The David Brown Book Company Presents New and Forthcoming titles in
Literature Dear Diego
Revolutionary Women Writers
by Elena Poniatowska, translated with an introduction by Nathanial Gardner
Charlotte Smith and Helen Maria Williams by Angela Keane
When Diego Rivera’s biographer, Bertram Wolfe, was sifting through the painter’s jumbled collection of correspondence, he encountered a series of Parisian letters from the Russian painter Angelina Beloff. Long before Diego became famous for his Mexican murals or his renowned wife, Frida Kahlo, he was married to Beloff. Wolfe was impressed by the letters and included a chapter on them in his biography of the muralist. Several years later, Mexican author Elena Poniatowska decided to rewrite them.
This book brings together two of the most significant British women writers of the Romantic period, Charlotte Smith and Helen Maria Williams, and explores the poetics and politics of their work. In the 1790s, when Charlotte Smith and Helen Maria Williams were at the peak of their critical reputations, they were known to each other and often cited together approvingly. It was Smith who provided the young William Wordsworth with a letter of introduction to Williams when he visited France in 1791 (though she had left by the time he got there). By the end of the decade, Smith and Williams were being cited together more pejoratively, as two of a number of women who came to stand for the amoral, sexually suspect and politically naïve English ‘Jacobins,’ who were vilified in the conservative press. Neither were in fact ‘Jacobins,’ but they were revolutionary. This book looks at how Smith and Williams earned such reputations and at the politics and poetics of the works that reveal Smith to be a self-constructed Romantic and Williams as a mistress of intimate disguise. 128p.
The result is Querido Diego, te abraza Quiela, a masterful blending of fact and fiction that creates a novella out of twelve imagined letters that Angelina writes to Diego over a nine-month period. This bilingual edition is a new initiative that introduces the reader to the work of one of Mexico’s most celebrated female writers and helps the student and enthusiast understand this author’s place and importance in Latin American letters. 266p. Aris & Phillips, Hispanic Classics, 2012 9780856688805, hardback – $80.00. Special Offer $64.00 9780856688812, paperback – $25.00. Special Offer $20.00
Northcote House Publishers, Writers and their Work, July 2012 9780746310960, hardback – $80.00. Special Offer $64.00 9780746309711, paperback – Was $26.00. Now just $19.95
Desire in Dante and the Middle Ages edited by Manuele Gragnolati, Tristan Kay, Elena Lombardi and Francesca Southerden This volume takes Dante’s rich and multifaceted discourse of desire, from the Vita Nova to the Commedia, as a point of departure in investigating medieval concepts of desire in all their multiplicity, fragmentation and interrelation. As well as offering several original contributions on this fundamental aspect of Dante’s work, it seeks to situate the Florentine more effectively within the broader spectrum of medieval culture and to establish greater intellectual exchange between Dante scholars and those from other disciplines. The volume is also notable for its openness to diverse critical and methodological approaches. In considering the extent to which modern theoretical paradigms can be used to shed light upon the Middle Ages, it will interest those engaged with questions of critical theory as well as medieval culture. 200p. Maney Publishing, Legenda Main Series, July 2012 9781907747960, hardback – $89.50. Special Offer $72.00
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Tirso de Molina Marta the Divine translated with an introduction by Harley Erdman Tirso de Molina’s Marta the Divine (c. 1614-15) is a spirited comedy about an ingenious young woman who fakes religious piety in order to avoid an arranged marriage imposed upon her by her father. Marta has been a controversial play over the years, condemned for immorality and salaciousness by some, championed as an anticlerical tract by others. No matter one’s perspective, Marta is memorable because of the audaciousness and resourcefulness of the title character. This edition presents the play for the first time ever in English translation. The translation is accompanied by the Spanish text, translators’ note and a substantial introduction. 112p. Aris & Phillips, Hispanic Classics, July 2012 9781908343000, hardback – $80.00. Special Offer $64.00 9781908343017, paperback – $25.00. Special Offer $20.00
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Aris & Phillips Aris & Phillips has been an imprint of Oxbow Books since 2002. The Aris & Phillips Hispanic Classics series publishes editions of Hispanic texts from the Middle Ages, through the Golden Age, to twentieth century literature including plays, poetry, and novels. The volumes include wide-ranging introductions, translator’s notes and select bibliographies. Each text is presented in the original language, with facing page English translation. The series editor is Dr Jonathan Thacker of Merton College, Oxford. We welcome proposals for submissions, please visit www.oxbowbooks.com Tirso de Molina
Pedro Calderón de la Barca
Jealous of Herself translated with an introduction by Harley Erdman
Life’s a Dream translated and with an introduction by Michael Kidd
Tirso de Molina’s Jealous of Herself (c. 1622-23) is an ingenious comedy of disguise and deception set in the streets, plazas, and fashionable apartments of early 17th- century Madrid. It follows a lofty-minded man who worships an idealised image of a woman. Attention is shifted from the dreamer to the dreamed - that is, to the individual trapped in and torn apart by this fantasy, the young woman, Doña Magdalena. Her internal conflict - the fact that she finds herself jealous of herself - ultimately becomes the axis of the play. The play is carefully structured and builds relentlessly, climaxing with two great set-piece scenes that deserve to be on any list of great Renaissance-era stage moments. This book is the first-ever English translation. 304p.
What is life? A frenzy. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a fiction; and the greatest good is fleeting, for all life is a dream, and even dreams are but dreams. That is the haunting lesson learned by Prince Sigismund in Life’s a Dream, the best known and most widely admired play of Catholic Europe’s greatest dramatist, Pedro Calderón de la Barca. Nowhere is Calderón’s talent more evident than in this poignant tale of a prince imprisoned at birth by his astrologer-king father and liberated on the same day a beautiful woman stumbles into his life. The volume comes with a generous set of supplementary materials including critical introduction, translator’s notes, suggestions for directors, bibliography, and glossary. 266p.
Aris & Phillips, Hispanic Classics, July 2012 9780856688751, hardback – $80.00. Special Offer $64.00 9780856688768, paperback – $25.00. Special Offer $20.00
Aris & Phillips, Hispanic Classics, 2011 9780856688966, hardback – $80.00. Special Offer $64.00 9780856688959, paperback – $30.00. Special Offer $24.00
Pepita Jiménez A Novel by Juan Valera translated from the Spanish by Robert M. Fedorchek, introduction by James Whiston The unifying thread of the work of Juan Valera y Alcalá-Galiano (1824-1905), is art for art’s sake, that is, beauty as the end and purpose of imaginative literature, an ideal epitomised by Pepita Jiménez, long considered one of the best novels of 19th-century Spain. When it was first published in 1874, Pepita Jiménez became an instant success. It tells of Luis de Vargas, a devout twentytwo-year-old seminarian who has come home to visit with his father before entering the priesthood. The storyline unfolds when he meets a comely twenty-year-old widow named Pepita Jiménez and has his religious calling put to the test. 295p. Aris & Phillips, Hispanic Classics, 2012 9780856688850, hardback – $80.00. Special Offer $64.00 9780856688867, paperback – $30.00. Special Offer $24.00
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Legenda from Maney Publishing Legenda is a book imprint jointly owned by Maney Publishing, a leading independent academic publisher, and the Modern Humanities Research Association, one of the UK’s most important learned societies. Titles range from medieval texts to contemporary cinema and form a widely comparative view of the modern humanities, including works on English, French, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Yiddish literature. For more information, visit www.legendabooks.com
LEGENDA MAIN SERIES The main Legenda series, with its distinctive blue cover, presents titles across a wide range of cultural topics.
