July 2019, 572-573 (full text online)
  • ‘Blanchot and the Moving Image seems like an opening salvo in a larger intellectual project, one that will track the ways in which—as one of the study's most exciting claims has it—"cinema's contribution to thought is fascination".’ — Mikko Tuhkanen, Postmodern Culture 29.2, January 2019
  • ‘Watt makes a convincing case for Blanchot's appositeness to the moving image and, in the process, discovers that Blanchot's phantasmatic presence is already insinuated within film theory's margins... Overall, Blanchot and the Moving Image is an impressive piece of research that betrays a wealth of cognizance, not only of Blanchot's own writings, but also of his subtle yet persistent influence within twentieth and twenty first century continental philosophy and, subsequently, Anglophone film theory.’ — Corey P. Cribb, Film-Philosophy 24.1, February 2020, 71-74 (full text online)

Brazil in the Midst of Neoliberal Turmoil: Devastation and Resistance
Edited by Márcio Seligmann-Silva
Portuguese Studies 37.14 July 2021

Breaking with Tradition: Belarusian Short Prose in the Early Twenty-First Century
Arnold McMillin
Publications of the Modern Humanities Research Association 2012 January 2018

  • ‘This book aims to show the powerful creative urges that continue to mark literature in Belarus, despite the continued denigration of the national language and culture. In this the author has succeeded magnificently.’ — Jim Dingley, Slavonic and East European Review 96.4, 2018, 770-71 (full text online)
  • ‘McMillin’s work makes an invaluable contribution to scholarship on Belarusian literature. Considering the difficulties with accessing the texts (often hard to find in print, as well as on the Internet), McMillin’s successful inclusion of these rare works in his analysis allows him to shed light not only on the writing of the more famous representatives of the Belarusian literary scene, but also on the subtle undercurrents of the literary process.’ — Palina Urban, Australian Slavonic and East European Studies 32, December 2018, 122-25

British Poetry since 1945
Edited by C. J. Rawson
Yearbook of English Studies 171 January 1987

Brute Meaning: Essays in Materialist Criticism from Dickens to Hitchcock
David Trotter
Selected Essays 928 September 2020

  • ‘Not a single essay here but is interesting in its own way. Many, as with ‘Dickens and Frith’ (Essay 4) take a minor topic and make something special from it. The essay on Middlemarch (Essay 5) seems a major contribution... All the essays are likeable and thoughtful, exhibiting an astonishingly wide reading.’ — Jeremy Tambling, Modern Language Review 117.3, July 2022, 474-76 (full text online)

Can Fiction Change the World?
Edited by Alison James, Akihiro Kubo, and Françoise Lavocat
Transcript 2922 January 2023

Catalan Narrative 1875-2015
Edited by Jordi Larios and Montserrat Lunati
Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures 1628 September 2020

  • ‘Two attractive features of the volume are its richness and the way it brings to life the wide variety of works analysed. Critical theory figures strongly in a number of the articles, but it is employed carefully and sometimes subtly as a framework that enhances rather than obscures the narrative texts under discussion. Finally, the editors’ succinct Introduction intelligently, clearly, and deftly ties together the diverse strands of the book’s eclectic content, inviting the casual reader to explore further.’ — David George, Modern Language Review 117.3, July 2022, 514-15 (full text online)

The Catalonian Journey of American Drama 1909-2000: From Jimmy Valentine to The Vagina Monologues
Ramón Espejo 
Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures 5919 February 2024

Chantal Akerman: Afterlives
Edited by Marion Schmid and Emma Wilson
Moving Image 923 April 2019

