Recent Reviews of MHRA Books

MHRA books are regularly reviewed in scholarly journals across the world, and sometimes also in literary papers such as the Times Literary Supplement. From time to time, our books also appear in Europe’s newspapers, from The Independent and the Daily Telegraph to El Imparcial and Gazeta Shqiptare. The following excerpts are from the 20 most recently received reviews:

  • The Tremors of Translation: An Edition of Voltaire's Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne (1756) — Clive Scott, ‘For scholars of literature and translation, rich reflections are served up, alongside intensely brilliant close poetic analysis... The most engaging element of this book remains Scott’s own conversational tone, with which he steers readers through a vast spread of erudite discussion, tossing about ideas, doodling and brainstorming to disrupt, provoke, shake, and deconstruct expectations.’ — Siofre Pierse, Modern Language Review 121.2, 2026, 276-77 (full text online)
  • The Integrity of the Avant-Garde: Karel Teige and the Biography of an Ambition — Peter Zusi, ‘Peter Zusi's book is an extremely noteworthy, focused and conceptually dense achievement that deepens our critical understanding of the significance of Karel Teige. [...] Zusi's view on Teige, his work and his significance is original and enlightening by no means only for foreign scholars interested in the Czech avant-garde. One can only hope the book will soon be published in Czech.’ — Josek Vojvodík, Umění 73.1, 2025, 82-85
  • Italo Calvino and Japan: A Journey through the Shallow Depths of Signs — Claudia Dellacasa, ‘Nella critica dell’opera di Calvino, il libro di Claudia Dellacasa è senza dubbio una novità. In contrapposizione a un approccio critico collegato a correnti critiche radicate nello strutturalismo e nel poststrutturalismo o in categorie di storia letteraria come modernismo epostmodernismo, Dellacasa incentra la sua critica su tematiche transculturali, ecologiche e post-o oltre-umane, campi di ricerca ai quali lei stessa ha contribuito con diverse pubblicazioni. Il libro infatti offre un’alternativa aggiornata ai diversi profili che si sono configurati nella critica dell’opera calviniana: un Calvino neo-realista, un Calvino strutturalista o poststrutturalista, un Calvino postmodernista e un Calvino semiologo d’ispirazione barthesiana e greimasiana. La studiosa dimostra che, nell’ultimo Calvino, queste correnti di pensiero teorico e critico tendono ad una semiotica ispirata a Peirce e a Eco, accanto a idee collegate alla filosofia del pensiero debole. In questo contesto sono state decisive sia l’esperienza di v’ — Ulla Musarra-Schrøder, Incontri 39.2, 2024, 137–139 (full text online)
  • Italo Calvino and Japan: A Journey through the Shallow Depths of Signs — Claudia Dellacasa, ‘By turning the spotlight on Calvino's encounter with Japan, Dellacasa's study aligns with contemporary world-literature approaches that trace how literary ideas circulate across borders, yet it also breaks new ground with its blend of ecomaterialist and posthumanist methodology. [...] Scholars of world literature will find Dellacasa's approach exemplary in its blend of close reading, theory, and cultural context. Italo Calvino and Japan makes a significant contribution to Calvino studies, offering new insights into the author's late oeuvre and the global dimensions of his imagination. By foregrounding Japan, Dellacasa uncovers connections and thematic developments in Calvino's work that had previously been underappreciated.’ — Ortensio Lando, Forum Italicum 2025 (full text online)
  • Staging Germanness in Contemporary British Theatre — Joseph Prestwich, ‘A thoughtful and considered study of contemporary Anglo-German theatrical exchange. Prestwich is extensive in his approach to the productions studied and engaging in his analysis. This text tells us much about the complex relations between the two states at theatrical and political levels and represents an important contribution to Anglophone scholarship on German theatre culture.’ — Richard McClelland, Comparative Drama 59.4, Winter 2025, 183-185 (full text online)
  • Crossings: Essays on Poetry and Translation from Hölderlin to Jaccottet — Charlie Louth, ‘Diese seltene Kombination von umfassender Gelehrtheit und philologischer Liebe zum einzelnen Wort zeichnet Louths Aufsätze als musterhafte Beispiele von 'literary criticism' aus, deren stilistischen Eleganz an die kritischen Schriften von T. S. Eliot und Frank Kermode erinnert. Oder vielleicht wäre es genauer zu sagen, dass Louths Aufsätze das Gleichgewicht von 'gravity and grace' erreichen, das er den poetischen und poetologischen Schriften Jaccottets zuschreibt. (289)’ — Kristina Mendicino, Hölderlin-Jahrbuch 44, 2024-2025, 417-21
  • George Moore, Confessions of a Young Man — Edited by Matthew Creasy, ‘A fine new critical edition of Confessions in its version of 1888 – the first for fifty years.’ — Emer Nolan, Times Literary Supplement 20 February 2026
  • Now Feed Yourself: Anglo-American and Italian Scholarship on Dante — Edited by Zygmunt G. Barański, Theodore J. Cachey, Jr., and Anna Pegoretti, ‘This volume is in a sense an annotated bibliography, but one that advances a thesis: namely that a distinct ‘Anglo-American’ approach to Dante Studies has taken shape over the last decade [...] best exemplified by research into the (soon-to-be) studia generalia of thirteenth-century Florence to which Dante may have had access.’ — Ryan Pepin, Medium Aevum 94.1, 2025, 257-58 (full text online)