Pessoa in an Intertextual Web
Women, Genre and Circumstance
Influence and Innovation edited by David G. Frier
Essays in Memory of Elizabeth Fallaize edited by Margaret Atack, Diana Holmes, Diana Knight, and Judith Still
Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) is Portugal’s most celebrated poet of the twentieth century, who wrote under the guise of dozens of literary personalities. As well as his poetry, however, his work is marked by a constantly inventive and innovative engagement with authors and literary traditions from a variety of sources, placing him firmly in the worldwide literary canon. This volume brings together a number of experts at the forefront of Pessoa studies, with chapters examining his literary relations with Italy, Spain, France, England and Portugal, as well as his contextualisation in relation to major philosophers such as Kant and Nietzsche. It also includes consideration of his prose masterpiece The Book of Disquiet, as well as of various aspects of his poetic oeuvre. 200p. Maney Publishing, Legenda Main Series, 2012 9781907747939, hardback – $89.50. Special Offer $72.00
Women, Genre and Circumstance brings together a series of challenging essays which explore the complex intersections of feminism, narrative and genre. Drawing on a wide range of 19th and 20th century texts - novels, short stories and films - they interrogate the relationship between women’s situation and writing practice, and representations of history, memory, love, old age; they pursue questions of narrative form and its meanings, particularly the distinctive features of the short story. The politics of feminist criticism and careful attention to the operations of narrative combine in a sustained exploration of the aesthetics and ethics of fictional practices, and their role in the negotiation of gender and circumstance. The essays were written as tributes to the leading feminist scholar Elizabeth Fallaize. 200p. Maney Publishing, Legenda Main Series, August 2012 9781907975301, hardback – $89.50. Special Offer $72.00
Regarding Lost Time Photography, Identity and Affect in Proust, Benjamin, and Barthes by Katja Haustein
Octavio Paz and T.S. Eliot Modern Poetry and the Translation of Influence by Tom Boll
What is autobiography and how does it transform in the age of technological reproducibility? Katja Haustein discusses this question as it relates to photography and the role of emotion in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1909-22), Walter Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood around 1900 (1932-38), and Roland Barthes’s Roland Barthes (1977) and Camera Lucida (1980). In her close critical readings, Haustein provides the first comprehensive comparative analysis of these popular works, mapping them against little-studied textual, visual and aural material, some of which has only recently become accessible. Her book opens new avenues in scholarship dedicated to three outstanding twentieth-century writers and contributes to a field of critical inquiry that is still in the making: the history of autobiography in the light of a history of the gaze. 206p.
When the sixteen-year-old Octavio Paz (1914-1998) discovered The Waste Land in Spanish translation, it ‘opened the doors of modern poetry’. The influence of T.S. Eliot would accompany Paz throughout his career, defining many of his key poems and pronouncements. Yet Paz’s attitude towards his precursor was ambivalent. Boll’s study is the first to trace the history of Paz’s engagement with Eliot in Latin American and Spanish periodicals of the 1930s and 40s. It reveals the fault lines that run through the work of the dominant figure in recent Mexican letters. By positioning Eliot in a Latin American context, it also offers new perspectives on one of the capital figures of Anglo-American modernism. 200p.
Maney Publishing, Legenda Main Series, 2012 9781907747915, hardback – $89.50. Special Offer $72.00
Maney Publishing, Legenda Main Series, August 2012 9781906540432, hardback – $89.50. Special Offer $72.00
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Legenda from Maney Publishing Proust, the One, and the Many
Translating the Perception of Text
Identity and Difference in A la recherche du temps perdu by Erika Fülöp
Literary Translation and Phenomenology by Clive Scott
One of the many aspects that make Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu such a complex and subtle work is its engagement with metaphysical questions. The disparate nature of the narrator’s experiences, hypotheses, and statements has generated a number of conflicting interpretations, based on parallels with the thought of one or another philosopher from Plato to Leibniz, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bergson, or Deleuze. Through the analysis of the narrator’s two seemingly incompatible perceptions of the world, which reveal reality to be either one or infinitely multiple, Erika Fülöp proposes a reading of the novel that reconciles the opposites. Rather than being undecided or self-contradictory, the narrative thematizes the insufficiency of the dualist perspective and invites the reader to take a step beyond it. 208p.
Maney Publishing, Legenda Main Series, July 2012 9781907975325, hardback – $89.50. Special Offer $72.00
Translation often proceeds as if languages already existed, as if the task of the translator were to make an appropriate selection from available resources. Clive Scott challenges this tacit assumption. If the translator is to do justice to himself/herself as a reader, if the translator is to become the creative writer of his/her reading, then the language of translation must be equal to the translator’s perceptual experience of, and bodily responses to, source texts. Each renewal of perceptual and physiological contact with a text involves a renewal of the ways we think language and use our expressive faculties (listening, speaking, writing). Phenomenology and particularly the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty underpins this new approach to translation. The task of the translator is tirelessly to develop new translational languages, ever to move beyond the bilingual into the multilingual, and always to remember that language is as much an active instrument of perception as an object of perception. 200p. Maney Publishing, Legenda Main Series, July 2012 9781907975356, hardback – $89.50. Special Offer $72.00
Renaissance Keywords
Dante in Oxford
edited by Ita Mac Carthy
The Paget Toynbee Lectures 1995-2003 edited by Martin McLaughlin and Michelangelo Zaccarello
Certain words played a crucial role in the making of the European Renaissance, and still recur today in our shifting understanding of it. Discretion and grace, to take two examples studied here, express how individuals thought about themselves, each other and their experience of the world, yet they are as hard to define as they are ever-present in Renaissance discourse. This collection of essays offers new interpretations of these and other ‘keywords’ and provides a rich contextual framework for the exploration of central Renaissance ideas. The result is an exploration at the cutting edge of contemporary research. 200p.
Maney Publishing, Legenda Main Series, July 2012 9781907975295, hardback – $89.50. Special Offer $72.00
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The Paget Toynbee lectures on Dante have taken place in Oxford since the mid-1990s. Named after the great medieval scholar of the first half of the twentieth century, they have been delivered by the major Dante experts of our time. This volume gathers together twelve of the most significant lectures, given by internationally renowned scholars such as Zygmunt Baranski, John Barnes, Lino Leonardi, Emilio Pasquini, Michelangelo Picone, Jonathan Usher and the late Peter Armour. The topics range from key questions such as Dante, Ovid and the poetry of exile, to ground-breaking work on obscenity in the Divine Comedy. 199p.
Maney Publishing, Legenda Main Series, 2011 9781900755993, hardback – $79.50. Special Offer $64.00
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Legenda from Maney Publishing Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism edited by David Adams and Galin Tihanov
The Picture as Spectre in Diderot, Proust, and Deleuze by Thomas Baldwin
Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism brings together ten innovative contributions by outstanding scholars working across a wide array of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Interdisciplinary in its methodology and compass, with a strong comparative European dimension, the volume examines discourses ranging from literature, historiography, music and opera to anthropology and political philosophy. It makes an original contribution to the study of 18th-century ideas of universal peace, progress, and wealth as the foundation of future debates on cosmopolitanism. At the same time, it analyses examples of counter-reaction to these ideas and discusses the relevance of the Enlightenment for subsequent polemics on cosmopolitanism, including twenty-first century debates in sociology, politics, and legal theory. 174p.
Maney Publishing, Legenda Main Series, 2011 9781907747946, hardback – $89.50. Special Offer $72.00
Textual Wanderings The Theory and Practice of Narrative Digression edited by Rhian Atkin
The possibility of ekphrasis the verbal representation of visual imagery is fundamental to all writing about art, be it art criticism, theory, or a passage in a novel. But there is no consensus concerning how such representation works. Some take it for granted that writing about art can result in a precise match between words and visual images. For others, ekphrasis amounts to a kind of virtuoso rivalry, in which the writer aims to outdo the pictorial image that is being described. In close readings of Diderot, Proust and Deleuze, Thomas Baldwin shows how ekphrasis can create a spectral effect. In other words, ekphrastic spectres do not function as fully present stand-ins for given works of art; nor can they be reduced to the status of passive and absent others. Baldwin also explores the ways in which the works of Diderot, Proust and Deleuze inhabit each other as ghostly influences. 143p.
Maney Publishing, Legenda Main Series, 2011 9781907625039, hardback – $89.50. Special Offer $72.00
Post-War Jewish Women’s Writing in French Juives françaises ou Françaises juives? by Lucille Cairns
Digression is a crucial motif in literary narratives. It features as a key characteristic of fictional works from Cervantes and Sterne, to Proust, Joyce and Calvino. Moving away from a linear narrative and following a path of associations reflects how we think and speak. Yet an author’s inability to stick to the point has often been seen to detract from a work of literature, somehow weakening it. This wide-ranging and timely volume seeks to celebrate narrative digressions and move towards a theoretical framework for studying the meanderings of literary texts as a useful and valuable aspect of literature. Essays discussing some of the possibilities for approaching narrative digression from a theoretical perspective are complemented with focused studies of European and American authors. As a whole, the book offers a broad and varied view of textual wanderings. 129p.
