Modern Portuguese Poetry
Edited by Paulo de Medeiros and Rosa Maria Martelo
Portuguese Studies 36.2•4 November 2020
Shaping and Reshaping the Caribbean: The Work of Aimé Césaire and René Depestre
Martin Munro
MHRA Texts and Dissertations 52•1 January 2000
Wanderers Across Language: Exile in Irish and Polish Literature of the Twentieth Century
Kinga Olszewska
Studies In Comparative Literature 12•5 July 2007
- ‘This book is perhaps most interesting in the account given of key Polish journals such as Kultura, and the contexts in which specific debates took place; and in the translations of Polish texts that underpin the argument.’ — Fiona Becket, Modern Language Review 104.2, April 2009, 540-41 (full text online)
Singing Poets: Literature and Popular Music in France and Greece
Dimitris Papanikolaou
Studies In Comparative Literature 11•23 February 2007
- ‘A well-informed and satisfying study.’ — Peter Hawkins, Modern Language Review 103.3, July 2008, 816-16 (full text online)
- ‘This engaging and stimulating study... is a fascinating examination of the construction and reception of "high-popular" musical genres and specific debates surrounding the question of what "good" and "authentic" national music should be.’ — Hazel Marsh, Popular Music 27.2, 2008, 318-20
- ‘Makes a significant contribution to the study of Modern Greek culture, and also forwards the thinking behind what makes the conjunction between high and popular culture in any context...’ — Hector Kollias, French Studies 63.1, 2009, 114-15
Pasolini after Dante: The 'Divine Mimesis' and the Politics of Representation
Emanuela Patti
Italian Perspectives 35•1 September 2016
British Poetry since 1945
Edited by C. J. Rawson
Yearbook of English Studies 17•1 January 1987
Likenesses: Translation, Illustration, Interpretation
Matthew Reynolds
Studies In Comparative Literature 30•25 September 2013
- ‘The collection reveals an impressive breadth of scholarship, travelling between disciplines and across centuries from George Stubbs’s equestrian paintings, through the more familiar Reynoldian territory of Robert Browning, to the conspicuously contemporary, ‘Dante on the Tube’. This diversity effectively demonstrates ‘continuities’ in literature, impressing upon the reader the contemporary relevance of earlier works through juxtaposition.’ — Rebecca Butler, Modern Language Review 110.3, July 2015, 793-94 (full text online)
Cultural Reception, Translation and Transformation from Medieval to Modern Italy: Essays in Honour of Martin McLaughlin
Edited by Guido Bonsaver, Brian Richardson, and Giuseppe Stellardi
Legenda (General Series) •17 May 2017
- ‘A remarkable unified collection... [the essays] may be read in any order, so rich and abundant are the resonances among them.’ — Carmine G. Di Biase, Times Literary Supplement 8 May 2018
- ‘Zygmunt G. Barański presents a deeply contextualized understanding of the Orpheus myth in Petrarch’s Canzoniere, taking into account Virgilian and Ovidian antecedents, and the traces of their elaboration in works including the Bucolicum carmen and Familiares. At the heart of his essay, Barański boldly, but not unpersuasively, asserts Petrarch’s lyric collection of fragments to be “the great overlooked Orphic text of the Western tradition”. Brian Richardson’s essay is also among the most ambitious, tackling a massive quantity of Renaissance Italian poetic production—extempore Latin and vernacular lyric compositions—and he does so with aplomb, providing perhaps the first categorization with a qualitative/theoretical valuation of this important but almost entirely overlooked subgenre of poetry... Meriting special distinction, Peter Hainsworth’s contribution rescues John Dickson Batten’s illustrations to Dante’s Inferno (1897–1900) from their relative oblivion.’ — Sherry Roush, Renaissance Quarterly 71.9, October 2018, 1193-95
- ‘The scope, historical locus and chronological ambition of the present volume are exceptionally wide and rich... The quality of the contributions is invariably high and all are case-studies relevant to the book’s central preoccupation with cultural contact and interchange... an admirable collection, full of stimulus and surprises, handsomely produced by Legenda.’ — unsigned notice, Forum for Modern Language Studies 54.2, July 2019, 265-66 (full text online)
- ‘This volume brings to mind one of Calvino’s own definitions, in his Why Read The Classics?: ‘The classics are those books which come to us bearing the aura of previous interpretations, and trailing behind them the traces they have left in the culture or cultures (or just in the language and customs) through which they have passed’ (McLaughlin’s translation). The volume invites readers into the palimpsest that is Italian culture, which is to say, among other things, its imitations, its intertextuality and transmediality, and its translations.’ — Antonella Braida, Translation and Literature 29, 2020, 291-96 (full text online)
- ‘The volume reads as a user guide to the most updated views on literary theory and cultural studies, demonstrating how ‘open’ a field Italian studies has become in recent years. Texts—in a semiological sense, hence comprising all meaningful artefacts of culture—are scrutinized through a wide range of approaches, including linguistic, philological, thematic, intertextual, historical, sociological, comparative. and hermeneutical.’ — Oscar Schiavone, Modern Language Review 115.3, July 2020, 737-41 (full text online)
Visual and Plastic Poetics: From Brazilian Concretism to the Chilean Neo-Avant-Garde
Rachel Elizabeth Robinson
Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures 53•7 March 2022
