LEGENDA

LEGENDA 

CATALOGUE 2013/2014 

New and forthcoming books in 

European Literature, Cultures and Thought 

New seRies 

FoR 2013: 

GeRMANic LiteRAtuRes 

From Maney Publishing and the Modern Humanities Research Association 

www.maneypublishing.com www.mhra.org.uk www.legendabooks.com 

www.maneypublishing.com www.mhra.org.uk www.legendabooks.com

Foreword 

i am delighted to introduce the new Legenda catalogue. with 

the continuing support of Maney Publishing and the Modern 

Humanities Research Association (MHRA), we have maintained an 

extensive, exciting and growing publishing programme, showcasing 

some of the very best research currently being undertaken across 

the humanities. 

we remain committed to expanding our activities without 

compromising on quality. 2012 saw the publication of the first 

volumes in our new Moving image series. in 2013 we will inaugurate 

the Germanic Literatures series, which will publish innovative studies 

of literature in German, Dutch and the scandinavian languages. 

Details of the first volumes can be found in the following pages. We 

are also making plans for a further new series, studies in Hispanic 

and Lusophone cultures. 

our aim, as ever, is to provide outlets for the best work by both 

first-time authors and established scholars. I hope you will agree that 

this catalogue reflects the vitality, range and depth of work in the 

humanities today. 

Professor Colin Davis 

Royal Holloway, university of London 

chairman of the editorial Board 

Contents 

GeRMANic LiteRAtuRes ...........................................................3 

GeRMAN AND AustRiAN LiteRAtuRe ...............................3 

eNGLisH LiteRAtuRe ..................................................................5 

HistoRY oF iDeAs..........................................................................5 

FReNcH LiteRAtuRe ...................................................................6 

ReseARcH MoNoGRAPHs iN FReNcH stuDies .............8 

HisPANic AND PoRtuGuese LiteRAtuRe .......................9 

itALiAN LiteRAtuRe .................................................................10 

itALiAN PeRsPectiVes .............................................................10 

MoViNG iMAGe ..............................................................................12 

RussiAN, ceNtRAL AND eAsteRN 

euRoPeAN LiteRAtuRe ...........................................................13 

stuDies iN YiDDisH ....................................................................13 

stuDies iN coMPARAtiVe LiteRAtuRe ..........................14 

LeGendA edItorIAL BoArd 

CHAIrMAn 

Professor Colin Davis, royal Holloway, University of London 

MAnAGInG edItor 

Dr Graham Nelson, University of oxford, 41 wellington square, 

oxford oX1 2JF, UK. email: graham.nelson@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk 

MAIn serIes 

Professor Malcolm Cook, University of exeter (French) 

Professor Robin Fiddian, wadham College, oxford (spanish) 

Professor Anne Fuchs, University of warwick (German) 

Professor Paul Garner, University of Leeds (spanish) 

Professor Andrew Hadfield, University of sussex (english) 

Professor Marian Hobson Jeanneret, Queen Mary, University of 

London (French) 

Professor Catriona Kelly, new College, oxford (russian) 

Professor Martin McLaughlin, Magdalen College, oxford (Italian) 

Professor Martin Maiden, trinity College, oxford (Linguistics) 

Professor Peter Matthews, st John’s College, Cambridge (Linguistics) 

Dr Stephen Parkinson, Linacre College, oxford (Portuguese) 

Professor Suzanne Raitt, william and Mary College, Virginia (english) 

Professor Ritchie Robertson, The Queen’s College, oxford (German) 

Professor David Shepherd, Keele University (russian) 

Professor Michael Sheringham, All souls College, oxford (French) 

Professor Alison Sinclair, Clare College, Cambridge (spanish) 

Professor David Treece, King’s College London (Portuguese) 

GerMAnIC LIterAtUres 

Professor Ritchie Robertson, University of oxford (Chairman) 

Dr Barbara Burns, Glasgow University 

Professor Jane Fenoulhet, University College London 

Professor Anne Fuchs, University of warwick 

Professor Susanne Kord, University College London 

Dr Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen, University College London 

Dr Almut Suerbaum, University of oxford 

Professor John Zilcosky, University of toronto 

ItALIAn PersPeCtIVes 

Professor Simon Gilson, University of warwick (General editor) 

Dr Francesca Billiani, University of Manchester 

Dr Manuele Gragnolati, somerville College, oxford 

Dr Catherine Keen, University College London 

Professor Martin McLaughlin, Magdalen College, oxford 

MoVInG IMAGe edItorIAL CoMMIttee 

Professor Emma Wilson, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (General editor) 

Professor Robert Gordon, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge 

Professor Annette Kuhn, Queen Mary, University of London 

Professor Jo Labanyi, new York University 

reseArCH MonoGrAPHs In FrenCH stUdIes 

Diana Knight, University of nottingham (General editor) 

Adrian Armstrong, Queen Mary, University of London 

Janice Carruthers, Queen’s University Belfast 

Nicholas Harrison, King’s College London 

Neil Kenny, All souls College, oxford 

Jennifer Yee, Christ Church, oxford 

reseArCH MonoGrAPHs In FrenCH stUdIes AdVIsorY BoArd 

Wendy Ayres-Bennett, Murray edwards College, Cambridge 

Celia Britton, University College London 

Ann Jefferson, new College, oxford 

Sarah Kay, new York University 

Michael Moriarty, University of Cambridge 

Keith Reader, University of Glasgow 

stUdIes In CoMPArAtIVe LIterAtUre 

Professor Stephen Bann, University of Bristol (Chairman) 

Professor Duncan Large, University of swansea 

Dr Elinor Shaffer, school of Advanced study, London 

stUdIes In YIddIsH 

Professor Gennady Estraikh, new York University 

Dr Kerstin Hoge, st Hilda’s College, oxford 

Professor Mikhail Krutikov, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor 

2

GerMAnIC LIterAtUres 

SERIES ISSN: 2052-1456 

Germanic Literatures includes monographs 

and essay collections on literature originally 

written not only in German, but also in 

Dutch and the scandinavian languages. 

Within the German-speaking area, it seeks 

also to publish studies of other national 

literatures such as those of Austria and 

switzerland. the chronological scope of the 

series extends from the early Middle Ages 

to the present day. we warmly encourage 

colleagues to approach us with proposals 

(www.legendabooks.com/proposals.html). 

Yvan Goll 

The Thwarted Pursuit of the Whole 

By Robert Vilain 

Germanic Literatures 1 

the life of the bilingual writer 

Yvan Goll (1891–1950) 

was one of perpetual 

experimentation and selfrenewal. 

In the first study 

to treat Goll’s whole literary 

career, Robert Vilain explores 

the full range of his poetry, 

novels, dramas, libretti, essays, translations and 

editions — from Expressionism in pre-war 

Berlin and fisticuffs with André Breton over 

Surrealism in post-war Paris, to the dream of a 

new poetry for the atomic age. Goll’s journey 

took in satirical Überdramen, extravagantly ironic 

novels and collaborations with Kurt weill in the 

1920s, lyrical love poetry for his wife and a lover, 

and the experiences of his magnificent alter ego 

Jean sans Terre in the 1930s, and poetry inspired by 

alchemy, geology and the Kabbalah in the 1940s. 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 56 1 

November 2013 • Hardback • £45.00/US$89.50 

Sebald’s Bachelors 

Queer Resistance and the Unconforming Life 

By Helen Finch 


why do queer bachelors and 

homosexual desire haunt the 

works of the German writer 

w. G. sebald (1944–2001)? in 

a series of readings of sebald’s 

major texts, from After Nature 

to Austerlitz, Helen Finch’s 

pioneering study shows that 

alternative masculinities subvert catastrophe in 

sebald’s works. From the schizophrenic poet 

ernst Herbeck to the alluring shade of Kafka in 

Venice, the figure of the bachelor offers a form 

of resistance to the destructive course of history 

throughout sebald’s critical and literary writing. 

sebald’s poetics of homosexual desire trace a ‘line 

of flight’ away from the patriarchal and repressive 

order of German society, which, in sebald’s view, 

led to the disasters of Nazism. 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 90 5 

June 2013 • Hardback • £45.00/US$89.50 

Goethe’s Visual World 

By Pamela currie 


Goethe's ideas on colour and 

imagery crossed many 

borderlines: those of artistic 

processes and philosophical 

aesthetics, art history and 

colour theory, together with 

the science of perception. 

this investigation into his 

writings ranges across art from 

Antiquity, the Renaissance and 

the eighteenth century, as well as exploring the 

centrality of these issues to Goethe’s literary 

work. Questions find answers, but also raise new 

questions. this systematic sequence of essays, 

originally written between 1999 and 2011, 

appeals to readers in all these separate areas, 

while drawing together their essential coherence. 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 89 9 

April 2013 • Hardback • £45.00/US$89.50 

German Narratives of Belonging 

Writing Generation and Place in the 

Twenty-First Century 

By Linda shortt 


Since unification, German culture has 

experienced a boom in discourses on 

generation, family and place. Linda shortt 

reads this as symptomatic of a wider quest for 

belonging that mobilises attachment to counter 

the effects of postmodern deterritorialisation 

and globalisation. Investigating twenty-first 

century narratives of belonging by Reinhard 

Jirgl, christoph Hein, Angelika overath, Florian 

illies, Juli Zeh, stephan wackwitz, uwe timm 

and Peter schneider, shortt examines how 

the desire to belong is repeatedly unsettled 

by disturbances of lineage and tradition. 

in this way, she combines an analysis of 

supermodernity with an enquiry into German 

memory contests on the National socialist era, 

1968 and 1989, that continue to shape identity 

in the Berlin Republic. exploring a spectrum of 

narratives that range from agitated disavowals 

of place to romances of belonging, this study 

illuminates the topography of belonging in 

contemporary Germany. 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 88 2 

2014 • Hardback • £45.00/US$89.50 

Visit the Germanic Literatures series page 

at www.legendabooks.com/series/gl 

3 

NEW 

SERIES 

GeRMAN AND 

AustRiAN 

LiteRAtuRe 

Goethe’s Poetry and the Philosophy 

of Nature 

Gott und Welt 1798–1827 

Regina sachers 

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, 

philosophy and theology come under increasing 

pressure owing to the emergence of the modern 

sciences. the collection Gott und Welt is Goethe's 

poetic contribution to this conflict, in which 

an alternative to orthodox christianity was 

being sought. Following the collection's various 

stages of composition and publication, this 

study offers new readings of some of Goethe's 

best-known poems: 'Die Metamorphose 

der Pflanzen', 'Dauer im Wechsel', 'Urworte. 