How have French Jewish women reacted to the great traumas of the last century - the Holocaust, North African decolonization and the resulting migration of African Jews to France, the ArabIsraeli crisis and the aftermath of 9/11? Cairns’s major new volume identifies the themes of books by French Jewish women from 1945 to the present day, gauging to what extent they are dominated by these events. Thirty authors in particular serve as representatives of a great, and greatly diverse, pool: divided not only as Ashkenazim or Sephardim, but by origins scattered across Algeria, Egypt, Germany, Hungary, Morocco, Poland, Romania, Russia, Tunisia, and Turkey. Theirs is a transnational, doubly-diasporic, and thus particularly complex paradigm in which feminism, loyalty to family culture and to the traditions of Judaism often exists in tension with French Republican models of assimilation, non-differentiation, and gender-blindness. 257p.
Maney Publishing, Legenda Main Series, 2011 9781907747908, hardback – $89.50. Special Offer $72.00
Maney Publishing, Legenda Main Series, 2011 9781906540401, hardback – $89.50. Special Offer $72.00
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Legenda from Maney Publishing Portuguese Modernisms Multiple Perspectives on Literature and the Visual Arts edited by Steffen Dix and Jerónimo Pizarro For a more encompassing and stimulating picture of Modernism - seen as a movement of the 20th century, a broad spectrum of work across many countries - we must explore its diversity. Portuguese Modernism manifested itself both in visual art and in literature, and made a vigorous contribution to this time of profound cultural change. Indeed, the sociocultural transformations that marked the early 20th century in Portugal are still current. This volume provides a critical guide for students and teachers, contributed to by an array of scholars with unparalleled knowledge of the period, its artists and its writers. 406p. Maney Publishing, Legenda Main Series, 2011 9781906540791, hardback – $89.50. Special Offer $72.00
English Responses to French Poetry 1880-1940 Translation and Mediation by Jennifer Higgins Between 1880 and 1940, English responses to French poetry evolved from marginalised expressions of admiration associated with rebellion against the ‘establishment,’ to mainstream mutual exchange and appreciation. The translation of poetry underwent a simultaneous evolution, from attempts to produce definitive renderings to definitions of translation as an ongoing, generative process at the centre of literary debate. This study traces the impact of French poetry in England, via a wide range of translations by major poets of the time as well as renderings by now-forgotten writers. It explores poetry and translations beyond the limits of the usual canon, and identifies key moments of influence, from late nineteenth-century English homages to Victor Hugo as a liberal icon, to Ezra Pound re-interpreting Charles Baudelaire for the twentieth century. 155p. Maney Publishing, Legenda Main Series, 2011 9781907625060, hardback – $89.50. Special Offer $72.00
Reading Games in the Greek Novel by Eleni Papargyriou How is play constituent in the formation of the Greek modernist novel? Reflecting competition with European and North American models as well as internal antagonism with more established literary genres in Greece, the novel after the 1930s employed playfulness as a means to demonstrate or even perform its novelty. Innovations unexpectedly came from the Greek periphery rather than Athens, and the Greek novel swiftly exchanged a passively understood realism for communicative patterns that actively involve the reader and
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educate him into bringing scraps of plot into a meaningful synthesis. Featuring key Greek authors such as Yannis Skarimbas, Stratis Tsirkas and Nikos Kachtitsis, this is a comprehensive and innovative study of Greek modernist prose fiction and the first of its kind to appear in English. 186p. Maney Publishing, Legenda Main Series, 2011 9781906540838, hardback – $89.50. Special Offer $72.00
Victor Hugo, Jean-Paul Sartre, and the Liability of Liberty by Bradley Stephens The arch-Romantic Victor Hugo (1802-85) and the Existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80) are widely perceived to have little in common beyond their canonical status. However, responding to Sartre’s often overlooked fascination with Hugo, Bradley Stephens cuts through generic divisions to argue that significant parallels between the two writers have been neglected. Stephens argues that both Hugo and Sartre engage with human being in distinctly non-ontological terms, thereby anticipating postmodernist approaches to human experience. From different origins but towards similar realisations, they expose the indeterminate human condition as at once release and restriction. These writers insist that liberty is not simply a political ideal, but an existential condition which engages human endeavour as a dynamic rather than definitive mode of being. This incisive new book affirms the ongoing relevance of the two most iconic French writers of the modern period to contemporary discourse on what it means to be free. 178p. Maney Publishing, Legenda Main Series, 2011 9781907747014, hardback – $89.50. Special Offer $72.00
Examining Whiteness Reading Clarice Lispector through Bessie Head and Toni Morrison by Lucia Villares Critics consider Clarice Lispector the leading female writer in the Brazilian literary canon. Her connections with the nation, however, seem to magically disappear as her work is analyzed. This paradox is the starting point for this analysis of the works of an author who - despite being born in the Ukraine - grew up to be an irreplaceable presence in Brazilian literature. Non-Brazilian authors, such as the South African Bessie Head and the North American Toni Morrison, provide triggering concepts to help tackle a blind-spot in Brazilian culture: the issue of racial difference. From this new perspective, overlooked black characters in Lispector’s work become crucial and relevant, and whiteness emerges as an unexamined set of norms. 200p. Maney Publishing, Legenda Main Series, 2011 9781906540470, hardback – $89.50. Special Offer $72.00
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Legenda from Maney Publishing The Truth of Realism
Proust Writing Photography
A Reassessment of the German Novel 18301900 by John Walker
Fixing the Fugitive in A la recherche due temps perdu by Aine Larkin
In his new book, Walker offers a radical reassessment of the German realist novel in the nineteenth century. Especially in the Englishspeaking world, German narrative realism has persistently been interpreted as the literary expression of an ‘ideology of the aesthetic’. The German realist novel is alleged to reflect philosophical idealism: to reject the ‘prose’ of modern society in favour of the ‘poetry’ of the inner aesthetic life. This book challenges that received view. Walker argues that German narrative realism should be read not only in relation to, but in crucial respects against, the dominant philosophical idiom of nineteenth century Germany. The core of the book is the close reading of eight of the best known realist novels in German by Keller, Raabe and Fontane. This reading shows how the German realist novel, far from transposing the assumptions of aesthetic idealism into narrative form, exposes the real consequences of those assumptions in the culture and society of its time. 213p.
The importance of vision and visual arts such as painting, theatre, and sculpture in Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu has long been affirmed; another significant system of visual representation in the novel is photography. Proust appropriated photography as a practice with its own distinctive characteristics which could inform his writing about the processes of perception and memory. Through close textual analysis of scenes where photography is experienced or observed as a practice, and scenes where photography is written into the body of the text, Aine Larkin offers an invigorating new study that sheds genuinely new light on the presence of photographic motifs in Proust’s novel, and the subtlety of Proust’s engagement with this modern imaging system in his work. 222p.
Maney Publishing, Legenda Main Series, 2011 9781906540906, hardback – $89.50. Special Offer $72.00
Maney Publishing, Legenda Main Series, 2011 9781907747953, hardback – $89.50. Special Offer $72.00
Mediterranean Travels
Dante’s Plurilingualism
Writing Self and Other from the Ancient World to the Contemporary Society edited by Patrick Crowley, Noreen Humble, and Silvia Ross
Authority, Knowledge, Subjectivity edited by Sara Fortuna, Manuele Gragnolati, and Jürgen Trabant
Written by leading scholars in the field, this collection analyzes the notion of travel writing as a genre, while tracing significant examples of Mediterranean travel writing that return us to Ancient Greece, to Medieval pilgrimages, to Venetians’ diplomatic missions, to an Egyptian’s account of Paris in the nineteenth century, to French artistic journeys in North Africa and to contemporary narratives of privileged resettlement, death, and dislocation. 256p.
