Published December 2013

Selected Essays of Malcolm Bowie I: Dreams of Knowledge
Malcolm Bowie
Legenda (General Series) vol 1 of 2

  • ‘Only someone with Bowie’s exquisite powers of expression and formidably focused, well-stocked mind could home in so closely on the multilevelled play of thought in some of the most difficult modern writers, and especially on the places where their work crosses aesthetic boundaries... It is therefore a huge treat to be able to revel in the publication of his Selected Essays, impeccably edited by Alison Finch and beautifully produced by Legenda... Even in the space of a short review, Bowie’s writing offers both pleasure and intense mental stimulation. For readers old and new, there are marvels in store in these two magnificent volumes.’ — Michael Sheringham, French Studies 68.3, July 2014, 422-23
  • ‘These two volumes can only add to our sense of [Bowie's] importance... Criticism like this is clearly so much more than criticism: it is an engagement with the act of creation that is brought back to creation itself. These two volumes are full of brilliance and insight and deftly communicated and thus infectious pleasure.’ — Patrick McGuinness, Times Literary Supplement 5805, 4 July 2014, 21
  • ‘His readings are always marked by a resistance to easy answers that would attempt to reduce or deny the complexity of the text under analysis; the role of the critic is to illuminate that complexity, giving close attention to the way the text functions and how it guides the reader to a range of potential interpretive moves. While he is a highly trustworthy guide through the intricacies of the text, as he himself writes in an essay on Mallarmé, 'somehow the passage through imbricated levels of utterance towards some final state of achieved propositional clarity is never quite the point' (I: 152).’ — Joseph Acquisto, Nineteenth-Century French Studies 43.1-2, 2014
  • ‘How Verdi moves Shakespeare’s Othello around the globe, finding the mental ‘fingerprint’ in Winnicott, introducing Judith Butler, deciphering Stéphane Mallarmé, exploring brevity in Proust (yes), Liszt’s relationship with Wagner, ‘that most exhausting of sons-in-law’: these are just a few of the subjects considered with such zest by Malcolm Bowie, who was a critic of immense talent.’ — Edward Hughes, Times Higher Education Supplement 1 January 2015, 63
  • ‘Evidence abounds in these pieces of Bowie’s keen appetite for intrinsically difficult subject-matter. Indeed, his ability to sustain his critical nerve in the handling of complex material was to become a hallmark of his achievement... Yet alongside this intensity of engagement with serious subject-matter, we also see the poise and panache of a critic who was so evidently at home with textual composition.’ — Edward J. Hughes, Modern Language Review 111.1, January 2016, 228-29 (full text online)

Language and Social Structure in Urban France
Edited by Mari C. Jones and David Hornsby
Legenda (General Series)

  • ‘From a variationist’s perspective, this is an insightful volume, methodical in its approach to the subject matter, and careful to consider existing research from across the social sciences. Its overarching aims are very well addressed, and the proposals outlined by the contributors will undoubtedly form an important part of future research on Metropolitan French. The volume’s undoubted strength and significant contribution comes from the break in the ‘reciprocal ignorance pact’ (Fishman 1991) that characterises the relationship between sociology and sociolinguistics. As Pooley rightly suggests (p. 209), it is this break in tradition that must now spearhead new avenues of research.’ — Jonathan R. Kasstan, Journal of French Language Studies 26.2, July 2016, 209-11

Photobiography: Photographic Self-Writing in Proust, Guibert, Ernaux, Macé
Akane Kawakami
Legenda (General Series)