Orphisch' and 'Wiederfinden'. Sachers shows 

that Gott und Welt is the long poem on nature 

which Goethe attempted to write for the last 

third of his life. As such it represents Goethe's 

unique answers to the intellectual challenges 

posed by the dawning age of science. 

ISBN: 978 1 907747 97 7 

2014 • Hardback • £45.00/US$89.50 

The Present Word 

Culture, Society and the Site of Literature 

Essays in Honour of Nicholas Boyle 

edited by John walker 

this book addresses three key 

areas of intellectual enquiry: 

literary criticism, cultural 

critique, and philosophical 

theology. once closely related, 

especially in the catholic 

tradition, they often appear to 

be separate and unconnected 

domains in the modern 

university. the work of Nicholas Boyle is one of 

the most significant recent attempts to reconnect 

them. Responding to that initiative, The Present 

Word challenges this fragmentation of knowledge. 

Several of the essays reflect a major change 

of emphasis in literary studies over the last 

two decades: the reconnection of an idea 

of literary criticism closely related to the 

experience of reading, and the wider societal 

and political concerns addressed by cultural 

studies. contributors also debate, from both 

perspectives, whether theological concepts can 

illuminate the secular culture in which literature 

is written and read. 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 61 5 

June 2013 • Hardback • £45.00/US$89.50

Saturn’s Moons 

W. G. Sebald — A Handbook 

edited by Jo catling and Richard Hibbitt 

BooK oF tHe weeK iN tHe 

iNDePeNDeNt! 

the German novelist, poet 

and critic w. G. sebald 

(1944–2001) has in recent 

years attracted a phenomenal 

international following for 

his evocative prose works 

such as Die Ausgewanderten 

(The Emigrants), Die Ringe 

des Saturn (The Rings of Saturn) and Austerlitz, 

spellbinding elegiac narratives which, through 

their deliberate blurring of genre boundaries 

and provocative use of photography, explore 

questions of Heimat and exile, memory and 

loss, history and natural history, art and nature. 

Saturn's Moons: W. G. Sebald — A Handbook 

brings together in one volume a wealth of new 

critical and visual material on sebald's life and 

works, covering the many facets and phases 

of his literary and academic careers — as 

teacher, as scholar and critic, as colleague and as 

collaborator on translation. Lavishly illustrated, 

the Handbook also contains a number of 

rediscovered short pieces by w. G. sebald, 

hitherto unpublished interviews, a catalogue 

of his library, and selected poems and tributes, 

as well as extensive primary and secondary 

bibliographies, details of audiovisual material 

and interviews, and a chronology of life and 

works. Drawing on a range of original sources 

from sebald's Nachlass — the most important 

part of which is now held in the Deutsches 

Literaturarchiv Marbach — Saturn's Moons 

will be an invaluable sourcebook for future 

sebald studies in english and German alike, 

complementing and augmenting recent critical 

works on subjects such as history, memory, 

modernity, reader response and the visual. 

‘An erudite and deeply engrossing Sebald compendium. It 

fits his œuvre that in place of a formal biography we have 

this border-crossing miscellany in which comment may 

be free but facts are indeed sacred. Michael Hulse, his 

equally gifted translator before Anthea Bell, reprints the 

correspondence in which he asked Sebald to confirm that 

the quartet of exiles’ testimonies so artfully braided into 

the emigrants tell real stories about real people... The 

wonderful alchemy via which Sebald transmuted the found 

material of actual biography and history into fiction that 

kept faith with truth explains much of his appeal.’ — 

Boyd tonkin, The Independent 2 December 

2011, Books of the week 

‘More than two-hundred pages are dedicated to a 

stunning bibliographic survey of Sebald... Hats 

off to the crew who have given us this monumental 

bibliographic record!’ — terry Pitt, Vertigo 24 

september 2011 

‘Para aficionados como yo, es una Biblia.’ — 

william chislett, El Imparcial 10 December 2011 

ISBN: 978 1 906540 02 9 

July 2011 • 692 pages • Hardback • £45.00/US$89.50 

Shandean Humour in English and 

German Literature and Philosophy 

edited by Klaus Vieweg, James Vigus and 

Kathleen M. wheeler 

one of many writers 

inspired by Laurence sterne’s 

Tristram Shandy, the German 

novelist Jean Paul Richter 

coined the term ‘shandean 

humour’ in his work of 

aesthetic theory. the essays in 

this volume investigate how 

sterne’s humour functions, 

the reasons for its enduring appeal, and what 

role it played in identity-construction and in 

the representation of melancholy. in tracing 

its hitherto under-recognised impact both on 

literary writers, such as Jean Paul and Herman 

Melville, and on philosophers, including Hegel 

and Marx, the collection reveals that shandean 

humour is a Grenzgänger — a point of 

commerce not only between Anglophone and 

German discourses, but also between literature 

and philosophy. 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 31 8 

March 2013 • Hardback • £45.00/US$89.50 

Traces of Trauma in W. G. Sebald and 

Christoph Ransmayr 

Dora osborne 

Both w. G. sebald 

(1944–2001) and the Austrian 

author christoph Ransmayr 

(1954–) were born too late to 

know directly the violence of 

the second world war and the 

Holocaust, but these traumatic 

events are a persistent 

presence in their work. in 

a series of close readings of key prose texts, 

Dora osborne examines the different ways in 

which the traces of a traumatic past mark their 

narratives. By focusing on the authors’ use of 

visual and topographical tropes, she shows how 

blind spots and inhospitable places configure 

signs of past violence, but, ultimately, resist 

our understanding. whilst links between the 

two authors are well-documented, this book 

offers the first full-length study of Sebald and 

Ransmayr and their complicated relation to the 

traumatic traces of National socialism. 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 40 0 


4 

Regarding Lost Time 

Photography, Identity, and Affect in Proust, 

Benjamin, and Barthes 

Katja Haustein 

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 emotions 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 this first book-length 

comparative analysis of these authors, Haustein 

maps their most famous works against littlestudied 

material, some of which has only 

recently become available: seminar manuscripts 

such as Barthes’s La Préparation du roman 

(1978–80), radio recordings, letters and diaries. 

in this way her study opens new avenues in 

scholarship on three eminent twentieth-century 

writers and contributes to a new field of 

enquiry: the history of autobiography in the 

light of a history of looking. 

ISBN: 978 1 907747 91 5 

January 2012 • 206pp • Hardback • £45.00/US$89.50 

German Women’s Writing of the 

Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries 

Future Directions in Feminist Criticism 

edited by Helen Fronius and Anna Richards 

German women writers of 

the eighteenth and nineteenth 

centuries have been the 

subject of feminist literary 

critical and historical studies 

for around thirty years. this 

volume, with contributions 

from an international group 

of scholars, takes stock of 

what feminist literary criticism 

has achieved in that time and reflects on future 

trends in the field. Offering both theoretical 

perspectives and individual case studies, the 

contributors grapple with the difficulties of 

appraising ‘non-feminist’ women writers and 

genres from a feminist perspective and present 

innovative approaches to research in early 

women’s writing. This inclusive and crossdisciplinary 

collection of essays will enrich the 

study of German women’s writing of the 

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and 

contribute to contemporary debates in feminist 

literary criticism. 

ISBN: 978 1 906540 86 9 

August 2011 • 204pp • Hardback • £45.00/US$89.50 

See more Legenda books in German 

and Austrian literature at 

www.legendabooks.com/german

eNGLisH LiteRAtuRe 

Form and Feeling in Modern 

Literature 

Essays in Honour of Barbara Hardy 

edited by william Baker 

with isobel Armstrong 

essays, short stories and poems 

by eminent creative writers, 

critics and scholars from three 

continents celebrate the literary 

achievements of Barbara 

Hardy, the foremost exponent 

of close critical reading in the 

latter half of the twentieth 

century and today. Her work, as the essays in the 

volume bear witness, encompasses 19th- and 20thcentury 

British fiction, poetry, and Shakespeare. 

in addition to an introduction outlining and 

assessing Hardy's career and writing, there is an 

extensive bibliography of her work. comparatively 

short, concise essays, stories and poems by twenty 

distinguished hands express the eclectic nature 

of Barbara Hardy's work and themselves form a 

many-faceted critical/creative gathering. Form and 

Feeling moves away from the traditional festschrift 

to create an innovative critical genre that reflects 

the variety and nature of its subject's work. 

in addition to Barbara Hardy's own writing, 

authors and subjects treated include Anglo-Welsh 

poetry, nineteenth-century fiction, Margaret 

Atwood, wilkie collins, ivy compton Burnet, 

charles Dickens, George eliot, elizabeth Gaskell, 

G. M. Hopkins, wyndham Lewis, George 

Meredith, Alice Meynell, Harriet Beecher stowe, 

shakespeare, and w. B. Yeats, amongst others. 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 37 0 


John Ruskin’s Continental Tour 1835 

The Written Records and Drawings 

edited by Keith Hanley 

and caroline s Hull 

John Ruskin’s training as an 

interdisciplinary polymath 

started in childhood. He learned 

to memorise the Bible at his 

mother’s knee and published 

his first poem aged ten. His 

lifelong fascination with geology 

found its earliest expression 

in journal articles from the age of fifteen, while 

his considerable talents as a draughtsman were 

developed by leading drawing masters before he 

was sixteen. Rather than being a prodigy in one 

particular field, it was his precocious mix of religion, 

science and art that laid the foundations for the 

fulfilment of his career as a critic of art, architecture 

and society. the cultural tours that he made with his 

family as he grew up provided the crucial focus for 

these developing interests, and the second extended 

tour of the continent in 1835 at the age of sixteen 

in particular established the paradigm for his 

orchestrated representation and analysis of cultural 

experience along ‘the old road’, though France to 

chamonix, and through the swiss Alps to northern 

italy as far as Venice. His diary of the journey and 

associated writings, together with the numerous 

drawings he made in relation to it, are annotated and 

fully catalogued for the first time in this edition that 

includes maps and an introductory essay. 