- ‘A variegated assortment of attentive readings of individual poems that further enrich the reader’s appreciation of the three poets. Robinson’s book is well-written, and a wonderful addition to the library of any academic interested in contemporary poetry, for Latin-American literary critics, for enthusiasts of the Avant-Garde, but also for anyone who would like to learn about three magnificent Chilean artist-poets that toiled under adverse political conditions to create beauty.’ — Eduardo Ledesma, Bulletin of Spanish Studies 100.4, 2023, 611-13 (full text online)
Essay as Enabler in Yves Bonnefoy: Creating the Good Reader
Layla Roesler
Research Monographs in French Studies 67•10 December 2022
Contemporary British and Irish Poetry
Edited by Samuel Rogers
Yearbook of English Studies 51•16 November 2021
Contemporary French Poetry: Towards a Minor Poetics
Daisy Sainsbury
Research Monographs in French Studies 65•26 July 2021
- ‘Sainsbury has opened up a hospitable space for further reflection and critical engagement. This is a sure-handed, accessible and very knowledgeable study of what is challenging, and critically important, work.’ — Michael G. Kelly, Modern Language Review 119.2, 2024, 273-74 (full text online)
Translating the Perception of Text: Literary Translation and Phenomenology
Clive Scott
Legenda (General Series) •10 October 2012
- ‘In echoing Walter Benjamin’s disapproval of the view that a translation is intended for ‘readers who do not understand the original’, Clive Scott convincingly argues in favour of translation as a literary art that helps promote the language of the source text rather than seeks to provide substitutes for it.’ — Ramona Fotiade, French Studies 68.1, January 2014, 143-44
- ‘The literary translation urged on us in this seismic manifesto is neither the creation of an object nor the reaching of a target: ‘Translation’s area of operation is not two langues, but language itself, and translation’s business is not merely to provide a version of a text, but to make the provision of that version a fruitful con- tribution to the development of the expressive potentialities of the language medium’.’ — unsigned notice, Forum for Modern Language Studies 50.1, January 2014, 130-31
- ‘The real achievement of this volume, I think, is that it pushes for an overhaul of current understanding of the task of the (literary) translator. Even readers and translators who reject some of his individual claims and particular ideas will find that the thrust of the work as a whole leaves a lasting impression. If all this does is serve to remind the translator not to translate as would a machine (word for word, from one language to another, searching for sameness), this is still a valuable contribution.’ — Mairi McLaughlin, Comparative Literature Studies 52.3, 2015, 653-56
Perpetual Motion: Studies in French Poetry from Surrealism to the Postmodern
Michael Sheringham
Selected Essays 2•25 May 2017
- ‘Sheringham s’y révèle un maître de l’art du compte rendu... Ce livre si riche en intuitions, détours, élucidations et remarquables traductions, se lira aussi comme l’art poétique d’un grand critique.’ — Jean Khalfa, French Studies 73.1, 145 (full text online)
- ‘Here is a reader finely attuned to the myriad ways in which poetry seeks out new encounters with reality through endless linguistic experimentation and play... it is his ability to unlock the detail of what poetry accordingly helps concretize and crystallize, mentally, spiritually and emotionally, that will stimulate and delight those guided from essay to essay on an adventure ever in the making.’ — Michael Brophy, Irish Journal of French Studies 18, 2018, 229-30
- ‘Poignant and richly rewarding... [Sheringham] offers an authoritative view of current academic study of a vast number of authors, major and minor, writing on almost the entire Surrealist and post-Surrealist constellation.’ — unsigned notice, Forum for Modern Language Studies 55.3, July 2019, 356-57
- ‘Questa scelta, in parte postuma, di scritti conferma in definitiva, per la varietà e ricchezza degli argomenti trattati e per l’acuità dello sguardo del suo A., la qualità di una ricerca che ha sempre rifuggito troppo facili schematismi per affrontare dimensioni assai diverse del poetico come quella oracolare, mistica o linguisticamente trasgressiva con eguale curiosità intellettuale e finezza d’analisi.’ — Fabio Scotto, Studi francesi 188, 2020, 396
Queer Genealogies in Transnational Barcelona: Maria-Mercè Marçal, Cristina Peri Rossi, and Flavia Company
Natasha Tanna
Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures 37•30 December 2019
Constructing Feminine Poetics in the Works of a Late-20th-Century Catalan Woman Poet: Maria-Mercè Marçal
Noèlia Díaz Vicedo
MHRA Texts and Dissertations 90•1 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
The Dialectics of Faith in the Poetry of José Bergamín
Helen Wing
MHRA Texts and Dissertations 42•1 January 1995
Poetry and the Leningrad Religious-Philosophical Seminar 1974-1980: Music for a Deaf Age
Josephine von Zitzewitz
Legenda (General Series) •1 September 2016
- ‘Von Zitzewitz convincingly demonstrates that the religious-philosophical impulse in general, and a pull to Russian Orthodoxy in particular, was a widespread cultural phenomenon in the late Soviet period, cutting across the official/unofficial divide... von Zitzewitz’s precise situating of her subjects in their unofficial environment constitutes a crucial key to understanding the semantic and formal features of their work, and in turn, the lonely and frustrated spirit of their time.’ — Ainsley Morse, Modern Language Review 112.4, 2017, 1053-55 (full text online)
- ‘In her impeccably researched and documented book, Josephine von Zitzewitz combines an examination of the Religious-Philosophical Seminar with five case studies of poets from the Leningrad underground of the 1970s and 80s... An important contribution to the study of both late-Soviet poetry and religious literary culture.’ — Sarah Clovis Bishop, Slavic and East European Journal 61.4, Winter 2017, 913-14