Modern Language Review 111.2•1 April 2016

Modern Language Review 111.3•1 July 2016

Modern Language Review 111.4•1 October 2016

Corín Tellado, Thursdays with Leila
Translated by Duncan Wheeler, with an introduction by Diana Holmes and Duncan Wheeler, and a prologue by Mario Vargas Llosa
New Translations 9•15 November 2016

  • ‘La estimable traducción al inglés de Los jueves de Leila, por parte de los profesores Duncan Wheeler y Diana Holmes, uno de los más conocidos relatos de Corín Tellado y que inicia la serie: “Querer es poder”, abre la puerta al género romántico de esta prolí ca escritora asturiana al mundo anglosajón.’ — Estefanía Tocado, Hispania 101.2, June 2018, 344-45
  • ‘Wheeler’s translation of Thursdays with Leila captures the informal, non-demanding style of Tellado’s writing, and this particular novel was a very good choice for translation as it illustrates most of the dominant characteristics of her fiction.’ — Patricia O’Byrne, Bulletin of Spanish Studies 95, 2018, 905-06

Georg Kaiser, After Expressionism: Five Plays
Translated by Fred Bridgham
New Translations 11•1 May 2016

  • ‘This volume is a valuable addition to world literature libraries, and of great interest to scholars of theatre... Scholars can be grateful to Bridgham for his efforts in placing these works before a broader public.’ — Carole J. Lambert, Translation and Literature 27, 2019, 100-07 (full text online)

Hugo von Hofmannsthal, An Impossible Man
Translated by Alexander Stillmark
New Translations 12•1 August 2016

  • ‘This MHRA edition is a useful reference work for Anglophone readers and students of Hofmannsthal and provides an authoritative translation of Der Schwierige that will be welcomed by literary and theatre historians alike.’ — Edward Saunders, Austrian Studies 2017, 25, 253-54 (full text online)

Portuguese Studies 32.1•14 March 2016

Authoritarian States and Corporatism in Portugal and Brazil
Edited by Paula Borges Santos and Luciano Aronne de Abreu
Portuguese Studies 32.2•10 October 2016

The French Art Novel 1900-1930
Katherine Shingler
Research Monographs in French Studies 43•19 December 2016

  • ‘An extremely informative and enjoyable study, which takes the reader on a rich and detailed tour of the early twentieth-century French artist’s world, “far beyond the form and concerns of the genre’s nineteenth-century foundational texts”. Clear, compelling, lucid, well researched, and beautifully written, Shingler’s book is an important and welcome sequel to scholarship written on the romantic art novel.’ — Dominique Jullien, H-France 18, May 2018, No. 111
  • ‘Shingler uncovers an approach to twentieth-century novels that bears pursuing further. Shingler investigates gender issues thoroughly and with great clarity, but she also locates other anxieties in the work of these writers.’ — Alexander Dickow, French Studies 72.2, April 2018, 305–306 (full text online)
  • ‘Il genere letterario dell’art novel viene de nito da Katherine Shingler come un genere in cui la nzione è strettamente connessa all’arte, nel senso che il focus della narrazione è rivolto a problematiche legate alle arti visive e i personaggi, perlopiù nel ruolo di protagonisti, sono degli artisti.’ — Michela Gardini, Studi francesi 185, 2018, 356-57
  • ‘A well-documented volume offering in-depth analyses of a well-chosen corpus, which comprises the expected classics as well as less familiar novels. The book will be useful and illuminating for readers of art novels and for literature and art students and scholars alike.’ — Emilie Sitzia, Modern Language Review 113.4, October 2018, 879-80 (full text online)

Broken Glass, Broken World: Glass in French Culture in the Aftermath of 1870
Hannah Scott
Research Monographs in French Studies 46•19 December 2016

