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👤 Gender and sexuality

Published January 1999

Goethe and Patriarchy: Faust and the Fates of Desire
James Simpson
Legenda (General Series)

  • notice, Germanistik 41.3-4, 2000, 921
  • ‘Simpson argues that Goethe's work, in essence, constitutes an act of self-diagnosis and therapy... his paradigm is not just Freudian, but also implicitly Jungian.’ — Paul Bishop, Modern Language Review 96.2, 2001, 566-7 (full text online)
  • ‘This book is not brilliant: it is too carefully argued and clearly written to deserve that flashy label of the day. A more apt descriptor might be formidable, both for its ambition and for its achievement. Simpson has undertaken nothing less than the elucidation of the paradigm that was central to all of Goethe's intellectual, personal, scientific and poetic concerns, the "ur-fantasy that is a fantasy of origins"... In the best tradition of British literary criticism, Simpson writes in a lively, engaging style that does not need jargon... No one working seriously on Goethe or on Faust can ignore the challenge of this study.’ — Arnd Bohm, Seminar 41.1, 2005, 73-74

Published July 2000

Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society
Edited by Letizia Panizza
Legenda (General Series)

  • ‘In her introduction Letizia Panizza writes that one of the aims of the collection is to recover neglected areas of Italian culture and society, which she has done... Many of the essays are quite good; all are informative.’ — Elissa B. Weaver, Renaissance Quarterly 2002, 713-15
  • ‘Offers a vast and well-organized view of the position that early modern women occupied in Italy from 1400 to 1650... I highly recommend the collection.’ — Rinaldini Russell, Forum Italicum 36.1, 2002, 214-15
  • ‘The above is merely a fraction of the content. There is certainly richness in this volume. Many branches of scholarship gain by having these articles in print and they are an eloquent testimony to the vitality of scholarship in this area.’ — Olwen Hufton, Modern Language Review 97.1, 2002 (full text online)
  • ‘This excellent book of essays... retains the liveliness and originality of the conference held at Royal Holloway, University of London, ... with the added bonus that all those given in Italian have been translated, so that - as the editor says - we can benefit from the work of many specialists, some of whose work has not previously been available in English.’ — Alison Brown, Italian Studies LVII, 2002, 171-2
  • ‘Without doubt, the most important volume yet published in English on the specific contribution of women to culture and society in Italy in the Renaissance... The coherence of the volume is assured by a number of overarching themes.’ — unsigned notice, Forum for Modern Language Studies XXXIX, 2003, 480

Published July 2001

Diderot and the Body
Angelica Goodden
Legenda (General Series)

  • ‘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

Published May 2002

Michel Foucault: Form and Power
Dan Beer
Legenda (General Series)

  • ‘Beer's book is a dialogue with Foucault, including critiques of his arguments by Baudrillard and Derrida. It has been suggested that the seductive beauty of Foucault's language masks the frailty of some of his positions, and Beer provides close analysis of the stylistic strategies he deploys.’ — unsigned notice, Forum for Modern Language Studies XXXIX, 2003, 465-6
  • ‘After Beer we can return to Foucault's texts with a new imagination and a new sensitivity to the force of his style.’ — Jeremy Carrette, Modern Language Review 99.2, 2004, 502-3 (full text online)

Published October 2002

Closer to the Wild Heart: Essays on Clarice Lispector
Edited by Cláudia Pazos Alonso and Claire Williams
Legenda (General Series)

  • ‘Given the relative paucity of work in English on Clarice Lispector, Pazo's and William's collection of English-language writing on this author is welcome, not just for its mere presence, but especially for its attention to newer critical thinking on race, gender and nation. Most especially welcome is the turn indicated in this volume toward an examination of the several kind of writing in which Lispector engaged - letters, cronicas, semi-autobiography, fiction - a turn that indicates a more comprehensive way of thinking both about her fiction and about her life-work as a whole.’ — Tace Hedrick, Luso-Brazilian Review 41:1, 2004, 203-5
  • ‘From the start Clarice Lispector, despite the South American sun, lives in the clouds and in cloudiness. She was to the public a charismatic obscurity, a witch, a recluse, a mystery - the Brazilian sphinx.’ — Lorrie Moore, The New York Review of Books 26 September 2009, 2-3

