Published February 2013
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
Published March 2013
Shandean Humour in English and German Literature and Philosophy
Edited by Klaus Vieweg, James Vigus and Kathleen M. Wheeler
Legenda (General Series)
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
Published September 2013
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 April 2014
Richardson and the Philosophes
James Fowler
Legenda (General Series)
- ‘James Fowler aims to restore Richardson to his proper place in an Enlightenment that resisted stratification along na- tional lines, and one in which Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment ideals inter- sected productively to engender the ideological dynamism we associate with the second half of the eighteenth century... Fowler initiates an important conversation about Richardson’s influence on the Continent.’ — Hans Nazar, French Studies 69.2, April 2015, 245
- ‘The strength of Fowler’s study is found in his examination of a debate that perplexed Christians and deists alike (and with which atheists, too, had to engage): the role of Providence in conducting human affairs (or not) and the subsequent question of whether justice is to be achieved in this world or the next.’ — Karen Lacey-Holder, Modern Language Review 110.3, July 2015, 785-86 (full text online)
- ‘The book is the most sustained examination to date of why Richardson, ‘a ‘‘counter-Enlightenment’’ writer’ who ‘claimed to write religious novels in order to counter anti-Christian tendencies in Britain’, should find such a sincere, serious, and even emulative audience in a generation of French intellectuals who ‘almost by definition, saw revealed religion as a source of prejudice and superstition’.’ — James Smith, The Year's Work in English Studies 95.1, 2016, 655-56
Published March 2015
Louisa Waterford and John Ruskin: 'For you have not Falsely Praised'
Caroline Ings-Chambers
Legenda (General Series)
- ‘This book is a valuable revelation of a little-known figure. Lady Waterford is shown both to have been acutely sensitive to the cultural currents of her day and to have been a strong talent in her own right.’ — John Batchelor, Modern Language Review 111.4, October 2016, 1128-29 (full text online)
- ‘Ings‐Chambers builds a strong case for reintegrating this artist in the wider Pre‐Raphaelite canon. Her writing makes Waterford’s art come across as essential thanks to its charm, vision and social/gender relevance.’ — Nic Peeters, Pre-Raphaelite Society Journal XXIII, 2015, 63-66
Published June 2015
The Reinvention of Theatre in Sixteenth-Century Europe: Traditions, Texts and Performance
Edited by T. F. Earle and Catarina Fouto
Legenda (General Series)
- ‘Sem dúvida, uma perspectiva rica e bastante abrangente do fenómeno teatral na Europa do séc. XVI.’ — Manuel José De Sousa Barbosa, Euphrosyne 45, 2017, 658-60
Published July 2015
Algernon Swinburne and Walter Pater: Victorian Aestheticism, Doubt and Secularisation
Sara Lyons
Legenda (General Series)
- ‘As British aestheticism continues to enjoy a revival of interest, it becomes ever more urgent to reassess the metaphysical work that Pater and Swinburne have done for us in their search for a way beyond doubt. Algernon Swinburne and Walter Pater is a timely reminder of our intellectual inheritance from this moment of crisis in Western religion.’ — Orla Polten, Essays in Criticism 66.3, July 2016, 390-96
- ‘Sara Lyons’s admirable monograph will prove a cornerstone in Victorian studies and will soon become invaluable to students and scholars alike working on 19th-century literature and culture.’ — Charlotte Ribeyrol, Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens 83, Printemps 2016
- ‘Lyons’s rethinking of Swinburne’s and Pater’s relationship to religion is absolutely necessary in light of recent revisions of the secularization thesis. She productively complicates the oversimplified binary between belief and unbelief that still too often plagues our readings of Victorian literature, and provocatively asks us to rethink the reasons underlying the Aesthetic Movement’s embrace of an ‘art for art’s sake’ philosophy. Algernon Swinburne and Walter Pater should be read by scholars of aestheticism, nine- teenth-century religion, and Victorian literature more generally.’ — Dustin Friedman, Review of English Studies Advance Access 4 October 2016
- ‘A valuable addition to scholarship on Swinburne, Pater and aestheticism.’ — Beth Newman, Victorian Studies 60.1, Autumn 2017, 126-28
Published September 2016
The Poetry of Ernest Jones: Myth, Song, and the ‘Mighty Mind’
Simon Rennie
Legenda (General Series)
Published December 2016
John Ruskin's Continental Tour 1835: The Written Records and Drawings
Edited by Keith Hanley and Caroline S. Hull
Legenda (General Series)
- ‘At a time when scholars often find it difficult to find support for editions of archival and biographical materials relating to significant cultural figures, it is pleasing that this important volume has found its way into print through the endeavours of the editors and the MHRA, whose Legenda imprint makes high-quality editions of such materials available... The edition is perfectly conceived and delivers something approaching perfection. It should be of interest beyond Ruskin Studies, particularly to scholars of Romantic art, poetry, and landscape tourism, nineteenth-century travel, and Victorian science.’ — Mark Frost, Modern Language Review 113.4, October 2018, 863-64 (full text online)