Maney Publishing, Legenda Main Series, 2011 9781907975073, hardback – $89.50. Special Offer $72.00
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Dante’s conception of language is encompassed in all his works and can be understood in terms of a strenuous defense of the volgare in tension with the prestige of Latin. By bringing together different approaches, from literary studies to philosophy and history, from aesthetics to queer studies, from psychoanalysis to linguistics, this volume offers new critical insights on the question of Dante’s language, engaging with both the philosophical works characterized by an original project of vulgarization, and the poetic works, which perform a new language in an innovative and selfreflexive way. In particular, Dante’s Plurilingualism explores the rich and complex way in which Dante’s linguistic theory and praxis both informs and reflects an original configuration of the relationship between authority, knowledge and identity that continues to be fascinated by an ideal of unity but is also imbued with a strong element of subjectivity and opens up towards multiplicity and modernity. 306p. Maney Publishing, Legenda Main Series, 2010 9781906540784, hardback – $89.50. Special Offer $72.00
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Legenda from Maney Publishing LEGENDA ITALIAN PERSPECTIVES Italian Perspectives publishes books and collections of essays on any aspect and period of Italian literature, language, history, culture, politics, art, and media, as well as studies which take an interdisciplinary approach and are methodologically innovative. At a time of growing academic interest, the series aims to bring together different scholarly perspectives on Italy and its culture.
Giraffes in the Garden of Italian Literature
Disrupted Narratives
Modernist Embodiment in Italo Svevo, Federigo Tozzi and Carlo Emilio Gadda by Deborah Amberson
Illness, Silence and Identity in Svevo, Pressburger and Morandini by Emma Bond
Writing in 1926, Carlo Emilio Gadda (1893-1973) acknowledges his peculiarity within the Italian literary field by describing himself as a giraffe or a kangaroo in Italy’s beautiful garden of literature. Gadda’s selfcharacterization as an exotic and even ungainly animal applies in equal measure to Italo Svevo (1861-1928) and Federigo Tozzi (1883-1920), authors who, like Gadda, thwarted efforts at critical classification. Yet the ostensible strangeness of these three Italian authors is diminished when their writing is considered within the framework of modernism, a label traditionally avoided by the Italian critical establishment. Indeed, within a modernism preoccupied with human embodiment, these Italian literary giraffes find their kin. Here, the central nexus of body, subjectivity and style that informs and binds the writing of Svevo, Tozzi and Gadda resonates with a modernist renegotiation and revalorization of a human body whose dignity and epistemological authority have been contested by social and technological modernity. 186p.
If Madame Bovary’s death in Flaubert’s 1857 novel marked the definitive end of the Romantic vision of literary disease, then the advent of psychoanalysis less than half a century later heralded an entirely new set of implications for literature dealing with illness. The theorization of a potential unconscious double in turn suggested a capacity to subvert or destabilize the text, exposing the main thread of the narrative to be unreliable or self-conscious. Indeed, the authors examined in this study (Italo Svevo, Giorgio Pressburger and Giuliana Morandini) all make use of individual ‘infected’ or suppressed voices within their texts which unfold through illness to cast doubt on a more dominant narrative standpoint. Applying the theories of Freud and more recent writings by Julia Kristeva, Bond offers a new critical reading of the literary function of illness, a function related to the very nature of narration itself. 200p. Maney Publishing, Legenda Italian Perspectives 24, July 2012 9781907975387, hardback – $89.50. Special Offer $72.00
Maney Publishing, Legenda Italian Perspectives 22, 2012 9781907975264, hardback – $89.50. Special Offer $72.00
Ugo Foscolo and English Culture by Sandra Parmegiani
Remembering Aldo Moro The Cultural Legacy of the 1978 Kidnapping and Murder edited by Ruth Glynn and Giancarlo Lombardi The 1978 kidnapping and murder of Christian Democrat politician, Aldo Moro, marked the watershed of Italy’s experience of political violence in the period known as the ‘years of lead’ (1969-c.1983). This highly interdisciplinary volume explores the evolving legacy of Moro’s death in the Italian cultural imaginary, from the late 1970s to the present. Bringing a wide range of critical perspectives to bear, interventions by experts in the fields of political science, social anthropology, philosophy, and cultural critique elicit new understandings of the events of 1978 and explain their significance and relevance to present-day Italian culture and society. 204p.
Maney Publishing, Legenda Italian Perspectives 23, 2012 9781907975271, hardback – $89.50. Special Offer $72.00
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The history of the literary relations between Italy and England has its most celebrated early modern representative in Ugo Foscolo (1778-1827). Foscolo’s translation of Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy is often regarded as the benchmark of his English experience, but there is more that can be uncovered. With over 3,000 letters spanning three decades, Foscolo’s correspondence represents a unique perspective from which to monitor his literary, philosophical, and political views. The ‘Epistolario’ is also a space in which Foscolo engages with literary, philosophical, and moral questions, and a place where he exercises an often private form of literary criticism. These are letters which ultimately produce one of the most complete yet most composite self-portraits in the history of modern Italian autobiography. In the first comprehensive and historicized reading of Foscolo’s correspondence, Sandra Parmegiani reveals the rich and complex relations between the Italian writer and the literature, philosophy, and culture of eighteenth- and nineteenth- century England. 152p. Maney Publishing, Legenda Italian Perspectives 20, 2011 9781906540609, hardback – $89.50. Special Offer $72.00
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Legenda from Maney Publishing LEGENDA RESEARCH MONOGRAPHS IN FRENCH STUDIES Research Monographs in French Studies are selected and edited by the Society for French Studies. The series seeks to publish the best new work in all areas of the literature, thought, theory, culture, film and language of the French-speaking world.
The Printed Media in Fin-de-siècle Italy
The Livres-Souvenirs of Colette
Publishers, Writers, and Readers edited by Ann Hallamore Caesar, Gabriella Romani, and Jennifer Burns
Genre and the Telling of Time by Anne Freadman
The Unification of Italy in 1870 heralded a period of unprecedented change. While successive Liberal governments pursued imperial ventures and took Italy into World War One on the Allied side, on the domestic front technological advance, the creation of a national transport network, the expansion of state education, internal migration to cities and the rise of political associations all contributed to the rapid expansion of the print industry and the development of new and highly diversified reading publics. Drawing on publishers’ archives, letters, diaries, and printed material, this book provides the most up-to-date research into the printed media in Italy between 1870 and 1914. This book is intended for those with interests in cultural production and consumption and questions of nation-formation and nationhood in and outside Italy. 200p. Maney Publishing, Legenda Italian Perspectives 21, 2011 9781906540746, hardback – $89.50. Special Offer $72.00
Maryse Condé and the Space of Literature
Throughout her career, Colette experimented with genre for the purposes of telling stories of her life. The books that resulted, known collectively as her “livressouvenirs,” are far from being autobiographies in the customary sense. By addressing the need to reconsider the generic issues surrounding autobiographical story- telling, Anne Freadman’s study brings the richness of “the genre question” to the fore, shedding a fresh light on this much-loved body of work. From the vignettes of La Maison de Claudine to the note-books of L’étoile vesper and Le Fanal bleu, from stories of losing to stories of collecting, Colette’s memory books take different narrative forms and explore the passing of time in different ways. This book investigates Colette’s variegated generic choices as so many ways of “telling time”. 200p.
Maney Publishing, Legenda Research Monographs in French Studies 33, July 2012 9781906540937, hardback – $75.00. Special Offer $60.00
The Subversive Poetics of Alfred Jarry
by Eva Sansavior
Ubusing Culture in the Almanachs du Père Ubu by Marieke Dubbelboer
The Guadeloupean writer and critic Maryse Condé has for the last twenty-five years divided her time between her native Guadeloupe and the United States. If the author’s work has attracted much critical attention in the United States, it is her fictional works that have been the focus of this attention, with these predominantly read in the light of political themes such as identity and resistance. In these intelligent and sensitive readings, Eva Sansavior argues in favour of adopting a broader thematic and generic approach to the author’s work. Sansavior accounts for the multiple and oblique uses of literature in Condé’s literary and critical work, tracking its complex interactions with tradition, reception, politics and autobiography, and also the singular possibilities that these interactions present for re- imagining the ideas of politics, literature, identity and, ultimately, the nature of critical practice itself. 200p.
Paradox and provocation were essential features of all of the work of Alfred Jarry (1873-1907). His nonconformist attitude, whether employed to subvert literary or artistic conventions or to scrutinize social and political issues, marked both his literary writing and his view of the world. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the experimental and satirical Almanachs du Père Ubu (1898 and 1901), which to date have received little critical attention. Jarry’s ground breaking use of collage in these early works, his absurdist humour and his rethinking of literary authorship and artistic originality foreshadow many innovations of twentieth-century art and literature. In this generously illustrated study, Marieke Dubbelboer examines key characteristics of Jarry’s poetics through an analysis of the Almanachs and addresses their role within the European avant-garde. 152p.