ISBN: 978 1 906540 85 2 

2014 • Hardback • £45.00/US$89.50 

Seamus Heaney and East European 

Poetry in Translation 

Poetics of Exile 

carmen Bugan 

Poetry born of historical 

upheaval bears witness both 

to actual historical events and 

considerations of poetics. under 

the duress of history the poet, 

who is torn between lamentation 

and celebration, seeks to achieve distance from 

his troubled times. Add to this a deep love for 

and commitment to the irish and english poetic 

traditions, and a strong desire to search for models 

outside his culture, and you have the poetry of the 

irish Nobel laureate seamus Heaney (1939–). 

in this study, carmen Bugan looks at how the 

poetry of seamus Heaney, born of the troubles in 

Northern Ireland, has encountered the ‘historicallytested 

imaginations’ of czeslaw Milosz, Joseph 

Brodsky, osip Mandelstam, and Zbigniew Herbert, 

as he aimed to fulfil a Horatian poetics, a poetry 

meant to both instruct and delight its readers. 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 64 6 

January 2013 • Hardback • £45.00/US$89.50 

See more Legenda books in English 

literature at 

www.legendabook.com/english 

HIstorY oF 

IdeAs 

Renaissance Keywords 

edited by ita Mac carthy 

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. in this collection of essays, 

scholars from across the humanities offer new 

interpretations of these and other 'keywords', to 

adopt Raymond williams's term, and investigate 

the vocabulary that not only accompanied, but also 

produced, the cultural transformations that made 

the Renaissance so distinctive. 

A keywords approach to Renaissance europe 

provides a rich contextual framework for the 

exploration of its central ideas. it also highlights the 

need for fresh thinking on current histories of the 

age. Renaissance Keywords engages with the ongoing 

debate about the term 'Renaissance' itself, perhaps 

more our keyword than theirs, and seeks alternative 

ways to understand a culture and society which 

produced conceptions of the self as much as it did 

art and science. the result is an exploration at the 

cutting edge of contemporary research. 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 29 5 

January 2013 • 158 pages • Hardback • £45.00/US$89.50 

5 

Transformative Change in Western 

Thought 

A History of Metamorphosis from Homer to 

Hollywood 

edited by ingo Gildenhard and Andrew Zissos 

this groundbreaking volume 

maps the shifting place and 

function of marvellous 

transformations from antiquity 

to the present day. Shapeshifting, 

taking animal bodies, 

miracles, transubstantiation, 

alchemy, and mutation recur and 

echo throughout ancient and 

modern writing and thinking, 

and continue in science fiction today as tales of 

gene-splicing and hybridization. The idea of 

metamorphosis lies in uneasy coexistence with 

orderly worldviews, and it is often cast out, or 

attributed to enemies. Augustine and the church 

Fathers consider shape-shifting ungodly; 

enlightenment thinkers suppress alchemy as 

unscientific; genetically-modified wheat and 

stem-cell research are stigmatised as unnatural. Yet 

the very possibility of radical transformation inspires 

hope just as it frightens. A provocative, theorizing, 

trans-historical history, this book ranges across 

classics, literature, history, philosophy, theology and 

anthropology. From Homer and ovid to Proust and 

H P Lovecraft, and through figures from Proteus to 

Kafka’s Fly and to spiderman, four historical 

surveys are combined with nine case studies to show 

the malleable, yet persistent, presence of 

transformation throughout western cultural history. 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 01 1 


Symbol and Intuition 

Comparative Studies in Kantian and 

Romantic-Period Aesthetics 

edited by Helmut Hühn 

and James Vigus 

that a symbolic object or work 

of art participates in what 

it signifies, as a part within 

a whole, was a controversial 

claim discussed with particular 

intensity in the wake of 

immanuel Kant’s Critique 

of Judgment. it informed the 

aesthetic theories of a constellation of writers 

in Jena and weimar around 1800, including 

Moritz, Goethe, schelling and Hegel. Yet the twin 

concepts of symbol and intuition were not only 

tools of literary and mythological criticism: they 

were integral even to questions of epistemology 

and methodology in the fields of theology, 

metaphysics, history and natural philosophy. the 

international contributors to this volume further 

explore how both the explanatory potential and 

peculiar dissatisfactions of the symbol entered the 

Anglo-American discourse, focusing on Coleridge, 

crabb, Robinson and emerson. contemporary 

debates about the claims of symbolic as opposed 

to allegorical art are kept in view throughout. 

ISBN: 978 1 907625 04 6 


See more Legenda books on the history of 

ideas at 

www.legendabooks.com/subjects/Ideas

FReNcH LiteRAtuRe 

Childhood as Memory, Myth and 

Metaphor 

Proust, Beckett, and Bourgeois 

catherine crimp 

A fascination with childhood 

unites the artist Louise 

Bourgeois (1911–2010) and 

the writers samuel Beckett 

(1906–89) and Marcel Proust 

(1871–1922). But while many 

commentators have traced 

their childhood images back to 

memories of lived experiences, 

there is more to their mythologies of childhood 

that waits to be explored. they invite us to move 

away from familiar ideas — whether psychological 

or biographical — about what a child can 

represent, and even what a child is. the haunting 

child figures of Bourgeois, Beckett and Proust 

echo each other as they show how imagining 

origins — for a life, for a work of art — involves 

paradoxes that test the limits of our forms of 

expression. Art meets literature, profusion meets 

concision, French meets english, and images of 

childhood reveal new insights in this encounter 

between three great figures of twentieth- and 

twenty-first-century culture. 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 39 4 


Dissonance in the Republic of Letters 

The Querelle des Gluckistes et des Piccinnistes 

Mark Darlow 

Eighteenth-century French 

cultural life was often 

characterised by quarrels, and the 

arrival of Viennese composer 

christoph willibald Gluck in 

Paris in 1774 was no exception, 

sparking a five-year pamphlet 

and press controversy which 

featured a rival Neapolitan 

composer, Niccolò Piccinni. However, as this study 

shows, the Gluck-Piccinni controversy was about far 

more than which composer was better suited to lead 

French operatic reform. A consideration of cultural 

politics in 1770s Paris shows that a range of issues 

were at stake: court versus urban taste as the proper 

judge of music, whether amateurs or specialists 

should have the right to speak of opera, whether 

the epic or the tragic mode is more suited for drama 

reform, and even: why should the public argue about 

opera at all? 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 54 7 


Dream Cities 

Urban Utopia and Prose by Poets in 

Nineteenth-Century France 

Greg Kerr 

Against a backdrop of dizzying 

urbanization, French utopian 

thinkers of the nineteenth- 

century set out to explore the 

transformative possibilities 

of the modern metropolis. 

Linking literary analyses with 

diverse strands of cultural and 

intellectual history, this study 

considers how the utopian vision of the city in 

turn came to impinge on prose writing by poets: in 

Saint-Simonian literature, and in texts by Théophile 

Gautier, charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud. At 

points steeped in the hyperbolic rhetoric of utopian 

projects, these texts nonetheless wear away at the 

internal coherence of that rhetoric and the idealizing 

meanings it supports. what emerges from Greg 

Kerr's analysis is a hitherto unfamiliar dimension of 

these writings, revealing the alertness of some of 

the greatest exponents of nineteenth-century poetry 

to the dynamic possibilities of utopian writing, and 

suggesting new ways to understand the evolution of 

poetic discourse across the century. 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 53 0 


French Divorce Fiction from the 

Revolution to the First World War 

Nicholas white 

one of the primary social 

changes ushered in by the French 

Revolution was the legalization 

of divorce in 1792. Diluted by 

the civil code and suppressed by 

the Restoration, divorce was only 

fully established in France by 

the Loi Naquet of 1884. French 

Divorce Fiction from the Revolution to 

the First World War tracks the part played by novels in 

this conflict between the secular rights of individual 

citizens and the sanctity of the traditional family. 

inspired by the sociologists Zygmunt Bauman and 

Anthony Giddens, white's account culminates in 

the first sustained analysis of the role of divorce in 

the refashioning of life narratives during the early 

decades of the Third Republic. As such, it redefines 

the relationships between canonical authors such 

as Maupassant and colette, rediscovered women 

novelists like Marcelle tinayre and camille Pert, and 

long-neglected patriarchs such as Paul Bourget and 

Anatole France. 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 47 9 


Jorge Semprún 

Writing the European Other 

ursula tidd 

the spanish communist exile 

and Francophone Holocaust 

writer Jorge semprún (1923– 

2011) is a major contributor 

to contemporary debates 

on the politics and ethics of 

remembering the Franco era, 

communism and the Holocaust 

in French, spanish and broader 

european contexts. His sophisticated literary 

testimonies have become landmark texts not 

least for their commitment to represent the lived 

experience of history. In this first detailed study in 

english of Jorge semprún’s writing, ursula tidd 

shows how semprún explores the parameters of 

self-writing as an address to the other in a richly 

intertextual corpus which weaves together history, 

fiction and auto/bio/thanatography, and gives voice 

to the traumatic experiences of geographical and 

political exile and concentration camp internment. 