  • ‘An important addition to literature on the subject. Kawakami’s conclusion is that we are entering a new age of writing about ourselves photographically. Researchers exploring the self-perceptions that are made available in the lens-inflected self-narratives of this new age will surely gain from setting their findings into context by reading this extremely rewarding study.’ — Shirley Jordan, French Studies 68.4, October 2014, 580-81
  • ‘All in all, this study brings a new perspective to bear on the study of autobiography that is in keeping with the times both thematically and theoretically. The photobio- graphical text reveals dimensions of personal experience that engage both text and image, reality and fantasy, writer and reader.’ — unsigned notice, Forum for Modern Language Studies 50.4, October 2014, 508
  • ‘This volume provides a readable introduction to photobiography and faithful syntheses of the texts. With its wealth of bilingual quotation, its consistent clarity, and a particularly strong chapter on Ernaux, Kawakami has fashioned a volume that could also work extremely well as a course book.’ — Paul Edwards, Screen 79, Summer 2014, 65-66
  • ‘Among the strengths of Photobiography, I would point to her use of the first person in her own prose, her very complete use of relevant criticism, and her mastery of works of differing if overlapping genres.’ — Ralph Sarkonak, Modern Language Review 110.2, April 2015, 550-51 (full text online)
  • ‘Kawakami’s lively new study of a particular brand of contemporary photo-textual practice signals a photographic turn in narratives of the self... Kawakami compellingly considers how Guibert, Ernaux, and Macé use photography to complicate the already ambiguous generic status of their texts, which hover on the border between document and fiction.’ — Ari J. Blatt, French Review 89.1, 2015, 228

Published September 2013

The Present Word: Culture, Society and the Site of Literature
Edited by John Walker
Legenda (General Series)

Reading Literature in Portuguese: Commentaries in Honour of Tom Earle
Cláudia Pazos Alonso and Stephen Parkinson
Legenda (General Series)

After Reception Theory: Fedor Dostoevskii in Britain, 1869-1935
Lucia Aiello
Legenda (General Series)

  • ‘This new study complements a number of existing accounts of Dostoevsky reception in Britain and adds to our understanding of Anglo-Russian cul- tural exchange more generally. It also explores the current state of reception studies in the literary humanities (which it views rather pessimistically), creatively blurring the distinction between ques- tions of individual aesthetic reaction (‘reader response’) and patterns of transmission and cultural exchange.’ — unsigned notice, Forum for Modern Language Studies 51.1, January 2015, 87
  • ‘This book calls attention to the complexity of reception and literary criticism, analyzes temporal and geographic context, and stresses the importance and nuances of the cultural context in which a work and its criticism arise. Aiello's study re-evaluates a familiar theoretical framework, providing a new perspective for scholars in the field.’ — Megan Luttrell, Slavic and East European Journal 58.4, Winter 2014, 722-24
  • ‘Fedor Dostoevskii once wrote in a letter to his brother, ‘Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled.’ Lucia Aiello’s new monograph traces the broad scope of social, psychological, and, most frequently, biographical criticism in Britain that has sought to unravel the mysteries of his major works.’ — Patrick Jeffery, Modern Language Review 111.2, April 2016, 600-601 (full text online)

Published June 2013

Taboo: Corporeal Secrets in Nineteenth-Century France
Hannah Thompson
Legenda (General Series)

  • ‘One of the principal merits of the book is that it is a study of how the ‘unspeakable’ manages to find a voice and how taboo excesses can be represented in language. It provides a reflective and stimulating commentary on the ways in which what is not usually talked about signifies and matters.’ — Françoise Grauby, Modern Language Review 109.3, July 2014, 809-10 (full text online)
  • ‘With such an array of taboo subjects, it struck me that it would have been hard to know where to begin, but one of the things I like best about this book is its craftsmanship... I think scholars and students will find much to discuss in Taboo.’ — Holly Christine Woodson, H-France 14.101, June 2014
  • ‘Throughout, Thompson identifies a variety of critical perspectives that throw those taboos into sharper focus, from seminal reference points such as Freud, Sontag and Butler to the emerging field of Disability Studies, resulting in a thought-provoking exploration.’ — unsigned notice, Forum for Modern Language Studies 50.4, October 2014, 510
  • ‘This monograph is an incisive study of representations of the unspeakable taboo body... Thompson’s lucid work argues that analysis of the form and function of the taboo encourages readers to re-examine their own values and preconceived notions towards the body. This study is especially useful to scholars of nineteenth-century French literature, gender studies, and disability studies.’ — Karen Humphreys, French Studies 69.3, July 2015, 403-04
  • ‘This is a valuable contribution to the growing field of studies investigating the literary body.’ — Bernadette Lintz, French Review 89.1, 2015, 282
  • ‘This examination of some of the best-known prose in nineteenth-century French literature is especially masterful for the thoughtful – sometimes stunning – deployment of the readings and the overall structure of the study... In its sweeping consideration of the body in disarray, Thompson’s study places itself squarely within studies of the body while also relying upon the tenets of newer arenas of inquiry such as disability studies.’ — Tammy Berberi, Disability and Society 31.3, 2016, 431-33