Maney Publishing, Legenda Research Monographs in French Studies 32, July 2012 9781906540944, hardback – $75.00. Special Offer $60.00
Maney Publishing, Legenda Research Monographs in French Studies 35, 2012 9781907747984, hardback – $75.00. Special Offer $60.00
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Legenda from Maney Publishing Syntactic Borrowing in Contemporary French A Linguistic Analysis of News Translation by Mairi McLaughlin It is widely held that the large-scale translation of international news from English will lead to changes in French syntax. For the first time this assumption is put to the test using extensive fieldwork carried out in an international news agency and a corpus of translated news agency dispatches. The linguistic analysis of three syntactic structures in the translations is complemented by an investigation of the effects of a range of factors including, most notably, the speed at which the translation is carried out. The analysis sheds new light on the ways in which news translation could lead to syntactic borrowing in French, and by extension, in other languages. 136p.
Maney Publishing, Legenda Research Monographs in French Studies 30, 2011 9781906540661, hardback – $75.00. Special Offer $60.00
LEGENDA STUDIES IN YIDDISH Studies in Yiddish is the only scholarly series in English that is dedicated to Yiddish, a transnational language whose interesting, if sometimes tragic, history spans more than a thousand years. The series includes monographs and edited volumes on all aspects of Yiddish language and culture.
Translating Sholem Aleichem History, Politics and Art edited by Gennady Estraikh, Jordan Finkin, Kerstin Hoge and Mikhail Krutikov Sholem Aleichem, whose 150th anniversary was commemorated in March 2009, remains one of the most popular Yiddish authors. But few people today are able to read him in the original. Since the 1920s, however, Aleichem’s works have been known to a wider international audience through numerous translations, and through film and theatre adaptations, most famously Fiddler on the Roof. This volume examines those translations published in Europe, with the aim of investigating how the specific European contexts might have shaped translations of Yiddish literature. 214p. Maney Publishing, Legenda Studies in Yiddish 10, July 2012 9781907975004, hardback – $89.50. Special Offer $72.00
Dreams of Lovers and Lies of Poets
A Captive of the Dawn
Poetry, Knowledge, and Desire in the Roman de la Rose by Sylvia Huot
The Life and Work of Peretz Markish (1895-1952) edited by Joseph Sherman, Gennady Estraikh, David Schneer and Jordan Finkin
The Roman de la Rose explicitly offers an ‘art of love’, while also repeatedly asserting that the experience of love is impossible to put into words. An examination of the intertextual density of the Rose, with its citations and adaptations of a range of Latin authors, shows that the discourse of bodily desire, pleasure, and trauma emerges indirectly from the juxtaposition and conflation of sources. Huot’s new book focuses on Guillaume de Lorris’s use of the Ovidian corpus, and on Jean de Meun’s dazzling orchestration of allusions to a wider range of Latin writers: principally Ovid, Boethius, and Virgil, but also including John of Salisbury and Alain de Lille. In both parts of the Rose, poetic allegory is a language that can express the unspeakable and the ineffable. 123p.
Peretz Markish (1895-1952) was a fiercely independent maverick who published work in all literary genres. Markish always went his own way in a literary career spanning four decades and embracing almost all twentieth-century aesthetic movements. After the Revolution, he settled in Poland, but returned to be integrated more closely into Soviet culture than any other Yiddish writer of his generation, receiving the Order of Lenin. It did not save him from Stalin’s show-trials of Jewish intellectuals, and he was executed in 1952, but as early as 1955 his writing was being rehabilitated in the Soviet press: a testament to his literary stature. This new volume combines a biography and bibliography with some twenty contributed essays by Peretz scholars, surveying the entire corpus of his work and all periods of his career. 244p.
Maney Publishing, Legenda Research Monographs in French Studies 31, 2010 9781906540807, hardback – $75.00. Special Offer $60.00
Maney Publishing, Legenda Studies in Yiddish 9, July 2011 9781906540524, hardback – $89.50. Special Offer $72.00
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Legenda from Maney Publishing LEGENDA STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE LITERATURE Studies in Comparative Literature are produced in close collaboration with the British Comparative Literature Association, and range widely across comparative and theoretical topics in literary and translation studies, accommodating research at the interface between different artistic media and between the humanities and the sciences.
Alienation and Theatricality
The Way of the World
Diderot after Brecht by Phoebe von Held
A Festschrift for R.H. Stephenson edited by Paul Bishop
Alienation (Vefremdung) as a dramaturgical device has come to be inextricably linked with the name of German twentieth-century playwright and theorist, Bertolt Brecht - with the context of Modernism, the Avant garde, and Marxist Theory. As a sociological and aesthetic notion avant la letter, it did however already exist in the thought of eighteenth-century French philosopher and writer Denis Diderot. This original study of scholar and theatre director Phoebe von Held destabilises the conventional understanding of alienation through a reading of Le Paradoxe sur le comédien and Le Neveu de Rameau, thereby opening it up to new ways of interpretation and aesthetic practices. 240p.
Inaugurated with a collection of intercultural readings of Goethe on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of his birth, the series Cultural Studies & the Symbolic has, to date, examined various aspects of Ernst Cassirer’s theory of symbolic forms. In its fourth volume, we turn our attention to the world, in the sense in which Nietzsche contrasts the astral order in which we live as opposed to the total character of the world which is, he tells us, in all eternity chaos. The volume is offered as a Festschrift for Roger Stephenson, who recently retired from the William Jacks Chair of Modern Languages at the University of Glasgow. It consists of a collection of essays reflecting his interests in various aspects of modern German and European literature, and his particular engagement with Weimar classicism, the so-called Meisterdenker tradition of ideas, and his commitment to close reading - illuminated by theory - within a broad cultural context. 154p.
Maney Publishing, Legenda Studies in Comparative Literature 17, 2011 9781906540128, hardback – $89.50. Special Offer $72.00
Blake, Lavater, and Physiognomy
Maney Publishing, Cultural Studies and the Symbolic 4, 2011 9781906540951, paperback – $78.00. Special Offer $62.00
by Sibylle Erle William Blake never travelled to the continent, and yet his creation myth is far more European than has so far been acknowledged. His early illuminated books, of the 1790s, run alongside his professional work as a copy-engraver on Henry Hunter’s translation of Johann Caspar Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy, in which Blake helped to make a likeness of a book about likenesses. Blake, Lavater, and Physiognomy demonstrates how the problems occurring during the production of the Hunter translation resonate in Blake’s treatment of the Genesis story. Blake takes us back to the creation of the human body, and interrogates the idea that ‘God created man after his own likeness.’ He introduces the ‘Net of Religion’, a device which presses the human form into material shape, giving it personality and identity. As Erle shows, Blake’s startlingly original take on the creation myth is informed by Lavater’s pursuit of physiognomy: the search for divine likeness, traced in the faces of their contemporary men. 244p. Maney Publishing, Legenda Studies in Comparative Literature 21, 2010 9781906540692, hardback – $89.50. Special Offer $72.00
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Northcote House Publishers NORTHCOTE HOUSE Writers and their Work, launched in 1994, embraces the best of modern literary theory and criticism, and features studies of many popular late-twentieth-century writers, as well as the canonical figures of literature and important literary genres. An important element of the series is to bring neglected or marginalized writers to a wider readership, to represent fully the rich diversity of postcolonial writing and to show the breadth and density of women’s writing through the centuries. The price of all paperback editions has now been permanently lowered to $19.95. For a full list, please see our website. George Meredith
Jean Rhys
by Jaqueline Banerjee
Second Edition by Helen Carr
George Meredith was a lyrical yet searingly honest poet, and an influential novelist whose fiction distilled, contributed to and animated the major debates of the Victorian age. He became at once an arbiter of taste in his own times, and a trailblazer for modernism. In many ways an extraordinary, larger-than-life figure, he has always had his admirers, and critics have continued to be drawn to the biographical, socio-political, scientific and experimental aspects of his oeuvre. Some of his works, including the sonnets of Modern Love, his ‘Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit’, and novels like The Egoist, have attained the status of classics. The present study focuses on such works, putting them in context to show how innovatively this versatile writer shaped and reshaped his material, and how powerfully his inimitable voice still resonates with (and challenges) us in the twenty first century. 128p. Northcote House Publishers, Writers and their Work, July 2012 9780746312131, hardback – $80.00. Special Offer $64.00 9780746312148, paperback – Was $26.00. Now just $19.95
Neglected and forgotten for many years, the arresting, elliptical novels written by the Domenican-born Jean Rhys are now widely acclaimed. Her last and most famous novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, her retelling of Jane Eyre, is a central text for the imaginative re-examination of gender and colonial power relations. Helen Carr’s account draws on both recent feminist and postcolonial theory, and places Rhys’s work in relation to modernist and postmodernist writing. Whilst all Rhys’s novels are autobiographical, it is a mistake, Carr argues, to see them simply in individual terms: Rhys uses the material of her own life to structure a devastating critique of the greed and cruelty of the Establishment world, both of Europe and of Empire. This new edition considers the growing body of critical appreciation of Jean Rhys. 128p. Northcote House Publishers, Writers and their Work, July 2012 9780746311639, paperback – Was $26.00. Now just $19.95
James Joyce
Salman Rushdie
Second Edition by Steven Connor
Second Edition by Damian Grant
This new edition of Professor Steven Connor’s book is an animated accessible introduction to the whole range of Joyce’s work from Dubliners through to Finnegan’s Wake. 128p.