  • ‘Perhaps due to glass’s ubiquity in the urban landscape, Parisians did not fully realize its fragile underpinning of Paris until Prussian bombing quite literally shattered glass’s transparency as urban phenomenon. It was through glass’s destruction that it became a privileged object manifesting the devastation of the année terrible for Parisians. Scott’s ingenuity lies in making glass visible, but especially in proposing broken glass as another ruin of Paris that both fascinated and disturbed contemporaries.’ — Colin Foss, H-France 18, March 2018, no. 53
  • ‘Scott’s incredible historical precision within a compact monograph has tremendous benefits to the field and raises even larger questions about the relationship between the Third Republic’s emphasis on glass and the social roles played by glass today, especially in the ecological arena. One wonders how the windowpanes, glass aquariums, and wine glasses of the post-industrial era gave way to the plastic wrapping and electronic screens that now serve as barriers between ourselves, the rest of humanity, and the planet as a whole.’ — Claire Nettleton, Nineteenth-Century French Studies 46.3-4, 2018
  • ‘This book is an outstanding contribution to an increasingly important field of study: the activating relationship between material culture and literary texts. Substantial and innovative chapters are devoted to Zola, Maupassant, and Huysmans, prefaced by a richly informative account of the proliferation of glass objects and structures, from the monumental to the miniscule, in nineteenth-century France.’ — Robert Lethbridge, French Studies 72.3, July 2018, 456-57
  • ‘This engaging and perceptive monograph is a significant contribution to the growing body of scholarship that resituates nineteenth-century literature within its material environment... A remarkably original work, one which is grounded in material research but which manages, nonetheless, to be rightly a work of primarily literary criticism.’ — Natasha Ryan, Modern Language Review 113.3, July 2018, 661-62 (full text online)

Southern Regional French: A Linguistic Analysis of Language and Dialect Contact
Damien Mooney
Research Monographs in French Studies 47•19 December 2016

  • ‘Encapsulates both the challenges and the promise of linguistics for history... the kinds of suggestive connections between linguistic form, social identity, and cultural context traced in chapter six hint at the considerable possibilities for integrating a substantive study of language into cultural history. It is to be hoped that more historians will take up this challenge.’ — Paul Cohen, H-France 18, February 2018, no. 5
  • ‘Un travail de grande qualité et sera une référence incontournable pour tous les dialectologues, phonologues et sociolinguistes qui s’intéressent à la variation phonologique en français.’ — Julien Eychenne, French Studies 72.3, July 2018, 484-85

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

Balzac's Love Letters: Correspondence and the Literary Imagination
Ewa Szypula
Research Monographs in French Studies 52•19 December 2016

  • ‘Balzac the inveterate re-reader forces his own readers into their own, creative, re-readings of his texts. How fortunate, then, that so many of Balzac’s own letters, not least those to Mme Hanska, have been preserved for our own reading and re-reading, and are thus able to give rise to this subtle, sophisticated, original — and eminently readable — new study.’ — Owen Heathcote, H-France 17, November 2017
  • ‘On en saluera en n l’originalité, la nesse d’analyse, et l’attention subtile prêtée à l’écriture de Balzac, à ses tactiques comme à son tact, à sa volonté de maîtrise comme à sa délicatesse.’ — Thomas Conrad, Studi francesi 185, 2018, 335-36
  • ‘Szypula treats the letters as texts in their own right, arguing persuasively that they can be analysed in much the same way as we might read and interpret Balzac’s fiction... As Szypula argues compellingly, the themes of writing and rereading assume special importance in the 1844 novel Modeste Mignon, in which Balzac can be seen to reflect on the limitations of rereading, particularly when a letter-writer is insincere. The study concludes with an Afterword that examines Mme Han ska’s attempts at revising Balzac’s letters following his death, a process that shows — as Szypula does so refreshingly in this volume — that this correspondence has never truly closed, but instead remains intriguingly open to rereading and re-interpretation.’ — Andrew Watts, French Studies 72.4, October 2018, 610-11

Slavonic and East European Review 94.1•1 January 2016

Slavonic and East European Review 94.2•1 April 2016

Slavonic and East European Review 94.3•1 July 2016

Slavonic and East European Review 94.4•12 October 2016

Rethinking Juan Rulfo’s Creative World: Prose, Photography, Film
Edited by Dylan Brennan and Nuala Finnegan
Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures 14•1 September 2016

José Saramago: History, Utopia, and the Necessity of Error
Mark Sabine
Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures 23•19 December 2016

  • ‘Beyond providing a rigorous, detailed and elegant analysis of those novels, Sabine offers a model for reading Saramago that will serve as reference point for any future work.’ — Paulo de Medeiros, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 95, 2018, 579-80
  • ‘This volume is of tremendous use to both seasoned scholars of Saramago and those who, like many in the English-speaking world, are familiar only with his later novels.’ — unsigned notice, Forum for Modern Language Studies 54.3, July 2018, 377
  • ‘Likely to be welcomed by specialists and non-specialists looking for a critical grounding in the author’s initial and decisive novels of the 1980s.’ — Ana Paula Ferreira, Journal of Lusophone Studies 4.2, 2019, 299-301 (full text online)
  • ‘From a broad perspective which accepts the idea of an inherent political project and its utopian message, this book excellently resumes the possible justifications, together with scholarly well founded contextualizations, thus offering an outstandingly solid basis from which to depart towards further fruitful debates.’ — Burghard Baltrusch, Portuguese Studies 36.1, July 2020, 115-19 (full text online)

