Literary Collections

Le Chevalier au barisel is an established part of the Old French literary canon, but up to now it has not been available in English. This translation offers a vibrant but scholarly version of the exciting short story, suitable for a wide readership including university students, scholars of associated disciplines (history, English, theology, fine arts, comparative literature, etc.) and general readers. The greatest strength of the book is the translation itself, which can be read without reference to the original text or alongside the medieval French. But also valuable is the apparatus surrounding the text: cultural rather than linguistic, explicative rather than excessively technical. A substantial commentary reveals the internal struggles of the protagonists, highlights existing research and suggests future lines of enquiry. This commentary is a freestanding work of rigorous scholarship that makes plentiful reference to the text.

These lively and candid letters from Rose Macaulay to her first cousin Jean Smith are previously unknown. Macaulay was one of the most versatile, successful, and significant writers in the first half of the twentieth century, Smith a talented but diffident and depressive poet who was briefly an Anglican nun before converting to Roman Catholicism. The letters throw fascinating and often amusing light not only on the writer’s private life, unconventional character, and varied career, but also on the lively literary and social circles in which she moved. They are essential reading for all interested in British literary culture and women’s writing.

From the 1930s to the 1970s, in New York and in Paris, daring publishers and writers were producing banned pornographic literature. The books were written by young, impecunious writers, poets, and artists, many anonymously. Most of these pornographers wrote to survive, but some also relished the freedom to experiment that anonymity provided - men writing as women, and women writing as men - and some (Anaïs Nin, Henry Miller) went on to become influential figures in modernist literature.

Dirty books tells the stories of these authors and their remarkable publishers: Jack Kahane of Obelisk Press and his son Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press, whose catalogue and repertoire anticipated that of the more famous US publisher Grove Press. It offers a humorous and vivid snapshot of a fascinating moment in pornographic and literary history, uncovering a hidden, earlier history of the sexual revolution, when the profits made from erotica helped launch the careers of literary cult figures.

This is the first full-length, published study of Beethoven’s songs. All the composer’s songs with piano are included, with full German texts and translations, together with comprehensive notes on the poetry and the music. The inclusion of unfinished songs gives a fascinating insight into Beethoven’s compositional methods.

An introductory essay considers reasons for the relative neglect of the songs, the significance of Beethoven’s choice of texts, his crucial role in the development of German art-song and specific aspects such as choice of key. Throughout the book, poetic and musical texts are discussed in their historical context, and in the overall context of Beethoven’s life and music.

It is anticipated that this book, like its predecessor The Schubert Song Companion, will encourage the performance and study of an important but comparatively neglected aspect of the work of the world’s most celebrated composer.

Julia Kavanagh was a popular and internationally published writer of the mid-nineteenth century whose collective body of work included fiction, biography, critical studies of French and English women writers, and travel writing. In this critically engaged study Eileen Fauset sees Kavanagh as a significant but neglected writer and returns her to her proper place in the history of women's writing.

With few known primary sources to go on the author manages, through her skilful selection of letters, official documents and historical commentary, to piece together some of the jigsaw of Kavanagh's life. Throughout this study, the biographical element informs and directs discussion of Kavanagh's writing itself. What emerges is a succinct and telling portrait of a woman who, through a desire to write, acquired both economic independence and a means through which she could voice her sexual politics. Eileen Fauset challenges the historical attitudes to 'popular romance', a genre read mainly by women and generally discounted as simple entertainment. She argues that in Kavanagh's novels romance is often the pivot around which issues of cultural and sexual difference are examined, a perspective that, invariably, also informed Kavanagh's non-fiction.

This study addresses the current enthusiasm for the reclamation of neglected women writers and also brings to light interesting material that might otherwise have remained unknown to the specialist. It will appeal to academics, students and enthusiasts of Victorian literature and women's writing.

Andrew Bennett argues in this fascinating book that ignorance is part of the narrative and poetic force of literature and is an important aspect of its thematic focus: ignorance is what literary texts are about. He sees that the dominant conception of literature since the Romantic period involves an often unacknowledged engagement with the experience of not knowing.

From Wordsworth and Keats to George Eliot and Charles Dickens, from Henry James to Joseph Conrad, from Elizabeth Bowen to Philip Roth and Seamus Heaney, writers have been fascinated and compelled by the question of ignorance, including their own. Bennett argues that there is a politics and ethics as well as a poetics of ignorance: literature’s agnoiology, its acknowledgement of the limits of what we know both of ourselves and of others, engages with the possibility of democracy and the ethical, and allows us to begin to conceive of what it might mean to be human.

This exciting approach to literary theory will be of interest to lecturers and students of literary theory and criticism.

Jonathan Lethem is the first full-length study dedicated to the work of an exciting, genre-busting contemporary writer with an increasingly high profile in American literature.

Examining all of Lethem’s novels, as well as a number of his short fictions, essays and critical works, this study shows how the author’s prolific output, his restlessness and his desire always to be subverting literary forms and genres, are consistent with his interest in subcultural identities. The human need to break off into small groupings, subcultures or miniature utopias is mirrored in the critical tendency to enforce generic boundaries. To break down the boundaries between genres, then, is partly to make a nonsense of critical distinctions between 'high' and 'low' literature, and partly to reflect the wider need to recognise difference, to appreciate that other people, no matter how outlandish and alien they may appear, share similar desires, experiences and problems. With this in mind, James Peacock argues that Lethem’s experiments with genre are not merely games or elaborate literary jokes, but ethical necessities, particularly when viewed in the light of the losses and traumas that shadow all of his writing. Jonathan Lethem, therefore, makes an important contribution not just to Lethem studies, but also to debates about genre and its position in postmodern or 'post-postmodern' literature.

It will be of interest to all scholars and students of contemporary American writing, as well as those interested in genre fiction and literature’s relationship with subcultures.

Martha Gellhorn was the doyenne of twentieth century war correspondence. Opinionated, honest and unafraid, she covered conflicts from the Spanish Civil War to Reagan’s wars in Central America in the 1980s. Martha Gellhorn: the war writer in the field and in the text is the first critical study of her Second World War fiction and journalism.

Often overlooked in accounts of war literature is the writer’s precise position in relation to battle and his or her resultant standing in the text. Kate McLoughlin traces Gellhorn’s daring attempts to access the war zone and her constructions of the woman war correspondent in her despatches, novels, short stories and play. Drawing on unpublished letters, close attention is given to Gellhorn’s rivalry with Ernest Hemingway (the two were married from 1940 to 1945) over reaching the Normandy beaches on D-Day and its textual outcome in the pages of Collier’s magazine. McLoughlin goes on to examine Gellhorn’s increasingly negative portrayals of the glamorous female war reporter and to suggests why such disillusionment might have set in.