- ‘The interest of the texts collected in this volume is on the whole remarkable. They represent a variety of literary genres ranging from the prose diary, the letter in verse, the dramatic sketch, the short story narrative, genres through which the same travel matter is shaped and reshaped, demonstrating the precociousness and versatility of Ruskin’s genius, his witty ironic vein, but also his brilliant mastery of prose... The recent interest in emotional labour involved in diary and travel writing will certainly profit from the fresh material unearthed by this critical edition.’ — Emma Sdegno, Review of English Studies 69, September 2018, 803-05 (full text online)
Published February 2017
Cognitive Confusions: Dreams, Delusions and Illusions in Early Modern Culture
Edited by Ita Mac Carthy, Kirsti Sellevold and Olivia Smith
Legenda (General Series)
- ‘Cognition-centered scholarship is here, and Dreams, Delusions and Illusions in Early Modern Culture is a welcome new contribution... I found myself wanting to dialogue with each of these writers... they enter into essential new investigations into the diversity of our cognitive experiences.’ — Donald Beecher, Renaissance Quarterly 71.1, 2018, 267-69
- ‘Sustained and intensive collaboration is evident in the collection, where every chapter displays a profound and fruitful engagement with cognitive psychology and philosophy that illuminates both early modern literary texts and contemporary science... These essays are thought-provoking, rigorous, and inventive themselves, and as exemplary models of properly collaborative research should interest early modernists, literary scholars, and other researchers into cognition.’ — unsigned notice, Forum for Modern Language Studies 54.3, July 2018, 372
Published April 2017
Gentry Life in Georgian Ireland: The Letters of Edmund Spencer (1711-1790)
Edited by Duncan Fraser and Andrew Hadfield
Legenda (General Series)
- ‘An extraordinary cache of letters... in this meticulously produced edition, which is an epistolary treat throughout.’ — Hazel Wilkinson, Times Literary Supplement 3 August 2018
- ‘As an edition of correspondence, this work by Duncan Fraser and Andrew Hadfield is a model of how an edition should be put together. In addition to discussing the use of Old and New Style calendars and describing the archive, they supply a chronological chart of the archive listing dates, folio numbers, addressees, and places of origin. The commentary on transcription skilfully analyses the trade-off between reading the original manuscript and a transcription which ‘pares away the obfuscating aspects of unfamiliar handwriting, outdated orthographical conventions, and the deleterious effects of time on paper’. The discussion of the idiosyncrasies of Spencer’s punctuation is instructive about eighteenth-century attitudes generally and especially noteworthy in its suggestion that dashes may be used as paragraph markers to save the cost of paper. Meanwhile, in their new printed form the letters are presented in a handsomely produced volume by Legenda, an imprint of the Modern Humanities Research Association. In t’ — Jean R. Brink, Modern Language Review 114.4, October 2019, 854-55 (full text online)
- ‘Spencer should have inherited family estates in Ireland that would make him comfortable for life. In fact, as a result of incompetence and skullduggery, he came into an inheritance that was so embarrassed, that for the rest of his life he had to struggle hard to hold onto social credibility. These letters, meticulously and brilliantly edited, tell part of the story of how Spencer tried to cope.’ — L G Mitchell, Notes & Queries 66.4, December 2019, 602-03 (full text online)
Published May 2017
Decadence and the Senses
Edited by Jane Desmarais and Alice Condé
Legenda (General Series)
- ‘I found Maxwell’s discussion of the tuberose, and more speci cally Walter Pater’s conscription of that flower to describe his own rarefied prose style, to be particularly interesting, as Pater’s writing is so often considered the acme of Decadent prose. It seems that the orchid that famously reminded Dorian Gray of the seven deadly sins should, perhaps, have been a tuberose. Equally interesting is Angela Dunstan’s suggestion that Theodore Watts-Dunton’s roman-à-clef Aylwin became for readers a means of owning the celebrity of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, or the notion extended by Liz Renes that John Singer Sargent’s Madame X should be considered a meditation on the white, sculptural body and its changing role in modern art.’ — Jamie Horrocks, English Literature in Translation 61.4, 2018, 525-28
- ‘It is perhaps fitting that the unity of a book on Decadent literature should be best experienced ‘decomposed’ to give place to the independence of each chapter. There is no doubt, however, that the high quality of its constituent parts forms a significant contribution to Sensory Studies and that the collection is a ‘must-read’ for any student of Decadence at the fin de siècle and beyond.’ — Patricia Pulham, Modern Language Review 114.1, January 2019, 128-29 (full text online)
