Spanish Culture from Romanticism to the Present: Structures of Feeling
Jo Labanyi
Selected Essays 1123 September 2019

  • ‘There is much in this book to celebrate—multiple topics, angles, issues and theories addressed in order to focus us on ‘ways of thinking about Spanish culture’, where ‘culture’ means literature, cinema, painting and photography, with (perhaps) history, historical memory, feminism, gender, race, nation formation, modernity and politics added to the mix.... Some of these essays are already classic studies that have influenced the way we think about certain literary periods or texts. Labanyi combines theory with specificity, details from the works studied inserted (or viewed through) various theoretical constructs. She claims to search for ‘moments of contradiction or incoherence’ in literature that often point to ‘something important’ (6), a claim fully realized in this book.’ — David T. Gies, Bulletin of Spanish Studies 98.3, 2021, 485-87
  • ‘The essays in Spanish Culture from Romanticism to the Present are suggestive in their individual approaches; the book as a whole is nevertheless unique as a window into the thought of one of the most influential scholars of Spanish culture in recent decades. Whether or not one always agrees with Labanyi, it is impossible not to be in awe of her mind and method, and how she has carried the profession forward.’ — Wadda C. Rios-Font, Studies in XXth and XXIst Century Literature 46.1, 2022
  • ‘Las páginas que abren el volumen son un brillante ejercicio de egohistoria donde Labanyi reflexiona tam- bién sobre la labor de re-archivo que acomete para este proyecto... Como Labanyi asevera desde las primeras páginas de Spanish Culture from Ro- manticism to the Present, lo que realmente cuenta son los momentos no esperados, de tensión, que el crítico logra desentrañar en el artefacto cultural objeto de estudio, “the contradictions and incoherence that, perhaps even more than areas of consensus, put us in touch with the pulse of the time” (4). Quizá sea este crucial precepto metodológico, aplicado de manera consistente a esta variedad de estudios realizados desde mediados de los noventa, adoptando diversos ángulos críticos y considerando distintos medios, lo que trasluce con mayor fuerza en Spanish Culture from Romanticism to the Present. Structures of Feeling: la tentativa generosa de motivarnos a releer a contracorriente para deshacer, o cuando menos problematizar, asunciones culturales que también atrav’ — Patricia López-Gay, Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 25, 2021, 310-12
  • ‘A key contribution to Spanish Cultural and Literary Studies. Running through the collection is the author’s attention to ‘structures of feeling’, drawing on Raymond Williams’s notion, as a driver and explanatory resource for the comprehension of a diverse array of cultural production primarily from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.’ — Richard Cleminson, Modern Language Review 118.2, 2023, 269-71 (full text online)

No Country for Nonconforming Women: Feminine Conceptions of Lusophone Africa
Maria Tavares
Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures 3230 September 2018

  • ‘An excellent scholarly contribution that is both clear and accessible. It must be critically addressed byprofessors, students, and researchers both in and beyond the Lusophone academic sphere.’ — Sandra I. Sousa, Journal of Lusophone Studies 4.1, 2019, 328-30 (full text online)

Women and Nationhood in Restoration Spain 1874-1931: The State as Family
Rocío Rødtjer
Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures 3423 April 2019

  • ‘This is a fine and important book that will hopefully convince those critics prone to discounting the contributions of conservative women writers (Asensi and de los Ríos) to make the effort to read them, keeping in mind Rødtjer’s suggestive arguments.’ — Alda Blanco, Bulletin of Spanish Studies 97.3, March 2020, 440-41

Queer Genealogies in Transnational Barcelona: Maria-Mercè Marçal, Cristina Peri Rossi, and Flavia Company
Natasha Tanna
Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures 3730 December 2019

Naturalism Against Nature: Kinship and Degeneracy in Fin-de-siècle Portugal and Brazil
David J. Bailey
Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures 4821 January 2020