The new edition of the successful first edition will cover all of Rushdie’s work up to the present. 128p.
Northcote House Publishers, Writers and their Work, August 2012 9780746311677, paperback – Was $26.00. Now just $19.95
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Northcote House Publishers Pre-Romantic Poetry
Pre-Raphaelitism
by Vincent Quinn
Poetry and Painting by Lindsay Smith
Pre-Romantic Poetry intervenes powerfully in debates about eighteenth-century writing, Romanticism, and literary history. By arguing that ‘pre-romanticism’ exists to patrol the limits of ‘romantic’ writing, this book questions existing approaches to eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury writing, and to period-based study more generally. As well as presenting pioneering reinterpretations of poets such as Thomas Gray and William Cowper, Pre-Romantic Poetry reads late-eighteenth-century poetry alongside earlier writers (especially Alexander Pope) and later ones (including William Wordsworth and John Keats). Paying particular attention to pastoral poetry, patronage, and occasional poetry, the book historicizes questions of language and form in order to shift prevailing notions of eighteenth-century and Romantic writing. 140p.
Northcote House Publishers, Writers and their Work, July 2012 9780746311837, hardback – $80.00. Special Offer $64.00 9780746311882, paperback – Was $26.00. Now just $19.95
This book re-assesses the significance to PreRaphaelitism of the fundamental relationship of poem to painting, of the visual to the verbal, to examine those aspects of the movement that account for its enduring legacy. Beginning with the profound and somewhat neglected influence of Ruskin’s work upon the poets and painters, Smith focuses in particular upon the PreRaphaelite rehabilitation of the sister arts analogy, and an aesthetic of ekphrasis as played out in the short-lived periodical The Germ and in D.G. Rossetti’s Sonnets for Pictures. At the heart of the project is a new reading of the notorious circumstances of Rossetti’s coffined book - those manuscript poems Rossetti disinterred from his wife Elizabeth Siddal’s grave that brings to the fore the all-pervasive significance to the Pre-Raphaelites of a complex aesthetic of resurrection. 128p. Northcote House Publishers, Writers and their Work, July 2012 9780746308066, hardback – $80.00. Special Offer $64.00 9780746308059, paperback – Was $26.00. Now just $19.95
Children’s Literature
The Imagist Poets
From the fin de siècle to the new millennium by Kimberley Reynolds
by Andrew Thacker
The literary scene in the 1890s changed rapidly, with ‘serious’ writers defining themselves against popular fiction and that read by women and children. As modernist influences changed the style and concerns of adult fiction, many areas of publishing for children seemed determined to uphold traditional class and gender roles and to perpetuate a strong sense of national loyalty. During the twentieth century, however, a rise in secularism, new political, cultural and scientific theories and the emergence of youth culture expanded the range of issues and attitudes found in children’s books. This updated version of Children’s Literature in the 1890s and 1990s, reflects on these changes and how they have helped to shape the new century. It includes a revised and expanded bibliography. 128p.
This book offers a lively account of the Imagist Poets, the first significant group of modernist poets writing in English. It discusses what their writing achieved, and analyses the theoretical claims of Imagism in relation to its poetic practice. It revises the received view of Imagism by drawing upon current re-readings of modernism in terms of gender and sexuality, cultural geography, and the idea of literary institutions and formations. The book shows the variety of practice within the Imagist group, and shifts the focus from seeing Imagism purely as the creation of Ezra Pound, by granting a much stronger focus, to often overlooked figures such as Amy Lowell, F.S. Flint and John Gould Fletcher. The book also examines the cultural formation of Imagism as a movement competing within the artistic avant-garde of London in the early twentieth century. 128p.
Northcote House Publishers, Writers and their Work, July 2012 9780746312186, paperback – Was $26.00. Now just $19.95
Northcote House Publishers, Writers and their Work, July 2012 9780746310625, hardback – $80.00. Special Offer $64.00 9780746310021, paperback – Was $26.00. Now just $19.95
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Northcote House Publishers G.K. Chesterton
Janet Frame
by Michael D. Hurley
by Claire Bazin
A revaluation of the vastly varied work of G.K. Chesterton through a literary reading of his philosophy, and a philosophical reading of his fiction. Novelist, essayist, poet, playwright, historian, journalist, Christian apologist, literary and social critic, G.K. Chesterton was one of the most protean and prolific writers of his age. Bernard Shaw called him a ‘colossal genius.’ This study determines the scale and quality of that genius. Interest in Chesterton today tends to be divided between those who enjoy his stories as an end in themselves, and those who argue his unique contribution to metaphysics. By comparing the ethical sympathies and literary style of his work across different genres, Michael D. Hurley brings Chesterton’s divided selves together: to show how his achievement as a writer and a thinker are inseparable, and why his philosophy must therefore be read aesthetically, and his fiction read philosophically. 128p.
An accessible close re-reading of Frame’s novels and short stories from an autobiographical perspective. This study examines the whole of Janet Frame’s output starting with the fiction (novels, short-stories and poems) before focusing on the two autobiographical novels, Owls do Cry and Faces in the Water, to end with the autobiographical trilogy, a sort of restorative prism inviting us to (re) read all her preceding works. It is the autobiography and its film version, An Angel at My Table (1990, directed by Jane Campion), that won her international fame. Frame’s life is extraordinary, not only because she was spared a lobotomy by winning a prize for her collection of short stories, but also because writing from the ‘rim of the farthest circle,’ she provides food for thought for anyone interested in postcolonial and gender studies. 140p.
Northcote House Publishers, Writers and their Work, 2012 9780746312100, hardback – $80.00. Special Offer $64.00 9780746312117, paperback – Was $26.00. Now just $19.95
Northcote House Publishers, Writers and their Work, 2011 9780746310564, hardback – $80.00. Special Offer $64.00 9780746310113, paperback – Was $26.00. Now just $19.95
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
R.K. Narayan
by Simon Avery
by Nicolas Grene
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-61) was one of the most important poets of the nineteenth century and has recently undergone a major critical reappraisal. In this new study, Simon Avery examines a range of her poems, both well-known and less familiar, drawn from across her career, in order to explore the concern with the search for a meaningful home which underpins much of her writing. In a series of interrelated chapters on Barrett Browning’s religious poetry, love poetry, political poetry, and her major work, Aurora Leigh, he considers the ways in which the speakers and protagonists of her poems constantly search for a place of security and stability even though this often seems finally unattainable. Attention is also given to Barrett Browning’s own search for a home in relation to inherited poetic models and traditions, and her establishment of an often radical poetics. 126p.
A detailed critical study of the leading Indian novelist in English and a key figure in the development of a distinctive postcolonial literature. This study covers all of Narayan’s work, offering an accessible introduction to his life and fiction with detailed analyses of the major novels. The chapters are organised on a thematic basis to allow a focus on the most significant critical issues his work raises. The introduction sketches the outline of his life and the chapters go on to explore how his own background was developed into the fictional South Indian small town of Malgudi; the controversial issue of Narayan’s politics; the submerged fables that animate some of his key novels and Narayan’s attitudes toward modernity as reflected in his essays and his fiction. Finally, there is an analysis of Narayan as storyteller and the special styles he devised to tell his elliptical, subtle and understated tales. 144p.
