MHRA Publication

‘This is a rich and rewarding study that opens up important new perspectives not only on its two chosen thinkers, but also on the questions of acting both onstage and in society more generally.’ — Joseph Harris, French Studies 66.4 (October 2012), 557
‘[Held's] general principle is surprisingly simple and compelling: While the 'self-alienating artifice' of Diderot's calculating actor succeeds for the most part at immedsing the audience to identification and illusion, there are moments at which it suddenly comes to the fore... Jolted by this 'sudden emergence of alienation', the spectator is now 'faced with her own involvement in the operation of delusion'.’ — Florian Nikolas Becker, Brecht Yearbook 37 (2012), 253-58

‘Reads like an essay by Montaigne... an ambitious and thought-provoking study.’ — Michéle Bissiére, French Review 76.3, 2003, 592-3
‘It is salutary to read a thoughtful, level-headed and well-informed account of the representation of the self in French writing... there is no doubting the depth, range and persuasiveness of the thesis advanced.’ — Anthony Strugnell, French Studies LVII.3, 2003, 428-30

Diderot and the Body
Angelica Goodden
Legenda (General Series) •1 July 2001

‘Vorremmo sottolineare anche la bellezza del titolo del volume di A. Goodden, titolo elegante nella sua apparente essenzialità ma al tempo stesso anticpatore di uno studio richissimo e interessante.’ — Paola Perazzolo, Studi francesi 139, 2003, 174
‘Welcome, in that it deals comprehensively with a subject which has lurked, half-hidden, in many previous studies of Diderot, often noticed but never fully confronted... Sends one back to grapple yet again with this most protean of philisophes.’ — D. J. Adams, French Studies LVII.2, 2003, 236-7
‘A richly interesting study, written with Angelica Goodden's characteristic vigour, which illuminates both Diderot's works and a wide range of eighteenth-century literature and thought.’ — unsigned notice, Forum for Modern Language Studies XL.1, 2004, 104
‘An eminently readable, coherent and cogent volume which captures the profundity, wisdom, humanity, excesses, sensuality, and frailty of Diderot, both the man and the writer.’ — Roseann Runte, French Review 77/4, March 2004, 783

‘The book could serve, almost by the way, as a brief introduction to the modes of early narrative fiction in any of the European languages on which it draws.’ — unsigned notice, Forum for Modern Language Studies XL.1, 2004, 112
‘McMorran's approach offers a number of intriguing comparisons among a set of novels not itherto considered together in a single study. It places Fielding and Sterne within a broader European context, which so many Anglocentric treatments fail to do. Most important, it usefully interrogates the ways that travel within a text reflects, influences, and subverts travel through a text.’ — Joseph F. Bartolomeo, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 17:2, 2005, 288-90
‘A highly accomplished comparatist, McMorran respects the specificities of the national traditions to which the works he discusses belong while teasing out the overarching European narrative on which his interpretation depends.’ — Charles Forsdick, Modern Language Review 102.1, January 2007, 187-88 (full text online)

‘Whiskin proves a perceptive and engaging commentator who will aid readers in their journeys through a literary world of orderly disorder.’ — Simon Davies, French Studies 68, 2014, 546-47

‘Current critical debates on both spectrality and ekphrastic poetics are greatly enriched by Thomas Baldwin’s tightly woven and theoretically intricate study.’ — Margaret Topping, French Studies 67.1 (January 2013), 125

‘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