MHRA is committed to disseminating research and to making it as widely available as possible. We have edited Modern Language Review since around 1920, so we have a track record of over a century of using publishing to support the field of modern languages. Our books came along later, in 1970: a year of great modernisation in the book industry, when the computer coding system used by W. H. Smith was developed into the mighty ISBN reference number. Now, in another year of modernisation in scholarly publishing, we are reissuing many of those early titles as Open Access ebooks at this website, which are completely free for anyone to read. This is work paid for by our own charitable funds, as a service to the scholarly community.

The titles revived today originally appeared in the Texts and Dissertations series, whose original covers were colour-coded according to the languages they studied. This is the very 1970s palette they came up with:

 Grey German to 1978
Mustard yellow German 1979-85
Grey German 1986-
Sundry shades of blue French
Pale green Italian
Red Hispanic
Purple Slavonic
A slightly beige brown English

Our long-standing distributor of these deep back-list titles, Turpin Books, went into receivership in late 2022, and stocks were tiny if they existed at all. So these have become hard books to obtain, but they are still frequently cited by contemporary scholars. For example, Ritchie Robertson's forthcoming German Political Tragedy: The Machiavellian Plot and the Necessary Crime (2024), which we will publish later this year, draws on Dorothy James's 1982 monograph Georg Büchner's 'Dantons Tod': A Reappraisal, still a valuable study of the play.

And there are many more like that. David Constantine's study of Hölderlin, and James Kearns's book on the Symbolist poets as part of the Paris art scene, to name only two, are models of the elegant, readable monograph at its best. Studies such as David Gillespie's look at the Soviet novelist Valentin Rasputin, or Christina Howells's on Jean-Paul Sartre, show us major figures of the past as they seemed when still living.

To download or read these books, see our new Open Access home page.

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