Published May 2013

Method and Variation: Narrative in Early Modern French Thought
Edited by Emma Gilby and Paul White
Legenda (General Series)

  • ‘Overall, this is an engaging volume that usefully emphasizes the narrative methods and less scientific genres which underlie early modern French thought and its philosophical fictions.’ — unsigned notice, Forum for Modern Language Studies 50.2, April 2014, 230-31
  • ‘This timely and important volume addresses the role of narration in revealing early modern French belief patterns... In demonstrating the range of ways in which early modern authors reconfigure and renegotiate narrative’s relationship to thought, argument, and proof, the contributors to this volume together add critical understanding to the complex articulation of fable, history, and argument in the early modern period.’ — Allison Stedman, French Studies 68.4, October 2014, 542-43

Published March 2013

Form and Feeling in Modern Literature: Essays in Honour of Barbara Hardy
Edited by William Baker with Isobel Armstrong
Legenda (General Series)

  • ‘The editors are to be congratulated on putting together a volume which maintains a consistently high quality, while ranging widely over a multitude of topics.’ — Leonee Ormond, George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Studies 64-65, October 2013, 99-100
  • ‘An excellent tribute to the work of Professor Hardy; however, the critical essays and their approach to fiction in the nineteenth century also make this collection of interest to scholars in the field who may not be as familiar with the work of Hardy.’ — unsigned notice, Forum for Modern Language Studies 50.4, October 2014, 506

Shandean Humour in English and German Literature and Philosophy
Edited by Klaus Vieweg, James Vigus and Kathleen M. Wheeler
Legenda (General Series)

Transformative Change in Western Thought: A History of Metamorphosis from Homer to Hollywood
Edited by Ingo Gildenhard and Andrew Zissos
Legenda (General Series)

  • ‘This audacious volume is concerned with nothing less than the almost 3000-year metamorphosis of the concept of metamorphosis in the Western imaginary... A most compelling entry in the history of ideas.’ — Dan Curley, Bryn Mawr Classical Review online, 2014.09.41
  • ‘The volume is exciting, enjoyable as well as serious, and therefore not only suggestive for future research but also set to be useful in teaching. I would happily assign relevant portions of it in courses on classical traditions and receptions. Whether in the classroom or elsewhere, it deserves to reach a large audience.’ — Benjamin Eldon Stevens, American Journal of Philology 135.3, Fall 2014, 492-96

Traces of Trauma in W. G. Sebald and Christoph Ransmayr
Dora Osborne
Legenda (General Series)

  • ‘Brought countless things to light about The Emigrants and Austerlitz that I am extremely grateful for, and I know I’ll never read either of these books again without saying a silent “thank you” to Osborne for opening my eyes to a new way of looking at them.’ — Terry Pitts, Vertigo 8 June 2013
  • ‘The detailed analyses and dynamic argumentation in addition to the illuminating introduction of the concept of ‘post-postwar literature’ make this study a significant contribution to scholarship on both Ransmayr and Sebald and to critical considerations of twentieth-century post-Holocaust literature in German more broadly.’ — Lynn L. Wolff, Modern Language Review 111.1, January 2016, 294-96 (full text online)
  • ‘Osborne has done a great service in awakening Sebald scholars to a kindred spirit in Ransmayr with a long-overdue systematic comparison of “traces of trauma” in the works of both immensely important writers, one a storied member of the literary establishment, one who will remain, even posthumously, an outsider looking in.’ — Mark R. McCulloh, Monatshefte 108.1, 2016, 150-52