Northcote House Publishers, Writers and their Work, 2011 9780746312018, hardback – $80.00. Special Offer $64.00 9780746312063, paperback – Was $26.00. Now just $19.95
Northcote House Publishers, Writers and their Work, 2011 9780746310786, hardback – $80.00. Special Offer $64.00 9780746309544, paperback – Was $26.00. Now just $19.95
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Northcote House Publishers Norman MacCaig by Alasdair Macrae Norman MacCaig, who died in 1996, was a prolific poet whose later poetry is accessible and popular. This study locates him in his literary and social contexts and presents his work according to its major emphases. Although he did not manifest dramatic changes of attitude or form, there are substantial developments in his writing and these are explored. A sufficient number of poems are quoted in their entirety to provide readers, unacquainted with the poet, with an introduction to the poetry, while the discussion of issues and the analysis of individual poems should enhance the understanding and enjoyment of readers already familiar with MacCaig. The ambition of this book is not to suffocate the poems with commentary but to allow the intelligence, humour and humaneness of the poems to speak to the readers and shock, delight and challenge them. 120p.
Northcote House Publishers, Writers and their Work, 2011 9780746310717, hardback – $80.00. Special Offer $64.00 9780746310762, paperback – Was $26.00. Now just $19.95
The Nineteenth-Century Sensation Novel New edition by Lynn Pykett A fully revised edition of The Sensation Novel taking account of wider interest in, and critical coverage of, this important and popular genre. First published in 1994, Lyn Pykett’s The Sensation Novel charted the re-emergence into critical view of a nineteenth-century fictional genre which had, in its own day, enjoyed immense popular success and given rise to heated critical and moral debates. Since the mid1990s, the sensation novel has continued to attract the attention of general readers, critics and scholars and has been brought to fresh audiences through television and radio adaptations of Lady Audley’s Secret, The Moonstone, an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical based on The Woman in White and a film of Basil. Among the recent studies of the genre, several have sought to shift critical attention from a relatively narrow range of texts published in the 1860s to include texts from later decades of the century. This revised and expanded version responds to these developments. 170p. Northcote House Publishers, Writers and their Work, 2011 9780746312124, paperback – Was $26.00. Now just $19.95
Olive Senior by Denise deCaires Narain This study of Olive Senior’s writing includes comprehensive coverage of her poetry, short stories as well as her non-fiction, placing this work in the context of debates about what it means to be Jamaican and Caribbean in the 20th and 21st centuries. Senior’s work remains intensely focused on loving portraits of ‘ordinary’ Jamaicans, whether they are struggling to make a living off the land in harsh rural contexts or to negotiate the complex postcolonial realities of life in the city. Senior scrutinises the way power operates at global and local levels, and the reader is always made aware of the bigger historical narratives which position the individuals that she writes about. In opting for a more cunningly mild-mannered literary voice, Dr Narain argues that Senior’s work provided a nuanced, engaged and gendered alternative definition for ‘writing resistance’ than is usually associated with Caribbean writers. 154p.
Northcote House Publishers, Writers and their Work, 2011 9780746310946, hardback – $80.00. Special Offer $64.00 9780746310991, paperback – Was $26.00. Now just $19.95
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New and Recent Titles in Literature Sehen Sie, so stirbt man also! 55 beste letzte Worte by Cornelius Hartz When a person dies, his last words have a very special significance. At best, they should summarize an entire life in one sentence. Words such as “More Light” (Goethe) or “You too, Brutus” (Caesar) are entered into cultural history - even if they are sometimes fictitious. In this volume, Cornelius Hartz presents 55 last words of famous men and women - from antiquity to the present, from Socrates, Beethoven, Jane Austen and James Dean to John Paul II. In addition to investigating the veracity of the quotes, there is also background information about the circumstances of each death. 160p.
Philipp von Zabern, 2012 9783805344333, paperback – $30.00. Special Offer $24.00
Memory and Legacy A Thackeray Family Biography, 1876-1919 by John Aplin This book, the second of two volumes, details not only the author’s life, but also the cosmopolitan and literary worlds inhabited by his two daughters, Minny and Annie. Memory and Legacy continues the family saga long after Thackeray’s death, tracing the later lives of his two daughters and their marriages. Annie in particular, took responsibility for guarding and shaping her father’s legacy until her own death in 1919. Drawing extensively on the letters, diaries, journals and notebooks of the Thackerays and their circle, Aplin sheds light on this remarkable man’s family, and the effect that his life, death and legacy had on those closest to him. Aplin’s two-part study incorporates significant new documentary evidence, some of it never previously seen by Thackeray scholars, and includes the fullest and frankest examination of the lives of Thackeray’s two daughters yet published. This will also appeal to followers of Viriginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group. 315p. Lutterworth Press, 2011 9780718892258, paperback – $53.00. Special Offer $42.00
The Inheritance of Genius
The Lost Literature of Socialism
A Thackeray Family Biography, 1798-1875 by John Aplin
Second Edition by George Watson
In his day, William Makepeace Thackeray was one of England’s premier novelists, possessed of both great cultural insight and an incisive pen. With time, however, the man himself has fallen from view. Seen today only through the window of his fiction, the author of Vanity Fair is all too readily written off as just another figure amidst the clubcentred, bachelor world of mid-Victorian England that fills his writings. This volume provides a unique account of Thackeray’s women and their place in his life. From a mother too readily written off by history as religious fanatic, to a wife institutionalised for most of their marriage, to two adult daughters never far from their father’s side, it is impossible to separate the writing from the life of the man behind them. Aplin presents the first wholly new reappraisal of Thackeray’s life, writing, and legacy through the lens that truly defined him - his family. 324p.
In his hard-hitting and controversial book, George Watson examines the foundation texts of socialism to find out what they really say; the result is blasphemy against socialism’s canon of saints. Marx and Engels publicly advocated genocide in 1849; Ruskin called himself a violent Tory and a King’s man; and Shaw held the working classes in utter contempt. Drawing on a range of sources from Robert Owen to Ken Livingstone, the author demonstrates that socialism was a conservative, nostalgic reaction to the radicalism of capitalism, and not always supposed to be advantageous to the poor. George Watson’s concern is to pay proper respect to the works of the founding fathers of socialism, to attend to what they say and not what their modern disciples wish they had said. This invigorating book forces the reader to abandon long-standing assumptions in political thought. It is certain to ruffle feathers, blue as well as red. 128p.
Lutterworth Press, 2010 9780718892241, paperback – $53.00. Special Offer $42.00
Lutterworth Press, 2010 9780718892272, paperback – $42.50. Special Offer $34.00
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New and Recent Titles in Literature In the Name of the Father (And of the Son)
Fiabe toscane di maghi, fate, animali, diavoli e giganti
by Immanuel Mifsud
Edizione economica. Volumes I and 2 by Carlo Lapucci
Back from his father’s funeral, the narrator starts reading a diary his father kept during his days as a soldier during the Second World War. The diary is almost impersonal, but it is exactly this impersonality which pushes the narrator to reexamine the relationship he had with his father. The father, who the son knew only as a cripple after he had been injured in a motorcycle accident, had always tried to convince those around him that he was tough enough to withstand all hardship, and had tried to bring up his son in his mould. The narrator revisits his father’s past, as well as his own, to find signs of weakness and displays of emotion. The narrator is not only older, which makes him attach new meanings to old events, but he has also changed in other ways, which influences the way he now sees things. 64p. Midsea Books, 2011 9789993273837, paperback – $14.00. Special Offer $11.00
Carlo Lapucci presents an annotated collection of Italian fables drawn from his childhood and the Tuscan tradition to which his father Enrico introduced him. Two volumes, divided into five thematic sections: Animals, Magicians and Fairies, Giants, Devils and Tricksters. Lapucci’s scholarly work includes the cultural and critical references necessary to frame these tales in their historical, mythological and magical traditions. Illustrations by Walter Bini. Italian text. Edizioni Polistampa, La Toscana racconta, 2011 Volume 1 228p, illus, 9788856300581, paperback – $20.00. Special Offer $16.00 Volume 2 204p, 9788856300673, paperback – $19.50. Special Offer $16.00
I Monti Orfici di Dino Campana
Le leggende della terra toscana
Un saggio, dieci passeggiate by Giovanni Cenacchi
by Carlo Lapucci
Dino Campana’s descriptions of ten trails in the Apennine Mountains trace the philosophical and poetic myths of the road as much as they do the trails themselves. This piece of Italian literary heritage offers readers the opportunity to seek out the places described by Campana, to admire their horizons, while sharing the poet’s ideals and life within this landscape. Italian text. 208p.
