Decadent and Occult Works by Arthur Machen
Edited by Dennis Denisoff
Critical Texts 53 / Jewelled Tortoise 4•11 July 2018

  • ‘What’s here will certainly enliven the reading lists of many undergraduate courses on the Victorian Gothic, but, hopefully, it will also allow Machen to be seen not simply as a writer of ‘shockers’ but as a significant and distinctive contributor to the wider literature of his day. The edition is bolstered by a helpful bibliography of secondary works and a chronology of Machen’s life and times. It is well produced and very competitively priced, meaning that it should find a home on university reading lists as well as on the hungry shelves of acquisitive Machenites such as myself.’ — Nick Freeman, Volupté 1.2, Winter 2018, 165-70
  • ‘This is an invaluable scholarly edition of Machen's work which makes a thoughtful case for his profound, but idiosyncratic contribution to Decadence.’ — Timothy J. Jarvis, Faunus 38, 2018, 56
  • ‘In taking the complexities of Machen’s relationship with the Decadent movement as its starting point, Denisoff’s volume is a significant intervention. ... There is an authentic sense of the volume as a carefully curated experience... a valuable teaching edition.’ — Jane Ford, Modern Language Review 115.3, July 2020, 712-13 (full text online)

Eliza Haywood, The Fortunate Foundlings
Edited by Carol Stewart
Critical Texts 59•31 May 2018

  • ‘This volume is a worthwhile read and is highly recommended.’ — unsigned notice, Forum for Modern Language Studies 55.2, April 2019, 245 (full text online)
  • ‘Carol Stewart’s new edition is of exceptional value. The volume is consistently and expertly footnoted. Historical personages are briefly identified, and likely references are offered. More importantly, Stewart’s introduction provides a brief but clear historical summary, a useful contextualization of the text in Haywood’s oeuvre, and a thoughtful analysis of the novel’s key features.’ — Matthew J. Rigilano, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 33.1, 2020, 168-71
  • ‘A key addition to Haywood scholarship, doing much to show her adroit handling of different genres as well as offering a new perspective on an author about whom there is still much to discover.’ — Jennifer Buckley, Modern Language Review 115.4, October 2020, 902-03 (full text online)

The Blind Bow-Boy by Carl Van Vechten
Edited by Kirsten MacLeod
Critical Texts 62•31 August 2018

  • ‘Kirsten MacLeod’s new MHRA Critical Texts edition of The Blind Bow-Boy makes it possible and attractive to bring Van Vechten into both the undergraduate and graduate classroom by illuminating the novel’s complex recipe for hedonism... In every sense, then, MacLeod’s framing of the novel makes it feel at once more significant and more enjoyable, and its availability now in an affordable paperback form will hopefully bring more scholars, students, and general readers into contact with its pleasures.’ — Kristin Mahoney, Textual Cultures 12.2, 2019, 144-46
  • ‘If one were to add The Blind Bow-Boy to a class on modernism, New York literature of the 1920s, or even a twentieth-century literature survey, this edition would make the work accessible to a wide range of students because it serves in itself as an excellent introduction to modernist work. Highly recommended.’ — Michelle E. Moore, Modern Language Review 116.3, July 2021, 500-01 (full text online)

Maud Beerbohm Tree: Lady of the Stage
Susana Cory-Wright
Legenda (General Series) •26 February 2018

  • ‘This is a beautifully presented work, with an attractive cover and illustrations... There is much emphasis upon the personal life and career of Maud, but the book is also good on the sociopolitical changes taking place in the theatre at this time, and on the role of women in society.’ — unsigned notice, The Year's Work in English Studies 98.1, 2019, 657-58

Swinburne’s Style: An Experiment in Verse History
L. M. Kilbride
Legenda (General Series) •10 September 2018

  • ‘An ambitious attempt to reckon with the poet’s achievement in verse... this book helps us to see Swinburne’s corpus for what it is: one of the most sophisticated formal projects in English verse, no matter what T. S. Eliot thought.’ — Justin A. Sider, English Literature in Transition 1880-1920 63.2, 2020, 280-83
  • ‘Kilbride provides the reader with insightful textual analyses that shed new light on a selection of Swinburne’s poetical works, some of which are canonical, others still fairly neglected.’ — Giovanni Bassi, Modern Language Review 115.4, October 2020, 905-07 (full text online)
  • ‘Combines a practitioner’s delight in Swinburne’s verse textures with a scholar’s insight into poetic experiment in nineteenth-century Britain and a literary theorist’s investment in social critique.’ — Julia F. Saville, Victorian Studies 63.1, Autumn 2020, 152-53 (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)

Arthur Symons: Poet, Critic, Vagabond
Edited by Elisa Bizzotto and Stefano Evangelista
Studies In Comparative Literature 44•25 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)

Erotic Literature in Adaptation and Translation
Edited by Johannes D. Kaminski
Transcript 7•10 September 2018

  • ‘Each chapter is conceptually challenging and theoretically rigorous. Indebted to the ‘cultural turn’ of translation studies, ... the contributors are sensitive to the vicissitudes of cultural values and sexual mores, and to the disfigurement that translation precipitates... This volume unleashes a network of exciting discursive tributaries, primed for further navigation.’ — Victoria Carroll, Modern Language Review 115.3, July 2020, 694-95 (full text online)
  • ‘In spite of the fact that the publishing industry has been flooded with erotic literatures since the old times and that translation studies has newly witnessed a felicitous avalanche in the academic publication of our time, erotic literatures and translation studies have by far remained two sufficiently wide and wild parallels in contemporary academia. Erotic Literature in Adaption and Translation edited by Johannes D. Kaminski hence boasts a brave and brilliant contribution, a contribution that not only makes such two distant parallels meet in one single volume but also conjures up a happiest convergence of the estranging twain—erotic literature in the West and its counterpart in the farthest East, by the medium of both multilingual translation and, above all, universal humanity, wherein reigns Eros, the Greek god of erotic love.’ — Min-Hua Wu, The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture 12.2, June 2019, 223-31 (full text online)

Thomas Elyot, The Image of Governance and Other Dialogues of Counsel (1533–1541)
Edited by David Carlson
Tudor and Stuart Translations 24•12 November 2018

  • ‘This edition will be highly useful to scholars and ought to find its way onto a number of university reading lists.’ — J. S. Crown, Sixteenth Century Journal 50, 2019, 1271

Writing in the Age of William IV
Edited by Maureen McCue, Rebecca Butler and Anne-Marie Millim
Yearbook of English Studies 48•10 December 2018