Chicago of the Balkans: Budapest in Hungarian Literature 1900-1939
Gwen Jones
Legenda (General Series)

  • ‘Based on a historical contextualization of the social background of writers and the ideological debates of the time, a good knowledge of the secondary literature, a detailed discussion of the content and plots of relevant literary works and ample quotations in Hungarian (consistently translated in English) from a representative sample of novels and short stories, Jones’s book is a social history of Budapest literature.’ — Alexander Vari, Slavonic and East European Review 93.2, April 2015, 352-55 (full text online)

Published February 2013

French Divorce Fiction from the Revolution to the First World War
Nicholas White
Legenda (General Series)

  • ‘Impeccably researched and well-written... Developing White's earlier survey of the family novel (1999), grounded in historical knowledge, guided by sociological readings, and underpinned by a massive amount of reading from the past two centuries, this ambitious study concludes with a meditation on contemporary images of relationships, in ways that hint at a welcome third volume of the triptych.’ — Rosemary Lloyd, Times Literary Supplement 27 September 2013
  • ‘Fortunately for nineteenth-century French readers, the advent of divorce did not signal an untimely end to the marriage of familial and plot structures... And just as fortunately for contemporary readers, Nicholas White has provided the first study of these distinctively modern tales, deftly weaving long-forgotten divorce novels, many of them quite popular in their time, into a complex and insightful broader sociocultural but also deeply literary and historical narrative.’ — Rachel Mesch, Romanic Review 2014, 104.1-2, 172-74
  • ‘A persuasive study of a society, and its literature, exploring the implications of new ideas of personal freedom.’ — unsigned notice, Forum for Modern Language Studies 50.2, April 2014, 232
  • ‘The originality of this important study is clear: it is the first book in English or French to focus on the divorce fiction that surrounds the Loi Naquet. The monograph’s ambitious breadth is reflected in the range of authors discussed: in addition to references to canonical figures such as Maupassant and Bourget, renewed consideration is afforded to the ‘Great Unread’, or what is termed ‘“minor” women writers and unfashionable patriarchs’ (p. 145), including André Léo, Claire Vautier, Marie-Anne de Bovet, and Camille Pert, and Anatole France, Alphonse Daudet, and Edouard Rod.’ — Steven Wilson, French Studies 68.2, April 2014, 257
  • ‘Nicholas White has considered a series of important questions about nineteenth- and twentieth-century French novels... His work opens the way for interested readers in fields as various as history, literature, sociology and gender studies to ask and answer new questions of their own about these novels now.’ — Jean Elisabeth Pedersen, French History 28.2, June 2014, 277-78
  • ‘An important contribution to the study of nineteenth-century French literature and the family. The authors covered are an exciting selection of, as White puts it, ‘unknown women and forgotten men’. He displays tremendous knowledge of the corpus and authors, but also of the eras and literary movements discussed. His inspired choice to conclude with American novelist Diane Johnson’s 1997 Le Divorce brings his story to the present, but also contributes to his broader argument about the literary value of texts beyond the canon.’ — Phoebe Maltz Bovy, Modern Language Review 109.4, October 2014, 1086-87 (full text online)
  • ‘Témoignant d’une profonde érudition, apportant une grande attention aux contextes idéologiques et biographiques, cet essai sans équivalent, aux analyses perspicaces, aux enjeux précis, à l’écriture claire et non départie d’humour, offre une lecture aussi enrichissante qu’agréable.’ — Claudie Bernard, French Review 89.1, 2015, 288

Dissonance in the Republic of Letters: The Querelle des Gluckistes et des Piccinnistes
Mark Darlow
Legenda (General Series)

