Published July 2009

Retrospectives: Essays in Literature, Poetics and Cultural History by Terence Cave
Terence Cave, edited by Neil Kenny and Wes Williams
Legenda (General Series)

  • ‘A very welcome overview of several of the central themes of Cave’s work.’ — John D. Lyons, French Studies 65.1, January 2011, 93-94
  • ‘An excellent overview, enhanced by the editors’ astute introduction, of this highly influential critic’s ideas... an impressive testament to a distinguished and continuing critical career.’ — Emma Herdman, Modern Language Review 106.4, 2011, 1156-57 (full text online)

Published April 2010

The Spirit of England: Selected Essays of Stephen Medcalf
Stephen Medcalf, edited by Brian Cummings and Gabriel Josipovici
Legenda (General Series)

  • ‘One of the more extraordinary scholars of the late twentieth century... The range of these essays is the more astonishing at a time when most critics prided themselves on their specialisms rather than their diversity. Medcalf wanted us to see things that could only be understood against the whole gamut of European literary history... Brian Cummings and Gabriel Josipovici are to be congratulated.’ — Stephen Prickett, Times Literary Supplement 26 November 2010
  • ‘A modern parable of birth and death, miraculous encounter and mysterious return, makes a fitting and beautiful conclusion to a book of which we can say, as we rarely can with such confidence, that it was written by a good and wise man.’ — Paul Dean, The New Criterion October 2010, 69-72
  • ‘Cummings and Josipovici have performed a 'mitzvah', a good deed, in editing these essays, which display a brilliant, humane mind at work. It is to be hoped that more Medcalf will be collected for the benefit of subsequent generations.’ — William Baker, Modern Language Review 106.3, July 2011, 871-73 (full text online)
  • ‘The value of this posthumous collection is that it acts as both a lament and a lantern of hope. All we have by way of a memorial are these esoteric essays – but what essays. They show a liberal humanism at its best, expansive learning worn lightly and a belief in teasing out the particularities of a panoply of works... In our bleak climate of fees and looming instrumentality for the humanities, such a voice as Medcalf’s, singing the value of thought and the non-paraphrasable nature of poetry, is as insightful as it is heartening.’ — unsigned notice, Forum for Modern Language Studies 48.1, 2012, 115
  • ‘Von solchen und literarischen Wundern berichtet das Buch, es sollte in vielen Inklings-Bibliotheken stehen und durch die Hände vieler Freunde der englischen Kultur gehen.’ — Elmar Schenkel, Inklings-Jahrbuch 29, 2011, 378-79
  • ‘Medcalf’s reflections throw great light upon Kipling, Horace, and translation.’ — unsigned review, The Year's Work in English Studies 91, 2012, 765

Published September 2013

Likenesses: Translation, Illustration, Interpretation
Matthew Reynolds
Studies In Comparative Literature 30

  • ‘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)

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)

Published May 2017

Enlightenment and Religion in German and Austrian Literature
Ritchie Robertson
Selected Essays 1

  • ‘A tour de force in the study of German-speaking cultures with a range and depth that takes readers from the Classical period in the eighteenth century to twentieth-century Modernism... Here we are confronted with, or rather treated to [...] erudition, insight and unerring logic.’ — Carol Tully, Times Literary Supplement 23 January 2018
  • ‘Any ambitious colleagues wishing to uncover the secret behind Robertson’s talent for producing the appropriate formulation are again referred to his introductory remarks, in which he recalls having learnt to use a typewriter whose roller would only turn in one direction, making it impossible to go back and emend what had been written. The present volume of essays suggests that there could be no better method of training future scholars than by providing them with similarly challenging, character-building implements.’ — Osman Durrani, Modern Language Review 113.2, April 2018, 433-35 (full text online)

Perpetual Motion: Studies in French Poetry from Surrealism to the Postmodern
Michael Sheringham
Selected Essays 2

  • ‘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

Published May 2018

Perspectives on Culture and Politics in the French Antilles
Celia Britton
Selected Essays 4

  • ‘Engagingly written and meticulously argued at every turn, Britton’s essays reveal unexpected dimensions in her primary archives and offer challenging arguments on the relationship between politics and aesthetics in the French Caribbean... Although Britton has an abiding passion for Glissant’s work, she never lets this interest overshadow the singularities of her other authors. This careful sensitivity is characteristic of the masterful readings Britton provides in her provocative new collection.’ — Justin Izzo, French Studies 73.2, April 2019, 329-30 (full text online)
  • ‘Les analyses abordées sont très attentives et riches en éléments qui peuvent constituer le point de départ d’autres études.’ — Emanuela Cacchioli, Studi francesi 189, 2019, 616-17

Published February 2020

Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio: Literature, Doctrine, Reality
Zygmunt G. Barański
Selected Essays 6

  • ‘Many will be familiar with Barański’s work, his distinctive voice and ability to interrogate some of the thorniest issues relating to Dante, medieval poetics and doctrine; but to have this voice sustained in one single volume is to witness a quite remarkable academic career and distinctive engagement with Dante.’ — Daragh O’Connell, Annali d'Italianistica 39, 2021, 414

Published September 2020

The Foreign Connection: Writings on Poetry, Art and Translation
Jamie McKendrick
Transcript 17

  • ‘This book might have been written for my pleasure. Many readers of this journal will surely feel the same.’ — Chris Miller, PN Review 28.3, January/February 2022
  • ‘There is a natural clemency at work, throughout the entire volume, which has nothing to do with fuzzy-mindedness – quite the contrary, but it means that McKendrick will never deliver the frenzied hatchet-job some poets (whom he admires) can execute, apparently with sangfroid. This intelligence – by definition an ironic intelligence in that it can simultaneously entertain different positions – is what makes him such a trustworthy guide. One feels also that humour, that saving resource, is always within reach... His astute use of quotation to illustrate a point is a fiduciary of sound judgement. Above all, Jamie McKendrick reminds us that there is no substitute for patient looking and listening. This close attention, this authentic love of the art, is rare in our day. These writings are to be prized.’ — Stephen Romer, The London Magazine February/March 2022, 77-84
  • ‘A welcome marker to remind us, if we needed reminding, of how much human beings need, and gain from, dialogue with other cultures and languages. The apparently foreign, as Jamie McKendrick demonstrates so well here, in fact shows us a threshold, a door.’ — Hilary Davies, Times Literary Supplement 19 May 2023, p. 8
  • ‘What Jamie McKendrick so finely details about Tom Lubbock’s English Graphic is an entirely apt description for his own collection of brief reviews, introductions, and essays, on literature and art: ‘The constraints of the form proved exceptionally viable and liberating for his procedures. Providing a “wiry outline”, the form itself allowed for wit, aperçu, mental calisthenics, provocation, aphorism, meditation and surprisingly sustained argument’.’ — George Kalogeris, Essays in Criticism 73.1, 2023, 130-31 (full text online)

Published October 2022

For the Love of Art
Peter Dayan
Selected Essays 10

  • ‘Rich and powerful discussions, bursting with invention and life. This is a formidably clever sequence of essays in which major writers and musicians are set in contrast and dialogue with each other.’ — John Batchelor, Modern Language Review 119.2, 2024, 181-88 (full text online)

Published February 2024

Chaos and the Clean Line: Writings on Franco-British Modernism
Stephen Romer 
Transcript 28

Crossings: Essays on Poetry and Translation from Hölderlin to Jaccottet
Charlie Louth 
Transcript 31