  • ‘Naturalism against Nature considerably expands our understanding of how the international literary movement known as Naturalism manifested itself in selected but fully representative writers in Portugal and Brazil... A very useful study and one that should be regarded as required reading for all students and scholars interested in Naturalism and its importance to the Lusophone world.’ — Earl E. Fitz, Bulletin of Spanish Studies 97.9, October 2020, 1559-1560 (full text online)
  • ‘The transnational dimensions of literary Naturalism operating between Brazil and Portugal are explored in this excellently written book by David Bailey.’ — Richard Cleminson, Modern Language Review 116.4, October 2021, 667-68 (full text online)
  • ‘Contribui o estudo, portanto, para uma melhor compreensão da particularidade da expressão literária naturalista em Portugal e no Brasil.’ — Patrícia H. Baialuna de Andrade, Journal of Lusophone Studies 6.1, Spring 2021

Exile and Nomadism in French and Hispanic Women's Writing
Kate Averis
Studies In Comparative Literature 311 July 2014

  • ‘Averis skilfully negotiates a corpus that encompasses six writers, two languages, and several nations in an engaging style and with careful structuring, which unfailingly maintains her reader’s engagement. This study offers a very welcome re-evaluation of exile as a linguistic, psychological, gendered, and existential site.’ — Trudy Agar, French Studies 69.4, October 2015, 560-61
  • ‘The originality and importance of this study in the field of Comparative Literature lies in the fact not only that it analyses exiled women writers (instead of exiled men writers) but also that these writers’ homelands are different, making the research findings more valid as they are extremely representative of women who write away from their birth countries... Averis’ analysis is extremely comprehensive, clearly exposed and well supported with a solid and respected bibliography.’ — Verónica Añover, Modern and Contemporary France 23.3, 2015, 410-11
  • ‘This book draws a new and original path within the analysis of contemporary women’s exilic writing and the nomadic configuration of identity. Not only does it develop key notions of exile and women’s writing, applying them to illustrative cases, it also articulates connections that overturn preconceived arguments, such as the exilic stereotyped figures still in use in Euro-American theorizations, or the negative connotations of exile, which are replaced by the idea of exile as a productive and creative site in which more fluid identities are rebuilt.’ — Marianna Deganutti, OCCT Review online, October 2015

Women, Men and Books: Issues of Gender in Yiddish Discourse
Edited by Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov
Studies In Yiddish 1630 December 2019

  • ‘The book presents the most recent research on the subject of gender in Yiddish literature and culture and paints a far more complex picture of gender roles in Eastern European Jewish life than is portrayed in traditional sources... As gender and sexuality are increasingly being understood as fluid, rather than determined categories, this kind of research is extremely significant for those of us who still speak, write and create in Yiddish, and want to hold on to it as a living language, capable of expressing all of our experiences.’ — Annabel Cohen, Forward 23 November 2020

Erotic Literature in Adaptation and Translation
Edited by Johannes D. Kaminski
Transcript 710 September 2018

  • ‘Each chapter is conceptually challenging and theoretically rigorous. Indebted to the ‘cultural turn’ of translation studies, ... the contributors are sensitive to the vicissitudes of cultural values and sexual mores, and to the disfigurement that translation precipitates... This volume unleashes a network of exciting discursive tributaries, primed for further navigation.’ — Victoria Carroll, Modern Language Review 115.3, July 2020, 694-95 (full text online)
  • ‘In spite of the fact that the publishing industry has been flooded with erotic literatures since the old times and that translation studies has newly witnessed a felicitous avalanche in the academic publication of our time, erotic literatures and translation studies have by far remained two sufficiently wide and wild parallels in contemporary academia. Erotic Literature in Adaption and Translation edited by Johannes D. Kaminski hence boasts a brave and brilliant contribution, a contribution that not only makes such two distant parallels meet in one single volume but also conjures up a happiest convergence of the estranging twain—erotic literature in the West and its counterpart in the farthest East, by the medium of both multilingual translation and, above all, universal humanity, wherein reigns Eros, the Greek god of erotic love.’ — Min-Hua Wu, The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture 12.2, June 2019, 223-31 (full text online)

Sexuality and the Sense of Self in the Works of Georg Trakl and Robert Musil
Andrew Webber
Bithell Series of Dissertations 15 / MHRA Texts and Dissertations 301 January 1990

Another Country: Sexuality and National Identity in Catalan Gay Fiction
Josep-Anton Fernàndez
MHRA Texts and Dissertations 501 January 2000