ISBN: 978 1 907747 00 7 


6 

Language and Social Structure in 

Urban France 

edited by Mari c. Jones and David Hornsby 

this volume brings together leading variationist 

sociolinguists and sociologists from both sides 

of the channel to ask: what makes France 

‘exceptional’? in addressing this question, 

variationists have been forced to reassess the 

accepted interdisciplinary consensus, and to ask, as 

sociolinguistics has come of age, whether concepts 

and definitions have been transposed in a way which 

meaningfully preserves their original sense and, 

crucially, takes account of recent developments in 

sociology. sociologists, for their part, have focused 

on the largely neglected area of language variation 

and its implications for social theory. Their findings 

therefore transcend the case study of a particularly 

enigmatic country to raise important theoretical 

questions for both disciplines. 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 41 7 


Method and Variation 

Narrative in Early Modern French Thought 

edited by emma Gilby and Paul white 

French philosophical and 

scientific writers of the early 

modern period made various use 

of forms of narrative — 

language that aims to tell a story 

— in their texts. equally, authors 

of fiction often sought to 

appropriate the language and 

tools of philosophical and 

scientific investigation. The 

contributions in this collection, from some of the 

most distinguished and exciting scholars working in 

French studies today, aim to bring into question 

oppositional relationships between terms such as 

‘philosophy’ and ‘fiction’ when these are applied to 

early modern texts. they consider authors as 

diverse as Montaigne, Descartes, La Rochefoucauld, 

Mme de Villedieu and Mme de Lafayette. if we are 

to be true to the early modern period, they argue, we 

have to acknowledge it as a time when the 

figurative, anecdotal and fictive on the one hand, 

and the truth-seeking on the other, influence each 

other mutually. 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 36 3 


Narrative Responses to the Trauma of 

the French Revolution 

Katherine Astbury 

During the French Revolution, 

traditional literary forms such 

as the sentimental novel and 

the moral tale dominate literary 

production. At first glance, it 

might seem that these texts are 

unaffected by the upheavals in 

France; in fact they reveal not 

only a surprising engagement 

with politics but also an internalised emotional 

response to the turbulence of the period. in this 

innovative and wide-ranging study, Katherine 

Astbury uses trauma theory as a way of exploring 

the apparent contradiction between the proliferation 

of non-political literary texts and the events of the 

Revolution. through the narratives of established

estselling literary figures of the Ancien Régime 

(primarily Marmontel, Madame de Genlis and 

Florian), and the early works of first generation 

Romantics Madame de staël and chateaubriand, 

she traces how the Revolution shapes their writing, 

providing an intriguing new angle on cultural 

production of the 1790s. 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 42 4 

October 2012 • 196 pages • Hardback • £45.00/US$89.50 

Photobiography 

Photographic Self-Writing in Proust, Guibert, 

Ernaux, Macé 

Akane Kawakami 

why do photographs interest writers, especially 

autobiographical writers? ever since their invention, 

photographs have featured — as metaphors, as 

absent inspirations, and latterly as actual objects 

— in written texts. in autobiographical texts, their 

presence has raised particularly acute questions 

about the rivalry between these two media, their 

relationship to the ‘real’, and the nature of the 

constructed self. in this timely study, based on 

the most recent developments in the fields of 

photography theory, self-writing and photobiography, 

Akane Kawakami offers an intriguing 

narrative which runs from texts containing 

metaphorical photographs through ekphrastic works 

to phototexts. Her choice of Marcel Proust, Hervé 

Guibert, Annie Ernaux and Gérard Macé provides 

unusual readings of works seldom considered in 

this context, and teases out surprising similarities 

between unexpected conjunctions. 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 86 8 


Postcolonial Fiction and Sacred 

Scripture 

Rewriting the Divine? 

sura Qadiri 

Francophone writers from North 

Africa and the Middle east 

often choose to write within 

a sacred context, sometimes 

engaging directly with islamist 

rhetoric. Novelists like tahar Ben 

Jelloun (Morocco), Assia Djebar 

(Algeria) and Amin Maalouf 

(Lebanon) revisit scripture as a way to convey 

nuances which they believe have been stamped 

out by monolithic religious world-views. For them, 

fiction offers a way to break away from limited 

exegetical horizons, but to remain within the faith. 

others, though, would go further, moving away 

from all religious practice, not just the excessively 

political or violent. tunisian writers Abdelwahab 

Meddeb and Fethi Benslama propose that all 

literature is of its very nature outside of religion, 

and that its proliferation will ultimately lead to a 

secular society. Qadiri explores this wide spectrum 

of approaches, not only by drawing comparison 

with metropolitan French thought, but also to assess 

its potential impact at a time of radical change in the 

islamic world. 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 81 3 

2014 • Hardback • £45.00/US$89.50 

Selected Essays of Malcolm Bowie 

I and II 

Volume I: Dreams of Knowledge 

Volume II: Song Man 

Malcolm Bowie, edited by Alison Finch 

Malcolm Bowie (1943–2007) was described by A.s. 

Byatt as ‘one of our best living critics. He writes 

beautifully, subtly and lucidly about very difficult 

subjects.’ Bowie was Marshal Foch Professor 

of French at oxford (1992–2002) and Master 

of christ’s college, cambridge (2002–2006). 

He received numerous honours, was invited to 

speak all over the world, and in 2001 won the 

international truman capote Prize for Literary 

criticism for his Proust Among the Stars. the essays 

and reviews in these volumes have never before 

been brought together. Ranging across literature, 

art, music, and psychoanalysis, they offer fresh 

insights into topics tackled in Bowie’s books, and 

discuss quite new ones. 

Volume i, Dreams of Knowledge, presents essays 

on memory, Proust, modern poetry (Mallarmé, 

Valéry, Eluard), and psychoanalysis. Bowie explores 

the uncertainties of knowledge, the relationship 

between fantasy and experience, and the ways great 

writers, artists and thinkers represent these. 

Volume ii, Song Man, presents shorter pieces, 

including Bowie’s essays on song and music 

criticism. they explore important cultural issues 

such as anti-Semitism, images of gender, and ideas 

of the nation. 

Volume I: Dreams of Knowledge 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 48 6 


Volume II: Song Man 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 49 3 


Purchase both these volumes together at the special rate of 

£80.00/US$180.00 

Taboo 

Corporeal Secrets in Nineteenth-Century 

France 

Hannah thompson 

French realist texts are driven 

by representations of the body 

and depend on corporeality 

to generate narrative intrigue. 

But anxieties around bodily 

representation undermine 

realist claims of objectivity and 

transparency. Aspects of bodily 

reality which threaten les bonnes mœurs — gender 

confusion, sexual appetite, disability, torture, 

murder, child abuse and disease — rarely occupy 

the foreground and are instead spurned or only 

partially alluded to by writers and critics. 

This wide-ranging study uses the notion of 

the taboo as a powerful means of interpreting 

representations of the body. the hidden bodies 

of realist texts reveal their secrets in unexpected 

ways. thompson reads texts by sand, Rachilde, 

Maupassant, Hugo, Barbey d’Aurevilly, Mirbeau 

and Zola alongside modern theorists of the body 

to show how the figure of the taboo plots an 

alternative model of author-reader relations based 

on the struggle to speak the unspeakable. 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 55 4 


7 

Translating the Perception of Text 

Literary Translation and Phenomenology 

clive scott 

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. 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 35 6 


Women, Genre and Circumstance 

Essays in Memory of Elizabeth Fallaize 

edited by Margaret Atack, 

Diana Holmes, Diana Knight 

and Judith still 

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. 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 30 1 

June 2012 • 162 pages • Hardback • £45.00/US$89.50 

See more Legenda books in French studies 

at www.legendabooks.com/french

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 Frenchspeaking 

world. its distinctiveness lies in the 

relative brevity of its publications (50,000–60,000 

words). As innovation is a priority of the series, 

volumes should predominantly consist of 

new material, although, subject to appropriate 

modification, previously published research may 

form up to one third of the whole. Proposals 

may include critical editions as well as critical 

studies. they should be sent with one or two 

sample chapters for consideration to the General 

editor, Professor Diana Knight 

(diana.knight@nottingham.ac.uk). 