Edizioni Polistampa, Italianistica nel mondo, 2011 9788856401431, paperback – $30.00. Special Offer $24.00
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Local legends can sometimes reveal more about a place than facts, often with a voice that dates from antiquity. With metaphors and symbols, traditional local legends united cities, kingdoms, and communities, giving consciousness, identity, and creative vigor to ancient Rome and the Italian Communes. This in-depth study offers a panorama of Tuscan legends with careful analysis that reveals the richness of these fantastical resources and their contribution to the heritage of this region. Italian text. 640p.
Edizioni Polistampa, Italianistica nel mondo, 2011 9788856300574, hardback – $40.00. Special Offer $32.00
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New and Recent Titles in Literature Indagine sul ‘Processo’ di Kafka
Fiktion als Erkenntnistheorie bei Diderot
La separazione e la colpa by Stefano Pasquini
by Yann Lafon
This journey through Kafka’s universe combines critical reading and psychological analysis in exploring The Trial. The Hebrew atmosphere of early twentieth-century Prague, the Kabala and Kafka’s family, as well as his rejection of bourgeois values are all present, and Kafka saw literature as the only escape from the mediocrity of reality. These are some of the principal aspects that define this work and one of the most difficult and loved writers of the last century, who traced the essentials of man and the elements of modernity. Italian text. 272p. Edizioni Polistampa, Biblioteca del Caffè, 2011 9788856401325, paperback – $25.00. Special Offer $20.00
As a philosopher of the French Enlightenment period, Diderot rejects, in the tradition of Locke, the view of God-given ideas, and, from a mainly materialistic perspective, addresses the problem of a theory of the origin of ideas. But early on he notices the narrow confines of the empirical verifiability of his theory. To overcome this limitation - as well as from the standpoint of an aesthetic lust for design - he also explores the mysteries of knowledge with the exploratory possibilities of fiction. In this work, Yann Lafon discovers new contexts of the fictional texts of Diderot. He thereby reconstructs dimensions of his theory that point beyond the materialist assumptions of Diderot. German text. 228p.
Franz Steiner Verlag, ZFSL-B 38, 2011 9783515098533, paperback – $67.00. Special Offer $54.00
Verteidigung des Lebens durch Poesie Über die Moderne von Klopstock bis Benn by Hans Dieter Schäfer
Shakespeare’s London Theatreland Archaeology, History and Drama by Julian Bowsher This guide to the unique theatrical venues of London, from 1567, when the first playhouse was built, to 1642, when Cromwell closed them down, sets out the rich dramatic history of this period in relation to the latest exciting archaeological evidence. The book also details the people involved - the builders, actors, playwrights and audiences - what they wore and what they ate, where they drank, where they fought, where they lived and died. There are theatrical quotes and jokes, and illustrations old and new, while a series of walks explores different areas of today’s London, where glimpses of Shakespeare’s London can still be caught. 250p, illustrated in colour.
Museum of London Archaeology, September 2012 9781907586125, paperback – $29.95. Special Offer $24.00
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In a period, which is shaped through speed and the pressures to perform and compete, there is a great sense of desire for freedom and the wish to live. Hans Dieter Schäfter shows that these themes are already found in the works of Klopstock, Eichendorff, Kafka and Benns. He illuminates the backgrounds of the development of their works in the mirror of modernity. German text. 72p, illus.
Franz Steiner Verlag, AM-L 2011.1, 2011 9783515099684, paperback – $21.00. Special Offer $17.00
Calderón y su escuela Variaciones e innovación de un modelo teatral: XV Coloquio Anglogermano sobre Calderón Wroclaw, 14-18 de julio de 2008 edited by Manfred Tietz and Gero Arnscheidt The texts used in the extraordinarily successful theater system of the Spanish Baroque are all based on a few basic formulas (comedia, auto sacramental, interludes) that were standardized and differentiated from preceding texts by Lope de Vega (1562-1635) and his students. In this anthology, 31 studies by international specialists show how this system was thematically and formally refined and modified by Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600-1681), the leading playwright of the Siglo de Oro, and his school. German text. 553p.
Franz Steiner Verlag, Archivum Calderonianum 12, 2011 9783515096614, paperback – $116.00. Special Offer $93.00
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New and Recent Titles in Literature Das Nibelungenlied und Das Buch des Dede Korkut Sprachwissenschaftliche Aspekte
Studien zu ausgewählten Fastnachtspielen des Hans Folz
Beiträge zum ersten interkulturellen Symposion in Baku, Aserbaidschan, 2009 edited by Kamal Abdullayev, Hendrik Boeschoten, Sieglinde Hartmann and Uta Sörmer-Caysa
by Martin Przybilski
With this conference volume the Kitab Dede Korkut moves into the focal point of intercultural comparative studies for the medieval heroic epic. The Saxon State and Regional Library in Dresden preserves the oldest and only complete transmission of this pre-Ottoman heroic poem. The Mainz Turkologist, Hendrik Boeschoten, offers the newest German translation: Ideal conditions for the beginning of scholarly cooperation between Azerbaijan and Germany, which aims at a rapprochement of academic discourse between the east and west. The themes dealt with in this volume arise from individual linguistic perspectives, such as syntax, lexicon, word formation, name studies or speechact theory. This conference volume is not only a first bridge-building attempt between east and west, but also a novelty for German studies on the Nibelungenlied. 192p, illus. Reichert Verlag, Imagines Medii Aevi 28, 2011 9783895008115, hardback – $100.00. Special Offer $80.00
Äsop - Der frühneugriechische Roman Einführung, Übersetzung, Kommentar. Kritische Ausgabe by Hans Eideneier The “Vita Aesopi,” known today as “Aesop’s Fables,” characterizes the life of the legendary fabulist Aesop, through to his death in Delphi, with a variety of funny individual episodes. Four versions from around 1600 are published here as evidence of early Modern Greek rhythmic narrative prose. A detailed text- and source-critical introduction with references to the profile of the “Metaphrastes,” an extensive commentary on each chapter, and a German translation with illustrations from the “Ulmer Aesop” (1476) develop this key text of medieval popular literature. German text. 446p, illus. Reichert Verlag, Serta Graeca 28, 2011 9783895007910, hardback – $250.00. Special Offer $200.00
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Struktur - Autorschaft - Quellen
At the threshold of modernism, the artisan poet Hans Folz plays a significant role as author and printer in the cultural center of Nuremberg. Part of his multifaceted oeuvre includes at least 18 carnival plays (Fastnachtspiele) that are currently being edited and commented on at the University of Trier. The studies contained in this volume were produced as part of this new edition of the Nuremberg carnival plays. They focus on four works by Hans Folz and illuminate them through structural, as well as material and motive-historical aspects. Particularly, a sustainable picture of the author’s specific operational processes is drawn. In addition, the volume contains an edition of the poem “Von den zwelff fauln pfaffenknecht” (“Of the Twelve Lazy Servants”) and a concordance of the new edition of the still relevant publication of Adelbert von Keller’s carnival plays. German text. 160p.
Reichert Verlag, 2011 9783895007903, hardback – $59.00. Special Offer $47.00
Anime Nude Finzioni e Interpretazioni Intorno a 10 Poeti del Novecento. Cvetaeva, Apollinaire, Wilcock, Kavafis, Achmatova, Borges, Hardy, Brodskij, Hikmet, Rilke by Silvio Ciappi and Francesco Ricci Through these ten poems and ten poetic descriptions, ten poets come to life in a blend of fiction and reality, poetry and psychology that traces a path to understanding the artistic works of the nineteenth century. Italian text. 104p, illus.
Mauro Paglia, Storie del mondo, 2011 9788856401639, paperback – $20.00. Special Offer $16.00
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