Published June 2003

Desiring the Dead: Necrophilia and Nineteenth-Century French Literature
Lisa Downing
Legenda (General Series)

  • ‘Downing is working outside the scope of any simple discourse of pathology, and perhaps outside the queer undoing of pathology as such. ...this is an impressive first book, striking without being facile, theoretically complex without being unruly, and attentive to literary qualities in the chosen texts while sustaining its thematic argument.’ — Peter Cryle, Modern Language Review 100.2, 2005, 505-6 (full text online)
  • ‘This is a successful, richly structured, and thought-provoking exploration of 'the cultural fantasy of necrophilia'.’ — Carol Rifelj, Nineteenth-Century French Studies 33, n. 1 and 2, Fall-Winter 2004-2005
  • ‘Downing's approach throughout is essentially post-Faucauldian and psychoanalitic. Her style, at once sober and engaging, is a model for academic prose in general. ... The work also indicates a new direction for death studies, and despite its omissions deserves consideration in this regard.’ — Jason Hartford, The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association Spring 2004, 119-21

Liberty, Equality, Maternity
Alison Fell
Legenda (General Series)

  • ‘A highly readable, well-informed, and clearly argued study of the discourses of motherhood in twentieth-century France.’ — Catherine Rodgers, Modern Language Review 99.4, 2004, 1059-60 (full text online)
  • ‘Ce livre consciencieux met en valeur l'humanité des trois écrivaines étudiées plutôt qu'une quelconque rigidité. Somme tout, c'est leur histoire personnelle que Fell explore, avec tout ce que cela supposes de contradictions, d'ambiguïtés, de tiraillements entre théorie et vécu.’ — Catherine Slawy-Sutton, French Review 79.2, 2006, 420-21

Published December 2003

Artful Seduction: Homosexuality and the Problematics of Exile
Karl Posso
Legenda (General Series)

Published February 2005

The Feminine in the Prose of Andrey Platonov
Philip Bullock
Legenda (General Series)

  • ‘The author traces with great clarity the development of Platonov's thinking... This appears to be Legenda's first excursion into the Russian field, and the results are impressive. There are long, carefully analysed quotations in Cyrillic, all fully translated in a way which does justice to Platonov's highly idiosyncratic style.’ — Michael Pursglove, Slavonic and East European Review 84.2, 2006, 314-15 (full text online)
  • ‘Interesting... Although Bullock sets out to concentrate on a single topic (gender) from specific points of view (feminism and psychoanalysis), he admits to his "admiration of the paradoxical nature of [Platonov's] prose", and it is exactly this admiration that prevents the monograph from becoming a single-minded study of just one theme in the prose in question.’ — Anat Vernitski, Modern Language Review 103.3, July 2008, 921-23 (full text online)
  • ‘The book is founded on close readings that every scholar of Platonov will want to consult. The formulations are elegant and are likely to be quoted frequently in the scholarly literature... This indispensable book on Platonov is also a compelling study in the value and limits of methodology.’ — Eric Naiman, Russian Review 68.4, 2009, 693-94
  • ‘Philip Bullock’s important new book on Andrei Platonov energetically elaborates what it promises at its outset: a feminist reading of Platonov’s most significant prose works... an eloquent and insightful investigation into a distinctly unsettled element in Platonov’s worldview. Bullock follows earlier studies of gender relations and sexuality in Platonov by Eric Naiman, Eliot Borenstein, and Valerii Podoroga but offers a far more extensive and synthetic account of the oeuvre.’ — Thomas Seifrid, Slavic Review 69.1, Spring 2010, 236-37
  • ‘(notice in Japanese)’ — Susumu Nonaka, Bulletin of the Japanese Association of Russian Scholars 38, 2006, 143-46
  • ‘(notice in Russian)’ — Tat’iana Krasavchenko, Literaturnovedenie 1 (2007), 124-32

Published September 2005

Women in Russian Literature after Glasnost: Female Alternatives
Carol Adlam
Legenda (General Series)

  • ‘An engaging look at some of the most influential figures in post-Soviet writing.’ — Benjamin Sutcliffe, Modern Language Review 104.1, January 2009, 307-08 (full text online)

Published August 2007

Contemporary Italian Women Writers and Traces of the Fantastic: The Creation of Literary Space
Danielle E. Hipkins
Legenda (General Series)

