Writing the Landscape: Exposing Nature in French Women's Fiction 1789–1815
Christie Margrave
Legenda (General Series) •23 April 2019
- ‘The book is meticulously researched and packed with critical responses from a variety of different fields, showing Margrave’s interdisciplinary intentions. This book opens the door for yet more focused work to be carried out on this understudied yet highly formative period in French literary and social history.’ — Stacie Allan, Modern Language Review 115.2, 2020, 470-71 (full text online)
- ‘Writing the Landscape’s strengths lie in its close literary analyses of lesser-known works by women... The book rightly calls our attention to a corpus of women’s writing that deserves more critical attention, and it renews our understanding of how - far from being insignificant green backdrops - landscape descriptions could serve as focal points within a novel.’ — Giulia Pacini, H-France 20, May 2018, no. 77
- ‘Scholars of European Romanticism have almost entirely overlooked the influence of French women writers of the First Republic and First Empire. In reaction to this oversight, Margrave's excellent monograph resituates the dominant themes of French Romanticism, firstly, as developing earlier than the 1820s and, secondly, as much more than a male phenomenon... This well-researched and beautifully written book provides fresh contributions to the fields of Women's Studies and French Romanticism by demonstrating the vital importance of these largely forgotten women writers of the First Republic and First Empire.’ — Julianna Starr, Women in French Studies 28, 2020, 147-48 (full text online)
- ‘Christie Margrave’s analysis of women writers’ feminist engagement with the Romantic vogue for natural landscape not only offers a fresh perspective on Romantic luminary Germaine de Staël; it also sheds light on the novels of Félicité de Genlis, Sophie Cottin, Barbara von Krüdener, and Adélaïde de Souza... This is an insightful, valuable, and timely study bound to inform and inspire future scholarship in French women’s writing of the Romantic era.’ — Laura Kirkley, French Studies 77.1, January 2023, 135-36 (full text online)
The Rise of Spanish American Poetry 1500-1700: Literary and Cultural Transmission in the New World
Edited by Rodrigo Cacho Casal and Imogen Choi
Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures 22•23 April 2019
- ‘En conjunto, The Rise of Spanish American Poetry supone una extraordinaria selección de aportaciones al estudio de los textos coloniales y sus relaciones culturales en un contexto transatlántico.’ — Víctor Sierra Matute, Bulletin of Spanish Studies 97.6, 2020, 1070-1071
- ‘La publicación no sólo resulta novedosa por la articulación multidisciplinaria de sus aproximaciones, sino por incorporar nuevas e interesantes interpretaciones... Sin duda, esta publicación constituye una aportación para el hispanismo que establece nuevas vías de interpretación dignas de ser atendidas y continuadas. Valga mencionar la hermosa factura del volumen y la esmerada edición, en la que el puñado de erratas detectadas no minimiza sus enormes aportaciones.’ — Andrés Iñigo Silva, Creneida 8, 2020, 394-400
- ‘Some of the strongest essays draw attention to authors, texts or topics that have for the most part received limited attention from scholars. The range of subjects covered is noteworthy and the editors and contributors deserve praise for their ability to bring into the realm of poetic signification issues as diverse as exploration, evangelization, natural disasters, ideological debates, literacy, humanism, print culture, theology, music theory, humor, Jesuit edu- cation, historiography, mourning, astrology, piracy or racialized discourses.’ — Emiro Martínez-Osorio, Colonial Latin American Review 29.4, 2020, 662-64 (full text online)
- ‘La proposition portée par Rodrigo Cacho, Imogen Choi et les onze contributeurs du volume présente, en définitive, de multiples mérites. Dans son approche de la poésie moderne, d’abord, elle promeut une lecture historique des corpus qui cherche et met en valeur les mécanismes d’hybridité depuis un regard résolument comparatiste entre les études hispanistes et les études américanistes. Dès lors, elle tire parti de la variété et de la variabilité idéologique et de positionnement politique des poètes et des poèmes plutôt que de l’ignorer en la réduisant à l’une ou l’autre des positions antagonistes. Le volume resitue aussi avec soin et de façon systématique les corpus abordés dans le contexte social et pragmatique de leur composition, dans leur lien avec ce que l’on pourrait appeler les usages de la poésie – y compris le véhicule musical, si rarement abordé dans les travaux des philologues. Ainsi la poésie peut-elle servir tout à la fois à édifier, à louer ou à décrédibiliser l’action des contemporains. L’ensembl’ — Aude Plagnard, Bulletin Hispanique 124.1, 2022, 365-69
Comparative Literature in Britain: National Identities, Transnational Dynamics 1800-2000
Joep Leerssen
Studies In Comparative Literature 27•23 September 2019
- ‘This is a study of the rare kind of which it can truthfully be said that it is definitive: the description fits Leerssen’s book perfectly. To those still living who launched comparative literature in the new universities some 50 years ago it will come as a happy reminder of an exciting time of innovation and change which they were fortunate to have been part of. To those of a later generation it will reveal that what happened in the 1960s did not emerge from nowhere: a long and honourable history, ably explored by Professor Leerssen, led up to it.’ — John Fletcher, Journal of European Studies 50.3, 2020, 302-321 (full text online)
- ‘The publication of [this book] is welcome news... The entire section on the nineteenth century is a treasure house of insights into cross-national and comparative ways of approaching knowledge... This is, all in all, a book to be heartily recommended for a wide variety of readers interested in comparative studies in the humanities and social sciences, while being of particular interest to those wishing to understand the evolution of literary and cultural studies.’ — Barnita Bagchi, History of Humanities Fall 2020, 554-56