Variation and Change in French 

Morphosyntax 

The Case of Collective Nouns 

Anna tristram 

research monoGraphs in French studies 40 

collective nouns such as majorité or foule have long 

been of interest to linguists for their unusual 

semantic properties, and provide a valuable source 

of new data on the evolution of French grammar. 

this book tests the hypothesis that plural agreement 

with collective nouns is becoming more frequent in 

French. through an analysis of data from a variety 

of sources, including sociolinguistic interviews, 

gap-fill tests and corpora, the complex linguistic 

and external factors which affect this type of 

agreement are examined, shedding new light on 

their interaction in this context. Broader questions 

concerning the methodological challenges of 

studying variation and change in morphosyntax, and 

the application of sociolinguistic generalisations to 

the French of France, are also addressed. 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 95 0 

2014 • Hardback • £40.00/US$75.00 

Dada as Text, Thought and Theory 

stephen Forcer 

research monoGraphs 

in French studies 39 

the Dada movement, revered 

as perhaps the purest form 

of cultural subversion and 

provocation in 20th-century 

europe, has been a victim of 

the readiness with which cultural 

historians have swallowed its 

own propaganda. Based on extensive close analysis 

of French-language Dada work in its original form, 

and offering english translations throughout, this 

major reappraisal looks at a broad range of media 

and topics — including poetry, film, philosophy, and 

quantum physics — in order to get beyond Dada’s 

typecasting as avant-garde anti-hero. Work by women 

writers and other marginalized figures combines 

with that of canonical Dadaists to present Dada in 

a radically new set of guises: poetic and textually 

subtle; intellectually and philosophically meaningful; 

peaceable and quasi-Buddhist; and, perhaps most 

uncomfortably of all, conformist and reactionary. 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 83 7 

2014 • Hardback • £40.00/US$75.00 

Marie NDiaye 

Inhospitable Fictions 

shirley Jordan 

research monoGraphs in 

French studies 38 

At stake throughout the 

fictional writings of Marie 

NDiaye (1967–) is the issue 

of the stranger’s welcome. 

NDiaye’s fascination with a spectrum of outsider 

figures and with the multiple, often subtle 

practices which create and sustain social groups 

as bounded entities, gives rise to detailed and 

disquieting portrayals not of hospitality but of the 

mechanisms and rituals of repulsion. 

engaging with critical theory on hospitality across 

the disciplines, shirley Jordan’s closely argued 

analysis of NDiaye’s novels, theatre and short stories 

probes the tropes of inhospitality around which 

the writer’s work coalesces, exploring the ethical 

significance of a corpus in which communities, 

environments and spaces are persistently tainted by 

unwelcoming. NDiaye is seen to elaborate a fantastic 

anthropology: one which, through sustained 

attentiveness to non-observance of the rules of 

hospitality, provides a focus for debate about 

belonging in a postcolonial world. 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 85 1 

2014 • Hardback • £40.00/US$75.00 

Stendhal’s Less-Loved Heroines 

Fiction, Freedom, and the Female 

Maria c. scott 



stendhal's most independent 

heroines are usually disliked 

or marginalized by critics. 

However, when gender-neutral 

criteria are applied, Mina 

de Vanghel, Vanina Vanini, 

Mathilde de La Mole, and 

Lamiel can all be shown to enact extraordinary 

experiments in freedom. these experiments are 

all the more remarkable in view of the gender 

of their agents, the historical situation of the 

author (1783–1842), and the conventions of the 

literary movement that his fiction helped to found: 

realism. simone de Beauvoir's 1949 study of 

stendhal's heroines gives preference to the reserved 

females over his Amazons. But existentialism, as a 

philosophy of freedom, also enables a reading of 

the self-determining heroines that acknowledges 

the superiority of their choices: their resistance and 

counter-plots, their paradoxical authenticity, their 

rejection of seriousness, and their assumption of 

responsibility for the routes they plot. 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 71 4 


8 

Echo’s Voice 

The Theatres of Sarraute, Duras, Cixous and 

Renaude 

Mary Noonan 



Hélène Cixous (1937–), 

distinguished not least as a 

playwright herself, told Le 

Monde in 1977 that she no 

longer went to the theatre: it 

presented women only as reflections of men, used 

for their visual effect. the theatre she wanted 

would stress the auditory, giving voice to ways 

of being that had previously been silenced. she 

was by no means alone in this. cixous' plays, 

along with those of Nathalie sarraute (1900–99), 

Marguerite Duras (1914–96), and Noëlle Renaude 

(1949–), among others, have proved potent in 

drawing participants into a dynamic ‘space of 

the voice’. if, as psychoanalysis suggests, voice 

represents a transitional condition between body 

and language, such plays may draw their audiences 

in to understandings previously never spoken. in 

this ground-breaking study, Noonan explores the 

rich possibilities of this new audio-vocal form of 

theatre, and what it can reveal of the auditory self. 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 50 9 


Furetière’s Roman bourgeois and the 

Problem of Exchange 

Titular Economies 

craig Moyes 



'If Furetière (1619–1688) 

hadn't been friends with 

Racine and Boileau, if he 

hadn't been famous for his 

Dictionary and for his battle 

with the Académie Française, 

it is unlikely that we would 

still be speaking of the Roman bourgeois (1666). its 

qualities are decidedly few. one cannot even say 

in its favour that it bears witness to a period and a 

moment in our literary history.' so writes Antoine 

Adam in his magisterial history of 17th-century 

French literature. But whatever one might feel 

about the aesthetic value of the Roman bourgeois 

— and following Adam it is usually classified as 

a precocious though failed example of narrative 

realism, sadly out of step with the classicism of its 

time — can we really say that it bears no witness 

to its period? craig Moyes shows on the contrary 

how, within the disarticulated narrative of the 

Roman bourgeois, Furetière — the titular abbot, 

the sitting academician, the secret lexicographer, 

the experimental novelist — was uniquely placed 

to explore a changing literary economy marked 

most spectacularly by the trial of Nicolas Fouquet 

(1661–1664), the decline of aristocratic largesse, 

and the subsequent centralization of artistic 

patronage around the personal reign of Louis XiV 

and the new administration of colbert. 

ISBN: 978 1 907747 99 1 

January 2013 • 168 pages • Hardback • £40.00/US$75.00

HisPANic AND PoRtuGuese LiteRAtuRe 

New seRies 

ANNouNceMeNt 

In 2014 Legenda will publish its first titles 

in a substantial new series to be called 

studies in Hispanic and Lusophone culture, 

which will be a major focus of next year's 

catalogue. the series is a collaboration with 

the Association of Hispanists of Great 

Britain and ireland, and we warmly welcome 

enquiries from authors: please contact the 

General editor, Professor trevor Dadson 

(t.j.dadson@qmul.ac.uk). sHLc covers not 

only spanish and Portuguese culture, from 

Latin America as well as the peninsular, but 

also minority cultures such as catalan or 

Basque. A fuller announcement will be made 

in the spring of 2013. see 

www.legendabooks.com/news for more 

information. 

A Sight for Sore Eyes 

The Surrealist Visuality of 

José María Hinojosa 

Jacqueline Rattray 

José María Hinojosa (1904–1936) 

has been credited with being a 

pioneer of surrealism in spain. 

He moved in the same circles as 

Buñuel and Dalí and was one of 

the key figures behind an attempt 

to form an organised group of 

spanish surrealists along the lines of the French 

model. And yet, the name of Hinojosa remains 

curiously neglected. He lived a relatively short but 

prolific literary life during which time he published 

some groundbreaking surrealist poetry and texts. 

His writing reveals a vision of surrealism which 

originates from a particularly spanish perspective 

as well as displaying many of those universally 

recognised surrealist motifs. one of these, the 

iconic image of the mutilated eye, forms the focal 

point of this present study on Hinojosa’s work. in 

keeping with the interdisciplinarity of surrealism, 

Hinojosa’s work is read here within the context of 

the visual arts — surrealist collage, paranoiac-critical 

activity and cinema. the impact of Hegelian thought 

upon Surrealism is reflected through the application 

of a ‘surrealist Dialectic’ in this exploration of 

Hinojosa’s surrealist visuality. 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 73 8 

August 2013 • Hardback • £45.00/US$89.50 

The Art of Ana Clavel 

Ghosts, Urinals, Dolls, Shadows and Outlaw 

Desires 

Jane elizabeth Lavery 

Ana clavel is a remarkable 

contemporary Mexican 

writer whose literary and 

multimedia œuvre is marked 

by its transgressive thrust and 

its queerness. that which 

steps beyond conventionally 

determined boundaries or the 

queer is evinced in the manner in 

which the author disturbs conceptions of the normal, 

not only by representing ‘outlaw’ sexualities and 

‘dark’ desires but also by incorporating into her fictive 

and multimedia worlds that which is at odds with 

normalcy as evinced in the presence of the fantastical, 

the shadow, ghosts, dolls, golems and even urinals. 

clavel’s literary trajectory follows a queer path 

in the sense that she has moved from singular 

modes of creative expression in the form of 

literary writing, a traditional print medium, 

towards other non-literary forms. Some of 

clavel’s works have formed the basis of wider 

multimedia projects involving collaboration with 

various artists, photographers, performers and it 

experts. Her works embrace an array of hybrid 

forms including the audiovisual, internet-enabled 

technology, art installation, (video) performance 

and photography. By foregrounding the outlaw 

heterogeneous narrative themes, techniques and 

multimedia dimension of clavel’s œuvre, the aim 

of this monograph is to attest to her particular 

contribution to Hispanic letters, which arguably is 

as significant as that of more established Spanish 

American boom femenino women writers. 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 65 3 

2014 • Hardback • £45.00/US$89.50 

Pessoa in an Intertextual Web 

Influence and Innovation 

edited by David G Frier 

Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) 

is Portugal's most celebrated 

poet of the twentieth century, 

who wrote under the guise of 

dozens of literary personalities, 

or heteronyms. As well as his 

poetry, however, his work is 

marked by a constantly inventive 

and innovative engagement with authors and 

literary traditions from an astonishing variety 

of sources, placing him firmly in the worldwide 

literary canon. the present volume brings together 

a number of experts at the forefront of Pessoa 

studies internationally, 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 features essays examining his work 

from a range of perspectives to complement 

the multi-faceted nature of Pessoa himself 

(psychoanalytical, philosophical, political and 

artistic), and it includes consideration of his prose 

masterpiece The Book of Disquiet, as well as of 

various aspects of his poetic œuvre. 