  • ‘In her captivating first book, Danielle E. Hipkins assumes the challenging task of applying feminist literary theory to a complex form and attendant writing practice.’ — Lynn Makau, Contemporary Women's Writing 2:2, December 2008, 181-82
  • ‘Rimane aperta la discussione, extratestuale, sullo spazio occupato dalle scrittrici contempo- ranee nel canone letterario. Non sono sicura che, come suggerisce Hipkins, la marginalità della Ombres sia legata al fatto che la scrittrice ‘points to a literature beyond a claustrophobic space of epigonality’ (p. 168), e non, semplicemente, a un mercato letterario dai ritmi di produzione e consumo di durata sempre più breve. Ma questa considerazione nulla toglie all’interesse dello studio proposto: abbiamo bisogno di letture puntuali e teoricamente ponder- ate dei percorsi letterari della post-modernità per arrivare a una migliore comprensione delle dinamiche culturali, di genere ma non solo, che attraversano la società in cui viviamo.’ — Gigliola Sulis, Italian Studies 64.1, Spring 2009
  • ‘Plenty of new wine and new research... a new interdisciplinarity in Italian gender and sexuality studies.’ — Carol Lazzaro-Weis, Journal of Romance Studies 10.2, Summer 2010, review article, 97-106

Men of their Words: The Poetics of Masculinity in George Sand's Fiction
Nigel Harkness
Legenda (General Series)

  • ‘This meticulously researched study makes a compelling argument to renegotiate the importance of masculinity in Sand's writing... His persuasive conclusions will therefore be of interest not only to scholars working on nineteenth-century France, but indeed to the wider fields of gender studies and literary criticism.’ — Forum for Modern Language Studies April 2009, 224)
  • ‘Nigel Harkness's aim in this excellent monograph is to liberate George Sand's masculinity from the restrictive autobiographical sphere of cross dressing and male pseudonymity and to situate it rather as the driving force of her literary texts. Drawing on a corpus of fifteen novels, he produces a series of authoritative close readings that demonstrate the extent to which the thinking of masculinity, and its inscription in literary representation, are inextricable for Sand.’ — Diana Knight, French Studies 64.2, April 2010
  • ‘Harkness's focused tracking of Sand's performances of poetic masculinity throughout this book undoubtedly furthers critical understanding of the highly complex and multiple narrative positions adopted in her fiction, especially its meta-discursive dimensions. His sensitive and often provocative close readings of Sand's works, especially Indiana and Lélia (in chapters 2 and 5), will inspire fresh appraisals of established Sand criticism.’ — Mary Orr, Modern and Contemporary France 17.3, August 2009

Published December 2007

Poetry and the Realm of the Public Intellectual: The Alternative Destinies of Gabriela Mistral, Cecília Meireles, and Rosario Castellanos
Karen Peña
Legenda (General Series)

  • ‘By bringing together three of the principal Latin-American authors of the twentieth century, Poetry and the Realm of the Public Intellectual contributes enormously to our understanding of what inspired and motivated them as authors. Peña proves to have a very thorough understanding of poetry, providing a painstakingly close readings of the three poets analysed. She also demonstrates a great deal of familiarity with both Spanish and Portuguese bibliographical sources in her studies of each of the writers... A valuable contribution to the field of Latin-American poetry, especially in its discussion of the question of gender and the place of female intellectuals in Latin America.’ — Vivaldo Santos, Bulletin of Spanish Studies 87.7, 2010, 1020-21
  • ‘Resumiendo, se trata de una contribución valiosa e importante sobre la conflictividad americana mediada por las voces femeninas. Por encima de todo, Peña nos muestra que la poesía es más vital y resonante en sus momentos de rebeldía.’ — Roland Spiller, Iberoamericana 43, 2011, 200-01

Making the Personal Political: Dutch Women Writers 1919-1970
Jane Fenoulhet
Legenda (General Series)

  • ‘Fenoulhet's project is exciting and original. It is a well-researched and informative account of how women writers in the Netherlands shaped the self at a time when self-realization was a male prerogative. And it makes you want to reread Carry van Bruggen, and that is surely a good thing.’ — Henriëtte Louwerse, Modern Language Review 104.3, 2009, 929-31 (full text online)
  • ‘Eight excellent case studies... that explore how through their work individual writers reflect upon and challenge the role of women in society.’ — The Year's Work in Modern Language Studies 69, 2007, 853)