- ‘Desmarais and Condé have done an enormous service by opening up this can of repulsive worms.’ — Dennis Denisoff, Victorian Studies 61.2, Winter 2019, 554-56
Published November 2017
Performing Medieval Text
Edited by Ardis Butterfield, Henry Hope and Pauline Souleau
Legenda (General Series)
- ‘Collectively, these studies effectively demonstrate the necessity for, and advantage of, an understanding of performance that transcends traditional academic boundaries and the volume, overall, serves as a solid exemplar of how to approach doing so.’ — unsigned notice, Forum for Modern Language Studies 55.2, April 2019, 248 (full text online)
- ‘An ambitious and wide-ranging exploration of performance in medieval European culture. Recognizing the ‘complex terminological web’ spun round the terms performance and performativity, the volume acknowledges and accepts performance as a ‘contested concept’. It also, importantly, recognizes the historical contingency of performance as an idea... The contributing essays illustrate both the ubiquity of performance in medieval culture and the very different ways it manifests in and through text, itself broadly conceived as manuscript, image, written word, and musical note.’ — Clare Wright, Modern Language Review 114.3, July 2019, 525-526 (full text online)
- ‘This thought-filled and thought-provoking volume offers a polyphony of perspectives on, and examples of, medieval performance.’ — Blake Gutt, French Studies 73.4, October 2019, 622-23 (full text online)
- ‘While these essays are likely to be read individually by specialists in their various fields, a reader of the whole volume will be rewarded with an enriched and nuanced understanding of the concepts of “performance” and “text,” and of the explanatory reach of the field of performance studies.’ — Anne Stone, Speculum 96.2, 2021, 482-84
Published February 2018
Maud Beerbohm Tree: Lady of the Stage
Susana Cory-Wright
Legenda (General Series)
- ‘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
Published September 2018
Swinburne’s Style: An Experiment in Verse History
L. M. Kilbride
Legenda (General Series)
- ‘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)
Published September 2019
Invention: The Language of English Renaissance Poetics
Rocío G. Sumillera
Legenda (General Series)
- ‘Distrust of the role of originality in Renaissance poesis often leads literary scholars to prioritize logico-rhetorical accounts of invention, which recommended writers to select their topics from authoritative discursive repertoires. Rocío G. Sumillera’s meticulous critical history of poetic invention up to Renaissance England is a persuasive caveat about our need to revise those notions.’ — Zenón Luis-Martínez, Parergon 38.1, 2021, 260-61 (full text online)
- ‘Taken together, Sumillera and Baron's books [Scarlett Baron, The Riddle of Creativity] cover literature and theory from Aristotle to the present. Each book reaches widely across European languages, combining science, theology and linguistics with conventional literary works. They look from opposite directions at the vanishing point that is the Romantic ideal of the artist as a lamp or organic entity, existing free from influence of any kind. The scope and ambition of the two projects is impressive. There is a great deal here to admire.’ — Bart van Es, Times Literary Supplement 11 December 2020
- ‘This is a wide-ranging and well-argued piece of work, with a comprehensive and useful bibliography. It makes an extremely valuable contribution to the study of a concept which must be at the heart of our understanding of literary composition in the Renaissance.’ — unsigned notice, Forum for Modern Language Studies 57.1, 2021, 142 (full text online)
- ‘All in all, this is a detailed yet wide-ranging scholarly book that will serve students and scholars equally well. Although its focus is English Renaissance poetics, the breadth of reference to European sources gives this study a notable ballast and breadth. Sumillera is particularly adept at the selection and presentation of primary quotations, finding the perfect examples — and plenty of them — to illustrate her argument. This makes the book a great resource, as well as a pleasure to read.’ — Catherine Bates, Modern Language Review 117.2, 2022, 278-79 (full text online)
- ‘This much-needed book is a comprehensive and thoroughly researched chronological overview of the concept of the invention of topics (inventio) in poetry, as it was originally understood in classical rhetoric, that lies at the heart of Renaissance theories of imitation as individual composition.’ — Goran Stanivukovic, Renaissance and Reformation 44.4, Fall 2021, 311-13 (full text online)
Published September 2022
The Poems and Songs of Henry Hall of Hereford: A Jacobite Poet of the 1690s
Oliver Pickering
Legenda (General Series)
- ‘Pickering has documented and illuminated with great learning and skill a minor but nevertheless fascinating figure in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century English literary culture – for which all serious students of the period will be very grateful.’ — David Hopkins, Seventeenth Century 38.4, 2023, 720-22 (full text online)