  • ‘Darlow quotes generously from a wide selection of the many texts that contributed to the quarrel, from the writings of well-known authors to anonymous pamphlets. His profound and thoughtful study should be of interest not only to music specialists, but to anyone with an interest in eighteenth-century aesthetics and ideas.’ — Derek Connon, Modern Language Review 109.2, April 2014, 513-14 (full text online)
  • ‘Mark Darlow’s excellent book is less concerned with questions about the extent to which Piccinni and other Italians imitated Gluck than with the wider context of the Querelle. This includes the politics of the Opéra itself, as well as the literary, social and political dimensions of the affair. He has gone beyond the published collections of polemic to sources hitherto ignored.’ — unsigned notice, Forum for Modern Language Studies 50.4, October 2014, 504
  • ‘This is a timely and important book... Darlow has digested an impressive range of source material: archival records, periodicals, pamphlets, letters, memoires, livrets, scores - and those are merely the eighteenth-century sources. His discussions are also constantly in- formed by copious reference to, and generous discussion of, the work of his scholarly peers.’ — Nathan John Martin, Music & Letters 282-85

Renaissance Keywords
Edited by Ita Mac Carthy
Legenda (General Series)

  • ‘A thoughtful, well-written and engaging volume whose accessible presentation of wide-ranging but precise detail should appeal to the Renaissance specialist and the general reader alike.’ — unsigned notice, Forum for Modern Language Studies 50.2, April 2014, 231
  • ‘These chapters share an approach, drawing insights from close attention to both dictionary definitions and uses of terms in different contexts, and thereby provide excellent examples of ‘word histories’.’ — Hugh Roberts, French Studies 68.2, April 2014, 241-42
  • ‘By bringing together intellectual history and philology in ways that are both rigorous and ambitious, the essays in Renaissance Keywords constitute a great contribution to the field of Renaissance and early modern studies. The book, however, transcends the limits of its field and offers anyone interested in the history of ideas important insights of the ways in which lan- guage in its ever-evolving nature determines ideas and worldviews.’ — Pablo Maurette, Modern Philology 112.3, February 2015, E231-33

Seamus Heaney and East European Poetry in Translation: Poetics of Exile
Carmen Bugan
Legenda (General Series)

  • ‘This book is a marvellous accumulation of insights and openings into Heaney’s work in the context of his affinities with the four East European poets with whom he shares an acute awareness that history is ‘the mother of culture’, as Brodsky put it in a comment on Herbert. In the minutiae of her study she has provided Heaney students with a valuable resource that will be challenging to surpass.’ — Gerry Smyth, Modern Poetry in Translation 2013 no. 3, October 2013, 106-11
  • ‘Though many critics have mentioned their influence, Carmen Bugan’s monograph is the first to offer a detailed, in-depth study of Heaney’s relationship with East European poets... This is a very good book, a massively and precisely documented scholarly study, written by someone who has a consummate knowledge of her subject.’ — Adolphe Haberer, The European English Messenger 22.2, 2013, 82-85
  • ‘A well-documented and insightful study of one of the few aspects of Seamus Heaney’s work that still needs attention. As Irish studies are becoming increasingly comparative and intercultural, this is a very welcome addition to the academic discussion on Seamus Heaney’s work and on Irish literature in general.’ — Florence Impens, Irish Studies Review 2014
  • ‘Bugan's book demonstrates just how productive cultural exchange between poets East and West can be. She shows how Heaney borrows the concept of exile - a Cold War topos par excellence - and successfully recasts it in the Irish context, imbuing his work with an ethical complexity and self-awareness that continues to resonate with readers from all corners of the globe.’ — Connor Doak, Slavic and East European Journal 58.2, Summer 2014, 166-67
  • ‘A densely researched and lucid study of a poetic congeniality that Heaney experienced with four East European poets... Published in the year that saw the death of this most influential of contemporary poets, it represents a fitting tribute to Heaney’s relational poetics.’ — Rui Carvalho Homem, Translation and Literature 23.3, 2014, 412-16

Published December 2012

Childhood as Memory, Myth and Metaphor: Proust, Beckett, and Bourgeois
Catherine Crimp
Legenda (General Series)