  • ‘What I like in Schmid and Wilson’s book is the breadth of content it offers. It is not a book about the “usual” subjects we speak about in the context of Akerman’s cinema. There is work on the director’s installations; there is work on, yes, ageing and smoking; there is work on what Albertine Fox calls “vocal landscapes”; and there is also work on Akerman’s use of light in Cyril Béghin’s excellent chapter Light out of Joint.’ — Nadin Mai, The Art(s) of Slow Cinema 5 July 2019
  • ‘Afterlives is an array of incredibly rich, beautiful, creative, and often deeply emotional responses to filmmaker, writer and artist Chantal Akerman's later works, looking with much needed detail attention to the final two decades of Akerman's creative output.’ — Ros Murray, Modern and Contemporary France 28.1, 2019, 175-76 (full text online)
  • ‘Together these essays resonate as similar tropes, films, and installations recur in new configurations. It is a testament to the artist, and to the editors, that new thought continues to illuminate Akerman’s oeuvre.’ — Ivone Margulies, H-France 20, May 2018, no. 66
  • ‘The diverse theoretical frameworks utilized in the essays allow for interdisciplinary discussions of Akerman’s oeuvre and propose new approaches for film studies. Elegantly written, this publication will interest scholars of European cinema, documentaries, multimedia art, cinematic adaptations of nineteenth-century literature, cultural memory, and the Holocaust.’ — Tessa Nunn, French Review 94.4, May 2021, 274-75 (full text online)

The Cinema of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub
Edited by Martin Brady and Helen Hughes
Moving Image 1422 April 2023

Comedy and Trauma in Germany and Austria after 1945: The Inner Side of Mourning
Stephanie Bird
Germanic Literatures 1019 December 2016

  • ‘This study offers an original and distinctive approach which illuminates key aspects of the chosen works while also enhancing the highly complex nature of mourning.’ — unsigned notice, Forum for Modern Language Studies 54.4, October 2018, 506 (full text online)
  • ‘A fresh perspective on comedy and the complex roles comedic devices have played in postwar German-language literature and lm and in discussions of trauma.’ — Corey L. Twitchell, German Studies Review 42.1, February 2019, 176-178 (full text online)

Comparative Literature in Britain: National Identities, Transnational Dynamics 1800-2000
Joep Leerssen
Studies In Comparative Literature 2723 September 2019

  • ‘This is a study of the rare kind of which it can truthfully be said that it is definitive: the description fits Leerssen’s book perfectly. To those still living who launched comparative literature in the new universities some 50 years ago it will come as a happy reminder of an exciting time of innovation and change which they were fortunate to have been part of. To those of a later generation it will reveal that what happened in the 1960s did not emerge from nowhere: a long and honourable history, ably explored by Professor Leerssen, led up to it.’ — John Fletcher, Journal of European Studies 50.3, 2020, 302-321 (full text online)
  • ‘The publication of [this book] is welcome news... The entire section on the nineteenth century is a treasure house of insights into cross-national and comparative ways of approaching knowledge... This is, all in all, a book to be heartily recommended for a wide variety of readers interested in comparative studies in the humanities and social sciences, while being of particular interest to those wishing to understand the evolution of literary and cultural studies.’ — Barnita Bagchi, History of Humanities Fall 2020, 554-56

Conceptualizing and Utilizing the Natural Environment: Critical Reflections from Imperial and Soviet Russia
Edited by Jonathan Oldfield, Julia Lajus and Denis J. B. Shaw
Slavonic and East European Review 93.11 January 2015

Configuring Community: Theories of Community Identities in Contemporary Spain
Parvati Nair
MHRA Texts and Dissertations 611 January 2004

Confrontational Readings: Literary Neo-Avant-Gardes in Dutch and German
Edited by Inge Arteel, Lars Bernaerts and Olivier Couder
Germanic Literatures 2128 September 2020

Constructing Feminine Poetics in the Works of a Late-20th-Century Catalan Woman Poet: Maria-Mercè Marçal
Noèlia Díaz Vicedo
MHRA Texts and Dissertations 901 March 2014

  • ‘Este libro de Noèlia Díaz-Vicedo constituye una apreciable aportación a los estudios sobre la obra de Maria-Mercè Marçal en general, y sobre su poesía en particular.’ — Javier Letrán, Bulletin of Spanish Studies 94, 2017, 1251-52