ISBN: 978 1 907747 93 9 

January 2012 • 200 pages • Hardback £45.00/US$89.50 

9 

Reading Literature in Portuguese 

cláudia Pazos Alonso and stephen Parkinson 

this collection brings together textual commentaries 

on thirty representative works of literature in 

Portuguese — either complete poems or extracts 

from longer works — ranging from the medieval 

lyric of the 13th century, through the poetry and 

drama of the Portuguese Renaissance, the great 

Realist novels of the 19th century, early 20th century 

Modernism and post-1974 writings through to the 

present day, while also including examples of 19th- 

and 20th- century Brazilian literature. The authors 

chosen — poets, dramatists and novelists — are 

generally regarded as iconic writers, and the three 

most famous canonical Portuguese authors (Luís 

de Camões, Fernando Pessoa, José Saramago) are 

featured, but the texts selected for commentary 

strike a balance between a focus on well-known and 

lesser-studied works. 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 62 2 


The Reinvention of Theatre in 

Sixteenth-Century Europe 

Traditions, Texts and Performance 

edited by t. F. earle and catarina Fouto 

the sixteenth century was 

an exciting period in the history 

of european theatre. in the 

iberian Peninsula, italy, France, 

Germany and england, writers 

and actors experimented with 

new dramatic techniques and 

found new publics. they 

prepared the way for the 

better-known dramatists of the 

next century but produced much work which is 

valuable in its own right, in Latin and in their own 

vernaculars. the popular theatre of the Middle 

Ages gave endless material for reinvention by 

playwrights, and the legacy of the ancient world 

became a spur to creativity, in tragedy and comedy. 

As soon as readers and audiences had taken in the 

new plays, they were changed again, taking new 

forms as the first experiments were themselves 

modified and reinvented. Writers constantly 

adapted the texts of plays to meet new 

requirements. these and other issues are explored 

by a group of international experts from a 

comparative perspective, giving particular emphasis 

to one of the great european comic dramatists, the 

Portuguese Gil Vicente. 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 76 9 

2014 • Hardback • £45.00/US$89.50 

See more Legenda books in Spanish 

literature at www.legendabooks.com/ 

spanish 

See more Legenda books in Portuguese 


portuguese

itALiAN LiteRAtuRe 

Authority, Innovation and Early 

Modern Epistemology 

Essays in Honour of Hilary Gatti 

edited by Martin McLaughlin 

and elisabetta tarantino 

Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), 

who died at the stake in 1600, 

is one of the best known 

symbols of anti-establishment 

thought. the theme of this 

volume, which is offered 

as a collection of essays to 

honour distinguished Bruno 

scholar Hilary Gatti, reflects 

her constant interest in the principles of cultural 

freedom and independent thinking. several essays 

deal with Bruno himself, including an analysis 

of the Eroici furori, and studies of his reception 

in relation to the group known as the Novatores 

and to English historical and literary figures (the 

Second Earl of Essex; Shakespeare and Ben 

Jonson) following Bruno’s stay in england. the 

authors and texts discussed here are linked by a 

relentless interest in the question of authority and 

originality, and they range from literary figures 

such as Alberti (1404–72) and Vasari (1511–74) 

to major scholars such as Athanasius Kircher 

(1601–80) and controversial philosophers and 

scientists who, like Bruno, were condemned 

by the church, such as tommaso campanella 

(1568–1639), Giulio cesare Vanini (1585–1619), 

the proponents of early modern psychology, and 

the 'New Philosophers' condemned by the Holy 

Office. Taken together, these chapters show how 

much that was new and revolutionary in early 

modern culture came from its confrontation with 

the past. 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 75 2 

2014 • Hardback • £45.00/US$89 

Dante in Oxford 

The Paget Toynbee Lectures 

edited by tristan Kay, 

Martin McLaughlin and 

Michelangelo Zaccarello 

oxford university’s Paget 

toynbee Fund has sponsored a 

number of significant initiatives 

on Dante in recent years, first 

a series of Lectures starting in the mid-1990s, 

and more recently a number of conferences. 

this volume gathers together some of the most 

important Paget toynbee Lectures. Named after 

the great medieval scholar of the first half of the 

twentieth century, they were delivered by major 

Dante experts of our time, such as John Barnes, 

Peter Hawkins, Lino Leonardi, emilio Pasquini, 

and the late Michelangelo Picone and Peter 

Armour. the topics range from Armour’s trilogy 

of lectures on the topics of exile, friendship and 

poverty in Dante to key questions such as Dante 

and ovid, Dante and history, and Dante and evil. 

ISBN: 978 1 900755 99 3 

February 2011 • 200 pages • Hardback • £45.00/US$89.50 

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 nuova 

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. 

ISBN: 978 1 907747 96 0 


Mediterranean Travels 

Writing Self and Other from the Ancient World 

to Contemporary Society 

edited by Patrick crowley, Noreen Humble and 

silvia Ross 

Across time the Mediterranean 

has been a zone of variable 

intensities, alliances and 

tensions: it is where the 

continents of europe, Africa 

and Asia meet, it is where 

North faces south in an 

asymmetrical relationship. its 

histories — of Greece and 

Rome, of christianity and 

islam, of modernity and tradition — have 

evolved through exploration, trade, pilgrimage, 

imperial expansion, imaginings, vacation and 

migration. travellers to this compelling region 

have recorded their journeys and their 

encounters with the other in a variety of modes 

that have also revealed as much about 

themselves. 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. 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 07 3 

August 2011 • 256 pages • Hardback • £45.00/US$89.50 

See more Legenda books in Italian 


italian 

10 

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. 

Proposals should be sent to the General editor, 

Professor simon Gilson, Department of 

italian, university of warwick, coventry cV4 

7AL, uK (s.gilson@warwick.ac.uk ). 

Leopardi’s Nymphs 

Grace, Melancholy, and the Uncanny 

Fabio A. camilletti 

itaLian perspectives 28 

How can one make poetry in a disenchanted age? 

For Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837) this was the 

modern subject’s most insolvable deadlock, after 

the enlightenment’s pitiless unveiling of truth. 

still, in the poems written in 1828–29 between 

Pisa and the Marches, Leopardi manages to turn 

disillusion into a powerful source of inspiration, 

through an unprecedented balance between 

poetic lightness and philosophical density. the 

addressees of these cantos are two prematurely 

dead maidens bearing names of nymphs, and thus 

obliquely metamorphosed into the charmingly 

disquieting deities that in Greek lore brought 

knowledge and poetic speech through possession. 

the nymph, camilletti argues, can be seen as the 

inspirational power allowing the utterance of a new 

kind of poetry, bridging antiquity and modernity, 

illusion and disenchantment, life and death. By 

reading Leopardi’s poems in the light of Freudian 

psychoanalysis and of Aby warburg’s and walter 

Benjamin’s thought, Camilletti gives a groundbreaking 

interpretation of the way Leopardi 

negotiates the original fracture between poetry and 

philosophy that characterizes western culture. 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 91 2 


The Tradition of the Actor-Author in 

Italian Theatre 

edited by Donatella Fischer 


the central importance of 

the actor-author is a distinctive 

feature of italian theatrical 

life, in all its eclectic range of 

regional cultures and artistic 

traditions. the fascination of 

the figure is that he or she 

stands on both sides of one 

of theatre’s most important power relationships: 

between the exhilarating freedom of performance 

and the austere restriction of authorship and the 

written text. This broad-ranging volume brings 

together critical essays on the role of the actorauthor, 

spanning the period from the Renaissance 

to the present. 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 80 6 

August 2013 • Hardback • £45.00/US$89.50

Edoardo Sanguineti 

Literature, Ideology and the Avant-Garde 

edited by Paolo chirumbolo and 

John Picchione 


Poet, novelist, theorist, 

playwright, translator, politician, 

and teacher, edoardo sanguineti 

(1930–2010) is one of the most 

original and influential Italian 

intellectuals of the second 

post-war period. An ardent 

and unremitting historical 

materialist, he investigated the links between 

language and ideology, literature and the other 

arts, together with their functions within the logic 

of late capitalism. the extraordinary range of 

his creative work persistently defies conventional 

aesthetic notions. 

with their variety of topics and critical perspectives, 

the essays assembled in this volume explore both 

the relevance of his theoretical postures and 

the ideological and formal fabric of his literary 

production. they highlight his subversive objectives, 

the complexity of the language, the astonishing 

linguistic ingenuity, metaliterary significance, 

whimsical disposition, and provocative social 

critique. testimonials by sanguineti’s colleagues 

and students, presented here in english translation, 

offer a portrait of the man, his temperament and his 

distinctiveness, and provide a personal view of the 

life and work of a brilliant intellectual. 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 78 3 


Dante and Epicurus 

A Dualistic Vision of Secular and Spiritual 

Fulfilment 

George corbett 


Dante and epicurus seem poles 

apart. Dante, a committed 

christian, depicted in the 

Commedia a vision of the 

afterlife and God’s divine justice. 

epicurus, a pagan philosopher, 

taught that the soul is mortal 

and that all religion is vain 

superstition. And yet epicurus is, for Dante, not 

only the quintessential heretic but an ethical ally. the 

key to this apparent paradox lies in the heterodox 

dualism — between man’s two goals of secular 

felicity and spiritual beatitude — at the heart of 

Dante’s ethical, political and theological thought. 