Translating Myth
Edited by Ben Pestell, Pietra Palazzolo and Leon Burnett
Studies In Comparative Literature 37•1 September 2016

The Rhetoric of Exile: Duress and the Imagining of Force
Vladimir Zorić
Studies In Comparative Literature 39•19 December 2016

  • ‘Since the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise and down to the exodus of Jews from Germany triggered by Kristallnacht, followed most recently by the flight of millions from the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, exile has constituted a basic experience of human history and myth, summoning forth a library of commentary... Zorić has taken a rich and fascinating topic and exposed it fruitfully to various theoretical analyses.’ — Theodore Ziolkowski, Modern Language Review 113.2, April 2018, 363-64 (full text online)
  • ‘The book has something of the virtues of classical philology, such as erudition and close reading of the overall European literary tradition in original languages. It is equally commendable for widening its scope to the literary depictions of exilic experience in often overlooked East and Central European literatures, thus escaping the rather common fault of essentially reducing European intellectual and imaginative experiences to its Western parts.’ — Aleksandar Pavlović, European History Quarterly 48.2, 402-03

Children and Yiddish Literature: From Early Modernity to Post-Modernity
Edited by Gennady Estraikh, Kerstin Hoge and Mikhail Krutikov
Studies In Yiddish 14•1 September 2016

Memory Across Borders: Nabokov, Perec, Chamoiseau
Sara-Louise Cooper
Transcript 6•19 December 2016

  • ‘Sara-Louise Cooper’s stimulating monograph convincingly approaches three writers whose lives and careers may at first seem disparate, and brings them together under the banner of border crossings, inter-generational memory, and its transmission.’ — unsigned notice, Forum for Modern Language Studies 54.2, April 2018, 265
  • ‘Cooper’s approach encompasses a range of critical discussions, yet her incisive close reading of each author remains central. The book will be useful to students and scholars of any of the three authors, and to those interested in the concept of mobility more widely. Cooper’s future contributions are much anticipated.’ — Fabienne Cheung, French Studies 72.3, July 2018, 475-76
  • ‘A meticulous and finely drawn study, highlighting the links in the three works between histories of self and wider histories, and the presence of multiple language and cultural affiliations in a single text... At the end of the work, the author makes a convincing plea not only for the richness to be found in comparative studies, but also for the recognition by French Studies of the constitutive force of movement and of different languages and places within and outside literature written in French.’ — Siobhan Brownlie, Modern Language Review 113.4, October 2018, 855-56 (full text online)
  • ‘This monograph, the sixth to appear in Legenda’s exciting new “Transcript” series, is an ambitious and searching work, which fully realises the imprint’s commitment to intercultural and trans-linguistic analysis... This is a beautifully written and elegantly produced monograph, in which stimulating and sensitive close readings are enriched by a deftly handled theoretical apparatus. It is also an important book that opens out onto discussion of much broader themes of urgent contemporary significance: national identity, migration, universalism, francophonie... A significant intervention for those working in memory studies, autobiography, comparative literature and transnational French Studies.’ — Maeve McCusker, H-France 18.201, October 2018

George Chapman: Homer's Odyssey
Edited by Gordon Kendal
Tudor and Stuart Translations 21•16 September 2016