  • ‘Challenging and original, this is a study that will appeal not just to specialists of these three creative figures but also to everyone interested in narrative, metaphors, and the ways in which the image of the child simultaneously enables and challenges creativity.’ — Rosemary Lloyd, French Studies 67.4, October 2013, 584-85
  • ‘The study is informed by a wide array of philosophical and theoretical points of reference and relies especially on Maurice Blanchot’s writing to make a convincing case for the importance of childhood in the oeuvres of Proust, Beckett and Bourgeois.’ — unsigned notice, Forum for Modern Language Studies 50.4, October 2014, 504

Dream Cities: Utopia and Prose by Poets in Nineteenth-Century France
Greg Kerr
Legenda (General Series)

  • ‘This is a valuable and ambitious study which operates deftly on the edge of cultural and intellectual history and successfully inflects our understanding of the emergence, and the evolution, of a literary form.’ — Claire White, Journal of European Studies 43, 2013, 378-79
  • ‘An ambitious inquiry into key structural and thematic aspects of poetic prose in nineteenth-century France, Greg Kerr’s Dream Cities combines a diverse array of primary sources and theoretical frameworks... Of particular interest in this book is Kerr’s attention to textual innovations pursued by several Saint-Simonian writers, including Barthélémy-Prosper Enfantin, Michel Chevalier, Charles Duveyrier, and Emile Barrault.’ — Suzanne F. Braswell, H-France 13, November 2013, 175
  • ‘In this study Greg Kerr intriguingly argues that the contemporaneous development of the prose poem is closely associated with utopian dreaming, as if Baudelaire’s dream of a prose poétique, sufficiently supple and abrupt to adapt itself to the ‘mouvements lyriques de l’âme, aux ondulations de la rêverie, aux soubresauts de la conscience’ ... could alone do justice to these new social and physical structures.’ — Rosemary Lloyd, French Studies 68.1, January 2014, 118
  • ‘This work is a fascinating study of the ways in which the modern metropolis altered not only the content, but also the formal innovations of several nineteenth-century French writers... An innovative and valuable contribution to both urban and literary studies.’ — unsigned notice, Forum for Modern Language Studies 50.1, January 2014, 128
  • ‘A significant contribution to our understanding of the ways that utopian and journalistic writing can be juxtaposed alongside the prose poem and other visual and architectural projections of urban futurity. Kerr convincingly shows how this set of disparate phenomena collectively reflects the dynamic, uncertain, and ultimately unfulfilled desires of a society en quête de forme.’ — Daniel Sipe, Nineteenth-Century French Studies 43.1-2, 2014
  • ‘Investigations of the ‘poème en prose’ as a hybrid form are multiple, and Kerr’s arguments add to them. His aims, however, are distinctive. Rather than seek to explain such hybridity by tracing the form’s identity or development within a specific historical tradition, he presents a more fluid and open kind of contextualization, in which new awareness of unfamiliar utopian rhetoric contributes to our understanding of the urban prose poem. Notions of hybridity are thereby extended and enriched.’ — Richard Hobbs, Modern Language Review 110.3, July 2015, 870-71 (full text online)

Symbol and Intuition: Comparative Studies in Kantian and Romantic-Period Aesthetics
Edited by Helmut Hühn and James Vigus
Legenda (General Series)

  • ‘Skilfully planned and structured, the volume offers original research on less familiar material while it lucidly covers most of the essential formulations of the symbol from the late eighteenth century onwards, thus speaking to readers of different backgrounds... It is Hühn and Vigus’s broad conception of the subject that ensures the collection’s originality and secures its unique place among the increasing studies of the symbol.’ — Stephanie Dumke, Angermion 7, 2014, 191-93
  • ‘This rich volume successfully inducts its readers into key aesthetic-philosophical debates around 1800, while at the same time breaking new ground by extending our understanding of the variations and functions of ‘symbol’ and ‘intuition’ within the works of individual writers and thinkers. It also makes meaningful comparisons and connections between texts that have not been discussed together before. The editors have drawn together a wide range of international scholars from the fields of German, English, and philosophy into a timely discussion.’ — James Hodkinson, Modern Language Review 110.3, July 2015, 786-88 (full text online)

Published October 2012

Translating the Perception of Text: Literary Translation and Phenomenology
Clive Scott
Legenda (General Series)