Corbett’s full-length treatment of Dante’s reception 

and polemical representation of epicurus addresses 

a major gap in the scholarship. Furthermore the 

study’s focus on fault lines in Dante’s vision of the 

afterlife — where the theological tensions implicit in 

his dualism surface — opens a new way to read the 

Commedia as a whole in dualistic terms. 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 79 0 


Disrupted Narratives 

Illness, Silence and Identity in Svevo, 

Pressburger and Morandini 

emma Bond 


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 (capable of expressing the 

body, and thus also the intimate damage caused 

by disease) 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 (1861–1928), Giorgio Pressburger (1937–) 

and Giuliana Morandini (1938–)) all make use of 

individual ‘infected’ or suppressed voices within 

their texts which unfold through illness to cast 

doubt on a more (conventionally) 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. 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 38 7 


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. 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 27 1 


11 

Giraffes in the Garden of Italian 

Literature 

Modernist Embodiment in Italo Svevo, 

Federigo Tozzi and Carlo Emilio Gadda 

Deborah Amberson 


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 self-characterization 

as exotic and even ungainly 

animals 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. 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 26 4 


The Printed Media in Fin-de-siècle Italy 

Publishers, Writers, and Readers 

edited by Ann Hallamore caesar, 

Gabriella Romani, and Jennifer Burns 


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 - 

books, magazines and journals - in Italy between 

1870 and 1914. with essays on publishers and 

reading communities, the professionalization of the 

role of journalist and writer, children's literature, 

book illustrations, and printed media in colonial 

territories among others, this book is intended 

for those with interests in cultural production and 

consumption and questions of nation-formation 

and nationhood in and outside italy. 

ISBN: 978 1 906540 74 6 

July 2011 • 222 pages • Hardback • £45.00/US$89.50 

See more titles in the Italian Perspectives 

series at www.legendabooks.com/series/ip

MoViNG iMAGe 


Moving Image publishes cutting-edge work 

on any aspect of film and screen media 

from europe and Latin America. studies 

of European-language cinemas from other 

continents, and of diasporic and intercultural 

cinemas (with some relation to europe or its 

languages), are also encompassed. 

The series seeks to reflect a diversity of 

theoretical, historical, and interdisciplinary 

approaches to the moving image, and includes 

projects comparing screen media with other art 

forms. 

Research monographs and collected volumes 

will be considered (but not studies of a single 

film). As innovation is a priority for the series, 

volumes should predominantly consist of 

previously unpublished material. 

Proposals should be sent with one or two 

sample chapters to the editor, Professor emma 

wilson, corpus christi college, cambridge 

cB2 1RH, uK. (efw1000@cam.ac.uk). 

Africa's Lost Classics 

New Histories of African Cinema 

edited by Lizelle Bisschoff and David Murphy 

movinG imaGe 5 

Until recently, the story of African film was 

marked by a series of truncated histories: many 

outstanding films from earlier decades were 

virtually inaccessible and thus often excluded from 

critical accounts. However, various conservation 

projects since the turn of the century have now 

begun to make many of these films available 

to critics and audiences in a way that was 

unimaginable just a decade ago. 

in this accessible and lively collection of essays, 

Lizelle Bisschoff and David Murphy draw 

together the best scholarship on the diverse and 

fragmented strands of African film history. Their 

volume recovers over 30 'lost' African classic 

films from 1920–2010 in order to provide a 

more complex genealogy and begin to trace new 

histories of African filmmaking: from 1920s 

egyptian melodramas through lost gems from 

apartheid south Africa to neglected works by great 

Francophone directors, the full diversity of African 

cinema will be revealed. 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 51 6 


Holocaust Intersections 

Genocide and Visual Culture at the New 

Millennium 

edited by Axel Bangert, Robert s c Gordon and 

Libby saxton 


Recent representations of 

the Holocaust have increasingly 

required us to think beyond 

rigid demarcations of nation 

and history, medium and genre. 

Holocaust Intersections sets out 

to investigate the many points 

of conjunction between these 

categories in recent images 

of genocide. the book examines transnational 

constellations in Holocaust cinema and television 

in Europe, disclosing instances of bordercrossing 

and boundary-troubling at levels of 

production, distribution and reception. it highlights 

intersections between film genres, through 

intertextuality and pastiche, and the deployment 

of audiovisual Holocaust memory and testimony. 

Finally, the volume addresses connections between 

the Holocaust and other histories of genocide 

in the visual culture of the new millennium, 

engaging with the questions of transhistoricity 

and intercultural perspective. Drawing on a wide 

variety of different media — from cinema and 

television to installation art and the internet — 

and on the most recent scholarship on responses 

to the Holocaust, the volume aims to update our 

understanding of how visual culture looks at the 

Holocaust and genocide today. 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 02 8 


Cinema’s Inter-Sensory Encounters 

Krzysztof Kieślowski and Claire Denis 

Georgina evans 


Sound cinema realised long-standing dreams 

of a synaesthetic art form, uniting image and 

sound with a success never achieved by earlier 

experiments. At the same time, this union 

cemented cinema’s future as a primarily narrative 

art form, seemingly pushing to one side the 

ambitions of abstraction. A closer look reveals, 

however, that it is through complex relationships 

among senses that fiction film strikes many of its 

deepest chords. the celebrated Polish and French 

directors Krzysztof Kie´slowski (1941–96) and 

Claire Denis (1948–) create films which unfurl 

subtle narratives through such inter-sensory 

encounters. close analysis opens wider questions 

about cinema and synaesthesia, selective attention, 

smell, pain and visceral feeling. How does the 

changing balance between one sense and another 

sway our responses? How can cinema, a medium 

which captures exterior forms, communicate the 

private inner world of pain and visceral sensation? 

evans explores the mysterious ways in which 

cinema moves us. 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 43 1 

2014 • Hardback • £45.00/US$89.50 

12 

Cinema and Contact 

The Withdrawal of Touch in Nancy, Bresson, 

Duras and Denis 

Laura McMahon 


Drawing on the work of 

contemporary French 

philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, 

Cinema and Contact investigates 

the aesthetics and politics of 

touch in the cinema of three 

of the most prominent and 

distinctive filmmakers to have 

emerged in France during the last fifty years: 

Robert Bresson, Marguerite Duras and claire 

Denis. countering the dominant critical account 

of touch elaborated by recent models of embodied 

spectatorship, Laura McMahon argues that cinema 

offers a privileged space for understanding touch 

in terms of spacing and withdrawal rather than 

immediacy and continuity. such a deconstructive 

configuration of touch is shown here to have 

far-reaching implications, inviting an innovative 

rethinking of politics, aesthetics and theology via 

the textures of cinema. The first study to bring 

the thought of Nancy into sustained dialogue with 

a series of detailed analyses of films, Cinema and 

Contact also forges new interpretative perspectives 

on Bresson, Duras and Denis, tracing a compelling 

two-way exchange between cinema and philosophy 

throughout. 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 03 5 


Spanish Practices 

Literature, Cinema, Television 

Paul Julian smith 


This book is the first to explore 

the interaction of three media in 

contemporary spain. Focusing 

on some of the best known 

and most important books, 

feature films, and television 

series in the country (including 

novelist Antonio Muñoz Molina, 

director Pedro Almodóvar, and the spanish version 

of telenovela Ugly Betty), it addresses three pairs 

of linked issues central to Hispanic studies and 

beyond: history and memory, authority and society, 

and genre and transitivity. Much of the material is 

very recent and thus as yet unstudied. the book 

also focuses on the representation of gender, 

sexuality, and transnationalism in these texts. 

Drawing on approaches from both the humanities 

and social sciences, it combines close readings of 

key texts with the analysis of production processes, 

media institutions, audiences, and reception. 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 04 2 


Visit the Moving Image series page at 

www.legendabooks.com/series/mi

RussiAN, ceNtRAL 

& eAsteRN 

euRoPeAN 

LiteRAtuRe 

After Reception Theory 

Fedor Dostoevskii in Britain, 1869–1935 

Lucia Aiello 

More often than not, 

monographs on the reception 

of an author are either detailed, 

chronologically organized 

accounts of the reputation of 

that author, or studies in literary 

influence. This study adopts 

neither of those approaches 

and deals with the reception 

of Fedor Dostoevskii in Britain from a double 

perspective. the detailed analysis of primary 

sources such as reviews, essays and monographs 

on Dostoevskii is associated here with a critical 

investigation of the dynamics of the reception 

process. on the one hand, the available sources 

are examined with the intention of exposing their 

underlying ideological tensions and impact on 

British literary circles. on the other hand, Fedor 

Dostoevskii's novels are shown to function as 

a prism, through which significant aspects of 

nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British 

intellectual life are refracted. In the final analysis, 

by using Dostoevskii as an exemplary case study, 

this book develops both a methodology that 

aims at clarifying what we mean when we refer to 

'reception' and a theoretical alternative to prevalent 

notions of reception. 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 44 8 


Chicago of the Balkans 

Budapest in Hungarian Literature 1900–1939 

Gwen Jones 

At the point of its creation 

in 1873, Budapest was intended 

to be a pleasant rallying point 

of orderliness, high culture and 

elevated social principles: the 

jewel in the national crown. 