  • Dante’s Blood — Anne C. Leone, ‘By focusing specifically on blood, Leone offers a novel perspective on Dante’s works [...] through the addition of an underexplored Italian perspective, Leone’s monograph supplements investigations by scholars such as Bettina Bildhauer, Peggy McCracken, and Caroline Walker Bynum into the cultural significance of blood across medieval Europe.’ — Rebecca Reilly, Medium Aevum 94.1, 2025, 246-48 (full text online)
  • Tutunakú: Language, Power and Youth in Central México — Lucia Brandi, ‘Provides insights for scholars working in language endangerment settings. It will interest those studying language ideologies, the lived experience of endangered language speakers, and collaborative language revitalization or reclamation.’ — Niku T’arhesi, Language in Society 2025, 1-3 (full text online)
  • Diaspora Reads: Community, Identity, and Russian Literaturocentrism — Angelos Theocharis, Adrian Wanner, Russian Review 85.1, January 2026, 108-09 (full text online)
  • Re-Viewing the Canon: Feminist Readings of German Literature from the Age of Goethe to the Present — Elizabeth Boa, ‘Die vorliegende Monographie fungiert zweifellos als übersichtliche Kollektion von komplexen und ertragreichen Aufsätzen Boas der letzten 40 Jahre, die sich mit Texten der Goethezeit bis zur Gegenwartsliteratur aus feministischer Perspektive befassen.’ — Maria Becker, Germanische-Romanische Monatsschrift 76.1, 2026, 128-130
  • The Integrity of the Avant-Garde: Karel Teige and the Biography of an Ambition — Peter Zusi, ‘As Zusi reveals, Teige’s enduring ambition throughout his career was that of a synthesizer. Any time there was a debate between two or more possible courses within the avant-garde, Teige’s aim was to bring them together, to reconcile in the name of a larger project... The introduction and chapter 1 offer the best introduction to Czechoslovak interwar modernism that I know; Teige’s life is convincingly narrated as exemplary of the evolution of art in its period.’ — Václav Lucien Paris, Comparative Critical Studies 22.2, 2025, 249–255 (full text online)
  • The Integrity of the Avant-Garde: Karel Teige and the Biography of an Ambition — Peter Zusi, ‘Teige was a true polymath. By extension, a Teige scholar must also work across his dizzying number of interests, and Zusi is more than up to the task. Drawing on Teige’s publications, diaries, artworks, and a vast set of secondary sources, he surveys what Teige wrote, what he read, and what he did not read, deftly situating him vis-à-vis figures like G. W. F. Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche, the Russian and international Constructivists, and Walter Benjamin, as well as domestic interlocutors like literary critic F. X. Šalda, Jan Mukařovský and the Prague Linguistic Circle, and Nezval. This amounts to more than an intellectual biography of one man. It is a revised cultural, intellectual, and political history of the Czechoslovak avant-garde that simultaneously reconfigures histories of interwar modernism and opens new directions for its study.’ — Alice Lovejoy, Slavic Review 84.3, 2025, 682-83 (full text online)
  • SPQR in the USSR: Elena Shvarts’s Classical Antiquity — Georgina Barker, ‘SPQR in the USSR is a detailed and meticulously researched exploration of classical references in Elena Shvarts’s poetry. The first book-length study of Shvarts’s work, it addresses poems written across her entire career, from her earliest unpublished verse of the 1960s to lyrics written months before her death in 2010... Barker’s excellent book provides inspiration for future exploration.’ — Sarah Clovis Bishop, Canadian Slavonic Papers 66.1-2, 2024, 257-58 (full text online)
  • Film Exhibition: The Italian Context — Edited by Damien Pollard and Edward Bowen, ‘One of the merits of this volume is that it offers a wide array of well-researched explorations of the diverse functions of film exhibition in Italy and its intersection with other facets of cinema, including production, distribution and marketing. By doing so, it delivers on the editors’ hope to offer a better understanding of Italian society... The volume also deserves credit for being the first one in English fully dedicated to this topic. Overall, the book is an excellent resource for scholars and students of Italian film and culture, as well as for those with a broad interest in the place of cinema and its industry within society.’ — Silvia Dibeltulo, Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies 14.1, 2026, 150-52 (full text online)
  • George Moore, Confessions of a Young Man — Edited by Matthew Creasy, ‘A welcome chance for readers to become acquainted with a largely forgotten text of one of Ireland’s most influential Irish revival and pre-revival writers. [...] An outstanding scholarly version of Moore’s intergeneric text.'’ — Graham Price, Volupté 8.2, 2025, 212–17
  • Translation Landscapes: Contemporary Galician Fiction in English — Laura Linares, ‘A substantial contribution to translation studies, minority-language scholarship, and the wider fields of the sociology of literature and transnational studies.’ — Helena Miguélez-Carballeira, Journal of European Studies 55.4, 2025, 480-84 (full text online)
  • The Tremors of Translation: An Edition of Voltaire's Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne (1756) — Clive Scott, ‘Clive Scott’s book is a remarkable celebration of the energies of creative language, and an important continuing contribution to the field of translation studies. It is also an exciting invitation to reread and reassess Voltaire’s poetry.’ — Nicholas Cronk, Voltaire Foundation 1 August 2025
  • Erasmus in English 1523-1584, Volume II: The Praise of Folly and Other Writings — Edited by Alex Davis, Gordon Kendal and Neil Rhodes, ‘Both the scholar and the learned reader will realize the many layers of appreciation that these volumes offer.’ — Joan Tello, Renaissance Quarterly 78, 2025, 509–12 (full text online)