  • ‘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

Narrative Responses to the Trauma of the French Revolution
Katherine Astbury
Legenda (General Series)

  • ‘Katherine Astbury’s welcome monograph includes within its purview a range of now forgotten texts and successfully questions the established view that the Revolution had little impact on novels written in the years following 1789.’ — Michael Tilby, French Studies 67.4, October 2013, 566
  • ‘Astbury offers an original theoretical approach to the fiction of the 1790s and sheds new light on many of these forgotten texts. Her study will be welcomed by eighteenth-century scholars.’ — Ruth P. Thomas, New Perspectives on the Eighteenth Century Spring 2014, 11.1, 86-88
  • ‘One of the great merits of the book is that Astbury has actually read, rather than glossed, these unloved novels. As a result, she can demonstrate how ostensibly escapist fiction was saturated with contemporary references... The book provides fresh and detailed exposition of key novels within the revolutionary corpus, and triumphantly succeeds in making a case for the political sub-currents bubbling away within some seemingly innocuous fiction.’ — Tom Stammers, French History March 2014, 28.1, 126-27
  • ‘Astbury’s account of 'The English Novel and the Literary Press in France during the Revolutionary Decade' is the center and triumph of her book. In this chapter, she makes a 'systematic examination of editors' and translators' choices' that reveal a dynamic, cross-Channel conversation about the convulsions in France and their consequences.’ — Gina Luria Walker, European Romantic Review 25.4, 2014, 522-27
  • ‘Astbury’s clear, elegant prose engages the reader and Astbury convincingly shows how the fiction of the Revolutionary decade, while perhaps not overtly political, nonetheless responded to Revolutionary events—whether through portrayals of moral regeneration in 1791 or through tales of exile in 1797.’ — Annie K. Smart, Nineteenth-Century French Studies 43.1-2, 2014
  • ‘Succeeds in changing the terms of a debate that had relegated a decade of literature to virtual oblivion. Astbury is absolutely right to insist on the historical and literary significance of the fiction of the 1790s. Given the historical impact of these years, it seems extraordinary that later generations of scholars have expressed such little interest in these works.’ — Lesley H. Walker, Modern Language Review 110.2, April 2015, 547-48 (full text online)
  • ‘Katherine Astbury’s Narrative Responses offers a fascinating counterpoint to the many studies that have focused on literary culture in pre-revolutionary France. Astbury asks important questions about novels produced during the Revolution: What kinds of texts did contemporaries want to read? How influenced were their authors by current events? And, finally, how political were those texts?’ — Mette Harder, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 28.3, Spring 2016, 593-94
  • ‘Le livre de Katherine Astbury mérite incontestablement d’être recommandé. Fondé sur une approche théorique et méthodologique clairement définie, il explore avec minutie un corpus de textes souvent méconnus (en laissant délibérément de côté les œuvres de Sade et Rétif) et a le mérite de ne pas proposer une lecture myope des œuvres de la période qui, pour n’être pas toutes ouvertement consacrées à l’écriture des événements, n’en livrent pas moins un regard sur l’Histoire et la Révolution.’ — Paul Kompanietz, Dix-huitième siècle 46, 2014, 724-25

Octavio Paz and T. S. Eliot: Modern Poetry and the Translation of Influence
Tom Boll
Legenda (General Series)

  • ‘What has been missing from Paz scholarship so far are comparative studies that take a larger international approach to a poet who prided himself on his intellectual cosmopolitanism... Tom Boll’s Octavio Paz and T. S. Eliot is a welcome contribution in this direction. It presents a careful and impressively researched study of young Paz’s reflections on Eliot’s poetry, which the former repeatedly acknowledged as one of the most important influences on his early work and on his vision of modernity.’ — Rubén Gallo, Modernism/modernity 21.2, April 2014, 564-65

Published June 2012

Women, Genre and Circumstance: Essays in Memory of Elizabeth Fallaize
Edited by Margaret Atack, Diana Holmes, Diana Knight and Judith Still
Legenda (General Series)

