Languages & Literatures 2011 | 1 | - Peter Lang

4 English Language and Literatures · Anglistik · Langue et littératures anglaises
Francesca Bugliani Knox
The Eye of the Eagle
John Donne and the Legacy
of Ignatius Loyola
Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles,
Frankfurt am Main, New York, Wien, 2011 .
XIV, 342 pp ., 1 ill .
Religions and Discourse . Vol . 49
Edited by James M .M . Francis
J
pb . ISBN 978-3-0343-0225-8
CHF 76 .– / € D 52 .30 / € A 53 .80 / € 48 .90 /
£ 44 .– / US-$ 75 .95
ohn Donne’s family were committed Catholics
. His two uncles were Jesuits . One of
them, Jasper Heywood, was the leader of the
Jesuit mission in England, while Donne’s
mother was a recusant who was forced to
leave the country in 1595 . In this detailed and
historically contextualized study, the author
argues that Donne was greatly influenced in
his journey from militant Roman Catholicism
to ordination in the Church of England
by Ignatius of Loyola’s religious ideals and in
particular by his Spiritual Exercises .
The book describes the pervasive influence
of the Spiritual Exercises on late sixteenth-
and early seventeenth-century Catholicism
and Protestantism . In this light, it
offers a close reading of Donne’s preordination
religious poems and prose with constant
reference to the sermons . These works are
usually read through the tinted lenses of
‘Catholicism’ or ‘Protestantism’ or other religious
‘-isms’ . The reading proposed here argues
instead that Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises
were for Donne a means to transcend
the simplistic and perilous divisions of contemporary
Catholicism and Protestantism .
FRanCeSCa Bugliani Knox graduated in
1976 from Pisa University (Dott . Lett .) and
was senior lecturer in the English Department
of the Università IULM, Milan, from
1986 to 2002 . In 2009 she was awarded a PhD
by Heythrop College, University of London .
She is now Research Fellow at Heythrop College
and Teaching Fellow at UCL . Her publications
include translations into Italian as
well as books and articles on various aspects
of English and Italian literature from the Renaissance
to the present .
T
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Clive Bush
The Century’s Midnight
he Century’s Midnight is an exploration
of the literary and political relationships
between a number of ideologically sophisticated
American and European writers
during a mid-twentieth century dominated
by the Second World War . Clive Bush offers
an account of an intelligent and diverse community
of people of good will, transcending
national, ideological and cultural barriers .
Although structured around five central figures
– the novelist Victor Serge, the editors
Dwight Macdonald and Dorothy Norman,
the cultural critic Lewis Mumford and the
poet Muriel Rukeyser – the book examines
a wealth of European and American writers
including Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir,
Walter Benjamin, John Dos Passos, André
T
Dissenting European and American Writers
in the Era of the Second World War
Oxford, 2010 . XIV, 594 pp ., 4 ill .
hb . ISBN 978-1-906165-25-3
CHF 78 .– / € D 53 .50 / € A 55 .– / € 50 .– / £ 45 .– / US-$ 77 .95
Valentina Castagna
Shape-Shifting Tales
his book provides an analysis of the representation
of women’s bodies and their
monstrous metamorphoses in selected short
stories by contemporary English writer Michèle
Roberts . The author explores the relationship
between traditional fairy tales such as the
Grimm Brothers’ and Charles Perrault’s, the
lives of female saints and Roberts’s counternarratives,
focussing on the analysis of images
of sublimed fleshliness and of acts of
monstrous violence on the body . The book
takes into account relevant Women’s Studies
criticism regarding the mother-daughter re-
Gide, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, George Orwell,
Boris Pilniak, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre,
Ignacio Silone and Richard Wright .
The book’s central theme relates politics and
literature to time and narrative . The author
argues that knowledge of the writers of this
period is of inestimable value in attempting
to understand our contemporary world .
Clive BuSh is Emeritus Professor of American
Literature at King’s College London . He pioneered
the teaching of American Studies at
the University of Warwick from 1966 to 1990 .
His books include Halfway to Revolution: Investigation
and Crisis in the Work of Henry
Adams, William James and Gertrude Stein (1991)
and Holding the Line: Selected Essays in American
Literature and Culture (Peter Lang, 2009) .
Michèle Roberts’s Monstrous Women
Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Oxford, Wien, 2010 .
127 pp .
pb . ISBN 978-3-0343-0568-6
CHF 40 .– / € D 27 .60 / € A 28 .40 / € 25 .80 / £ 23 .20 / US-$ 39 .95
lationship, as Roberts’s stories question the
role of mother figures in traditional fairy tales
and hagiography and at the same time rework
the concept of motherhood itself .
valentina CaStagna is a Postdoctoral
Research Fellow at the University of Palermo
(Italy) . She was Visiting PhD Student at Birkbeck
College, University of London, in 2005
and was awarded her PhD from the University
of Salerno (Italy) in 2007 . She is the author of
Corpi a pezzi (2007) and has recently edited
the Italian critical version of Marina Warner’s
Brigit’s Cell (2010) .
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