From the turn of the century 

to world war ii, however, 

the Hungarian capital was 

described, variously, as: Judapest, the sinful city, not 

in Hungary, and the chicago of the Balkans. this 

is the first English-language study of competing 

metropolitan narratives in Hungarian literature 

that spans both the liberal late Habsburg and 

post-liberal, ‘Christian-national’ eras, at the same 

time as the ‘Jewish Question’ became increasingly 

inseparable from representations of the city. works 

by writers from a wide variety of backgrounds 

are discussed, from Jewish satirists to icons of 

the radical Right, representatives of conservative 

national schools, and modernist, avant-garde and 

‘peasantist’ authors. 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 57 8 


See more Legenda books in 

Russian literature at 

www.legendabooks.com/russian 

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. its high and low literary 

and non-literary texts and practices have 

been of central importance not only to 

Jewish existence and history but also to the 

wider cultural and creative life in central 

and eastern europe, israel and the New 

world. the series regularly publishes the 

proceedings of the international Mendel 

Friedman conference, which is convened 

every two years at the university of oxford. 

in addition, the series includes monographs 

and edited volumes on all aspects of Yiddish 

language and culture, and proposals for new 

publications are welcomed. 

Proposals should be sent to 

Dr Graham Nelson 

(graham.nelson@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk). 

Uncovering the Hidden 

The Works and Life of Der Nister 

edited by Gennady estraikh, Kerstin Hoge and 

Mikhail Krutikov 

studies in Yiddish 12 

Der Nister (Pinkhes Kahanovitsh, 1884–1950) is 

widely regarded as the most enigmatic author in 

modern Yiddish literature. His pseudonym, which 

translates as ‘the Hidden one’, is as puzzling 

as his diverse body of works, which range from 

mystical symbolist poetry and dark expressionist 

tales to realist historical epic. Although part of 

the Kiev Group of Yiddish writers, which also 

included David Bergelson and Peretz Markish 

(who are the focus of the sixth and ninth volumes 

in the studies in Yiddish series), Der Nister 

remained at the margins of the Yiddish literary 

world throughout his life, mainstream success 

eluding him both in and outside the soviet union. 

Yet, to judge from the quantity of recent research 

and translation work, Der Nister is today one of 

the best remembered Yiddish modernists. the 

present collection of twelve original articles by 

international scholars re-examines Der Nister’s 

cultural and literary legacy, bringing to light new 

aspects of his life and creative output. 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 84 4 


13 

Joseph Opatoshu 

A Yiddish Writer between Europe and America 

edited by sabine Koller, Gennady estraikh and 

Mikhail Krutikov 


At the turn of the twentieth 

century east european Jews 

underwent a radical cultural 

transformation, which turned a 

traditional religious community 

into a modern nation, struggling 

to find its place in the world. An 

important figure in this ‘Jewish 

Renaissance’ was the American- 

Yiddish writer and activist Joseph opatoshu 

(1886–1954). Born into a Hassidic family, he spent 

his early childhood in a forest in central Poland, 

was educated in Russia and studied engineering 

in France and America. in New York, where 

he emigrated in 1907, he joined the revitalizing 

modernist group Di yunge — the Young. His 

early novels painted a vivid picture of social 

turmoil and inner psychological conflict, using 

modernist devices of multiple voices and mixed 

linguistic idioms. He acquired international fame 

by his historical novels about the Polish uprising of 

1863 and the expulsion of Jews from Regensburg 

in 1519. though he was translated into several 

languages, Yiddish writing always fostered his ideas 

and ideals of Jewish identity. 

Although he occupied a key position in the 

transnational Jewish culture during his lifetime, 

opatoshu has until recently been neglected by 

scholars. this volume brings together literary 

specialists and historians working in Jewish and 

slavic studies, who analyse opatoshu's quest for 

modern Jewish identity from different perspectives. 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 60 8 


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. 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 00 4 


See more Legenda books in Yiddish studies 

at www.legendabooks.com/series/siy

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. 

Proposals should be sent to Dr Graham Nelson 

(graham.nelson@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk). 

Likenesses 

Translation, Illustration, Interpretation 

Matthew Reynolds 

studies in comparative 

Literature 30 

translation, illustration and 

interpretation have at least 

two things in common. they 

all begin when sense is made 

in the act of reading: that is 

where illustrative images and 

explanatory words begin to form. 

And they all ask to be understood in relation to the 

works from which they have arisen: reading them 

is a matter of reading readings. Likenesses explores 

this palimpsestic realm, with examples from Dante 

to the contemporary sculptor Rachel whiteread. 

the complexities that emerge are different from 

empsonian ambiguity or de Man’s unknowable 

infinity of signification: here, meaning dawns and 

fades as the hologrammic text is filled out and 

flattened by successive encounters. Since all literature 

and art is palimpsestic to some degree — Reynolds 

proposes — this style of interpretation can become 

a tactic for criticism in general. critics need both to 

indulge and to distrust the metamorphic power of 

their interpreting imaginations. 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 82 0 


Iris Murdoch and Elias Canetti 

Intellectual Allies 

elaine Morley 

studies in comparative Literature 29 

since the revelation of iris Murdoch’s (1919–1999) 

affair with elias canetti (1905–1994), scholarship 

on their relationship has been largely biographical, 

focusing in particular on canetti’s alleged role as 

the real-life model for some of Murdoch’s most 

invidious protagonists. Little research, however, 

has been done on the extensive common ground 

between the two writers’ literary projects. in this 

groundbreaking comparative study, elaine Morley 

conducts a careful philological comparison of 

Murdoch’s and canetti’s works, from their literary 

themes and theories to their idiosyncratic stylistic 

practices. Morley demonstrates that these authors 

were preoccupied with a common philosophical 

problem, and that they were in fact not only 

personally close, but also more intellectually allied 

than has been previously thought. 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 74 5 


The Realist Author and Sympathetic 

Imagination 

sotirios Paraschas 


Literature 28 

The nineteenth-century realist 

author was a contradictory 

figure. He was the focus of 

literary criticism, but obscured 

his creative role by insisting 

on presenting his works as ‘copies’ of reality. He 

was a celebrity who found himself subservient to 

publishers and the public, in a newly-industrialised 

literary marketplace. He was the owner of his work 

who was divested of his property by imperfect 

copyright laws, playwrights who adapted his novels 

for the stage, and sequel-writers. This combination 

of a conspicuous yet precarious status with a selfeffacing 

attitude was expressed by an image of the 

author as a plural, Protean subject, possessing the 

faculty of sympathetic imagination — which the 

realists incorporated in their works in the form of 

a series of fictional characters who functioned as 

‘doubles’ of the author. 

Paraschas focuses on two realists, Honoré de Balzac 

and George eliot, and traces this authorial scenario 

from its origins in the late eighteenth century to its 

demise in the early twentieth century, examining its 

presence in the works of e.t.A. Hoffmann, Friedrich 

Schlegel, Charles Baudelaire and André Gide. 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 70 7 


Comparative Literature in Britain 

National Identities, Transnational Dynamics 

1800–2000 

Joep Leerssen with elinor shaffer 


the discipline of comparative literature, with 

its application of a transnational perspective to 

literature as a multinational historical praxis, is gaining 

fresh interest in today’s globalizing, post-colonial 

world. it emerged in the nineteenth century as a 

countermovement to the increasingly nationalphilological 

scope of literary studies. the chequered 

history of its emergence and acceptance in the British 

isles throws a fascinating light on literary, critical and 

scholarly mentalities of the last two centuries. 

in this book, Leerssen and shaffer approach 

the discipline’s history in Britain as a problem 

in intellectual history, situated in a variety of 

contexts and cross-currents. The meaning of 

‘literature’ itself has been in flux, as was the 

British academic system which has valued it very 

differently at different times. cultural transfers 

from continental scholarship, and champions such 

as Matthew Arnold, gave comparative approaches 

increasing prestige. British comparatism became 

an established academic discipline after the second 

world war. shaped by an imperial preoccupation 

with ethnicity rather than nationality, by the cultural 

politics of the ‘Four Nations’ of the British isles, 

and by the enduring tradition of reviewing and 

criticism, it has since then been both challenged 

and enriched by structuralism, post-structuralist 

theory, and the decline of eurocentrism. 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 66 0 


14 

Architecture, Travellers and Writers 

Constructing Histories of Perception 

1640–1950 

Anne Hultzsch 


Literature 26 

Does the way in which buildings 

are looked at, and made sense of, 

change over the course of time? 

How can we find out about this? 

By looking at a selection of travel 

writings spanning four centuries, Anne Hultzsch 

suggests that it is language, the description of 

architecture, which offers answers to such questions. 

the words authors use to transcribe what they see 

for the reader to re-imagine offer glimpses at modes 

of perception specific to one moment, place and 

person. Hultzsch constructs an intriguing patchwork 

of local and often fragmentary narratives discussing 

texts as diverse as the 17th-century diary of John 

evelyn, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) 

and an 1855 art guide by swiss art historian Jacob 

Burckhardt. Further authors considered include 

17th-century collector John Bargrave, 18th-century 

novelist tobias smollett, poet Johann wolfgang 

von Goethe, critic John Ruskin as well as the 20thcentury 

architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner. 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 63 9 

2014 • Hardback • £45.00/US$89.50 

Prometheus in the Nineteenth 

Century 

From Myth to Symbol 

Caroline Corbeau-Parsons 


on Zeus’ order, Prometheus was chained to Mount 

caucasus where, every day, he was to endure his liver 

being devoured by a bird of prey — his punishment 

for bringing fire to mankind. Through the impulse 

of Goethe, his fortune went through radical 

changes: the titan, originally perceived as a trickster, 

was established both as a creator and a rebel freed 

from guilt, and he became a mask for the Romantic 

artist. This cross-disciplinary study, encompassing 

literature, the history of art, and music, examines 

the constitution of the Prometheus myth and the 

revolution it underwent in 19th-century Europe. It 

leads to the symbolist period — which witnessed 

the coronation of the titan as a prism for the 

total work of art — and aims to re-establish the 

importance of Prometheus amongst other major 

Symbolist figures such as Orpheus. 

ISBN: 978 1 907975 52 3 


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