  • ‘Like the woman to whom it pays tribute, and whose haunting gaze looks out at us from its cover, this volume of essays combines intellectual rigour with humanity, serious purpose with humour, depth of insight with lightness of touch.’ — Julia Waters, Modern and Contemporary France 20.4 (November 2012), 505-06
  • ‘A powerful and moving reminder of the lineaments and achievements of [Elizabeth Fallaize's] scholarly work. Equally, as critical explorations of a variety of nineteenth- and twentieth-century narrative artefacts and practices, [these essays] are a pleasure to read, combining to create a collection that is an academic delight and would certainly have delighted the woman to whom it is dedicated.’ — Alex Hughes, French Studies 67.2 (April 2013), 294-95
  • ‘The chapters which form this scholarly homage... keep the dialogue open with a scholar, teacher, feminist and mentor who spent her life engaging with French literature. Yet, each contribution, particularly those of Michèle le Doeuff, Ursula Tidd and Diana Holmes, offers intellectual stimulation in its own right.’ — France Grenaudier-Klign, New Zealand Journal of French Studies 34.2, 2014, 130-32

Desire in Dante and the Middle Ages
Edited by Manuele Gragnolati, Tristan Kay, Elena Lombardi and Francesca Southerden
Legenda (General Series)

  • ‘A series of Dante symposia organized by Manuele Gragnolati and colleagues over the past few years have brought youthful vitality to an ancient field... There is much careful scholarship and thoughtful reading in this book, which should attract Dante and medieval studies scholars alike, particularly those interested in contemporary critical approaches to medieval texts.’ — Gary Cestaro, Renaissance Quarterly 66.1 (Spring 2013), 323-24
  • ‘As well as offering several original contributions on this fundamental aspect of Dante’s work, it seeks to situate the Florentine writer more effectively within the broader spectrum of medieval culture and to establish greater intellectual exchange between Dante scholars and those from other disciplines.’ — unsigned notice, Studi Medievali 53.2 (2012), 1029-30
  • ‘The essays not only present a rich view of contemporary thinking on medieval notions and expressions of desire but address some of the most compelling issues of modern Dante and medieval scholarship... desire in the medieval context emerges as an issue to be expressed through the unique capabilities of poetry, an experience to be physically, spiritually, and emotionally undergone, and, ultimately, a state to be manifested in the very act of writing.’ — Ruth Chester, Modern Language Review 109.1, January 2014, 221-22 (full text online)
  • ‘This is a well-conceived collection, with an excellent bibliography, that will be valuable both for Dante scholars and every medievalist or early modernist with an interest in topics related to desire: the body, perception, memory, mysticism, just to name a few. The volume achieves a rare balance of interdisciplinarity and cohesiveness, bringing together approaches to the text as diverse as queer theory and translation studies, but maintaining a common intent to map desire as a hermeneutic tool in Dante studies and beyond.’ — Eleonora Stoppino, Speculum 89.3, 2014, 773-74
  • ‘This is a very useful source for Dante scholars, because it offers original and innovative contributions on the many-sided aspects of desire. [...] It is also a very valuable study for any scholar interested in the topic on a comparative or interdisciplinary level and seeks to illustrate how the current discourse on desire can apply to Dante and the medieval world.’ — Niccolino Applauso, Italica 90.4, Winter 2013
  • ‘This interesting interdisciplinary collection contributes significantly to our growing understanding of desire in the Middle Ages.’ — Beatrice Priest, Medium Aevum 82.2, 2013
  • ‘Il punto di forza di questo volume risiede a mio avviso nell'impiego di originali modelli d'analisi dell'opera dell'Alighieri che, offrendo percorsi inediti e accostamenti seppur talora arditi, hanno il pregio di costituire un effervescente contributo al panorama degli studi danteschi. Proprio la materia d'analisi, il desiderio, che si pone come proteiforme agente di cambiamento, l'insieme di questi articoli non manchera' di stimolare nuovi indirizzi di ricerca.’ — Gabriella Addivinola, L'Alighieri 42, 2013