Published July 2009

The Power of Disturbance: Elsa Morante's Aracoeli
Edited by Sara Fortuna and Manuele Gragnolati
Legenda (General Series)

  • ‘The chapters avail themselves of the entire arc of twentieth-century theories and models of subjectivity and sexuality, to try to unravel Manuele's search for freedom from his all-consuming passion for his mother Aracoeli, and include Freud, Jung, Klein, Bowlby, Stern, Sander, Winnicott, Laplanche and Pontalis, Kristeva, Lacan, Cavarero, Muraro, Silverman, (Jessica) Benjamin, and Butler. These theories serve the novel very well, illuminating the many strands and aspects of Manuele's 'condition' and of the novel... An invaluable teaching tool and thus an incentive to include Aracoeli in advanced university courses in Italian and European literature.’ — Adalgisa Giorgio, Italian Studies 66.1, March 2011, 144-46

Published April 2010

Sex in Imagined Spaces: Gender and Utopia from More to Bloch
Caitríona Ní Dhúill
Legenda (General Series)

  • ‘Ni Dhúill's study shines a bright light on the hitherto neglected importance of sex and gender questions in utopian societies. Sex In Imagined Spaces is a cogently argued, beautifully written, and highly original contribution to knowledge in utopia studies and beyond; it not only mobilizes important wider cultural developments for the analysis of literary texts, but also gives a brilliant gender-theoretical spin to the double function of utopian texts as vision and critique.’ — Anna Katharina Schaffner, Germanistik in Ireland 7 (2013), 228-30
  • ‘This excellent monograph tackles the concept of utopia by repositioning it within the fields of literature and creative practice examined through the lens of the gendered body.’ — unsigned notice, Forum for Modern Language Studies 49.2 (2013)
  • ‘This is an excellent book which deals with the relationship between utopian desire, gender relations, and social outcome in a nuanced and intelligent way.’ — Peter Thompson, Modern Language Review 108.3, 2013, 948-49 (full text online)

Published February 2011

The Libertine’s Nemesis: The Prude in Clarissa and the roman libertin
James Fowler
Legenda (General Series)

  • ‘The beguiling cover of this Legenda volume is well matched by the book’s contents. Fowler’s thesis is an original and well-argued one: the establishment of a symbiotic relationship between the libertine and the prude in a number of key eighteenth-century texts... the argument is persuasive and elegant, and we are swept along by the author’s enthusiasm for his subject.’ — John Phillips, French Studies 66.3, July 2012, 402

Published March 2011

Post-War Jewish Women’s Writing in French
Lucille Cairns
Legenda (General Series)

Published July 2011

Examining Whiteness: Reading Clarice Lispector through Bessie Head and Toni Morrison
Lucia Villares
Legenda (General Series)

  • ‘By enhancing our understanding of Clarice Lispector’s novels with such an original and indispensable study, Villares demonstrates other unexplored ways through which Lispector broke away from the Primitivist vogue and mulattophilia of her generation of modernistas... During those years of intensively nationalist modernizing projects, performing whiteness included the assimilation of an urban ethos, among other bourgeois life standards. Villares’ study highlights the relevance of Lispector’s work for our comprehension of such deep cultural transformations.’ — Sonia Roncador, Ellipsis 12, 2014, 311-13

Published August 2011

German Women's Writing of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: Future Directions in Feminist Criticism
Edited by Helen Fronius and Anna Richards
Legenda (General Series)

  • ‘The volume will be of great use to students and researchers alike, as a source of well-written critical scholarship and of pointers to severe deficits in current research. It offers productive methodologies for taking the enquiry forward in areas vital to a fuller, more nuanced understanding of the place of women writers as part of the whole picture of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cultural history in the German-speaking lands.’ — unsigned notice, Forum for Modern Language Studies 48.4 (October 2012), 489
  • ‘Thus the book’s structure, like its title, ultimately collapses: the future has not yet happened. Yet it is glimpsed here—and it will indeed necessarily entail killing off and reviving the female author and the female reader, undoing and redoing gender, sexuality, and herstory, embracing pluralism and firing the canon. And it will only have been achieved once the gatekeepers become contributors and all critics—including men—are doing feminist criticism.’ — Robert Gillett, Modern Language Review 109.2, April 2014, 547-48 (full text online)

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

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

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