  • ‘Kendal states that Chapman sought “to bring Homer’s translucence within the reader’s grasp” (29) and this edition (recently joined by an edition of Chapman’s Iliad, ed. Robert Miola) does something similar for Chapman’s work, endowing a multifaceted, challenging, and important early modern poem with a new level of accessibility.’ — Katherine Heavey, Renaissance Quarterly 71.1, 2018, 224-25
  • ‘George Chapman’s Homer’s Odyssey, edited by Gordon Kendal, performs an inestimable service by giving students and scholars an easily readable text of Chapman’s landmark 1616 translation of the Odyssey, with modernized spelling and punctuation and a helpful marginal glossary as well as a very fine introductory essay that places Chapman’s achievement in its literary and cultural context.’ — Lowell Gallagher, Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 58.1, Winter 2018, 219-77
  • ‘The MHRA edition vastly improves our ability to appreciate Chapman’s Homer as English poetry. The new edition presents a far more accessible text of Chapman’s Homer than any previous edition... The new MHRA editions undoubtedly surpass previous editions for classroom use. They make it practical, perhaps for the first time, to incorporate Chapman into courses on Jacobean poetry, on classical reception and the history of translation, on the materiality of the early modern book.’ — Sarah Van der Laan, Spenser Review 48.2.15, Spring-Summer 2018
  • ‘A clear, inexpensive critical edition of Chapman's Odyssey is a welcome addition to the Modern Humanities Research Association's series, as it puts into print a work of significant influence on and reflective of early modern literature and culture... The text itself is extensively footnoted and well glossed, giving the novice reader of early modern English a solid guide to the more difficult elements of vocabulary and allusion without interfering unduly with a smooth reading of the poem.’ — Natalie Grinnell, Sixteenth Century Journal 49.3, 2018, 884-85
  • ‘We should certainly be grateful for Kendal’s careful, learned, and illuminating scholarship, which guides us through the twists and turns of the translated text to a fuller understanding and enjoyment of Chapman’s English Odyssey.’ — Marie-Alice Belle, Renaissance and Reformation 41.2, Spring 2018, 164-66
  • ‘For the significantly improved access to Chapman’s Homer and for the rich collection of pointers in the footnotes, both of these volumes are worthy additions to the MHRA series. Miola and Kendal also allow their affection for Chapman to energize their editions, which provides the reader with some extra motivation to tackle these challenging texts.’ — Sheldon Brammall, Translation and Literature 27, 2018, 223–31
  • ‘This recent addition to the MHRA’s ‘Tudor & Stuart Translations’ series is quite simply a joy to read... one of the great achievements of this volume is that it accomplishes the difficult task of both guiding the novice (perhaps student) reader through Chapman’s complex undertaking and offering researchers an excellent platform on which to conduct their own studies... Catering so broadly to the needs of a diverse readership, the volume is much to be commended.’ — Andrew Hiscock, Modern Language Review 113.4, October 2018, 855-56 (full text online)

An Apology or Answer in Defence of The Church Of England: Lady Anne Bacon's Translation of Bishop John Jewel's Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae
Edited by Patricia Demers
Tudor and Stuart Translations 22•1 January 2016

  • ‘Lady Anne Bacon’s 'An Apology or Answer in Defence of the Church of England', edited by Patricia Demers for the Modern Humanities Research Association (MHRA) Tudor and Stuart Translations series, has a comprehensive and wonderfully clear introduction describing Bacon’s provocative and blunt style, her commitment to humanist rather than technical translation principles, and her motives for taking on a translation of John Jewel’s flash point 'Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae' in the first place.’ — Katherine Eggert, English Literature 57, 2017, 208
  • ‘Patricia Demers’s new edition is an important addition to the MHRA series Tudor and Stuart Translations. In line with the ambitions of the series, the edition makes Anne’s translation more accessible to modern readers, both through its substantial introduction and through the comprehensive footnotes on the text itself... This edition will be welcomed not only by scholars of early modern female translation, but also by those interested in the place held by the Apology in Elizabethan religious debate.’ — Gemma Allen, Renaissance Quarterly 70.1, Spring 2017, 361-62
  • ‘This is an excellent volume and should become the new standard edition of the English translation of the Apologia. The work is available in an affordable paperback edition, making it ideal for classroom use.’ — Greg Peters, Sixteenth Century Journal 48.1, 2017, 242-43
  • ‘Patricia Demers’s beautifully- and painstakingly-edited volume makes an excellent addition to the series... Demers has produced a very fine and full edition of the Bacon/Jewel Apology or Answer in Defence of the Church of England that should be invaluable to scholars and graduate students working in early modern women’s writing, Elizabethan history, and the history and theology of the English Reformation.’ — Patricia Brace, Renaissance and Reformation 40.2, Spring 2017, 169-171
  • ‘This edition is an invaluable resource for both students and scholars for many reasons, such as its structure and features, the excellent background information in the introduction, and the clarity of Demers’s writing... This volume will prove very useful to scholars of the Elizabethan Church, and its glossary and footnotes also make it accessible for students. Considering the centrality of its argument to early Elizabethan religious debate, this new edition is an invaluable addition to modern translations of early modern primary sources.’ — Angela Ranson, Spenser Review 48.2.11, Spring-Summer 2018