Bloomsbury Literary Studies

Praise for Thomas Mann in English - now in paperback!

This week, the Bloomsbury Literary Studies team is heading to the annual conference of the German Studies Association. We’re excited to showcase sixteen volumes from New Directions in German Studies, our fantastic series that uses new perspectives and methodologies to reframe aspects of the discipline and shed light on underrepresented areas of study. We’re especially happy to now offer a paperback edition of one of our most widely acclaimed volumes, David Horton’s Thomas Mann in English. The praise this book has garnered speaks to both the incredible value of Horton’s book and the innovative nature of our series. Check out some of the reviews below:

“Horton has made a major contribution to the field. Henceforth anyone who wants to comment on translation of Mann must first read and digest this book.”
Modern Language Review

“David Horton’s Thomas Mann in English is a book that, had the normal publishing logic triumphed, would never have been published. It’s a single-author study of a non-Anglophone writer, it focuses on only one aspect of that author’s reception history, it does not employ trendy jargon or speak to any topic that’s ripped from today’s headlines, and it does not even have a sexy title. And yet it is a supremely interesting work, not just because it sheds new light on Thomas Mann’s oeuvre, but also because it raises thought-provoking questions about the future of literary study ... [It] is arguably the first absolutely rigorous, comprehensive, and even-handed treatment of a subject that has already attracted much attention in the scholarly literature, namely the impact of Mann’s first translator, Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter. ... In my opinion, however, the most important service that Thomas Mann in English provides to German Studies has nothing to do with translation studies per se. It concerns, rather, David Horton’s approach to reading. Over the past few years, literary criticism has been riven by serious methodological disputes, as advocates of computer-assisted ‘distant reading’ strategies have done battle with more hermeneutically oriented scholars and sociologically informed ‘surface reading’ approaches have begun to displace the psychoanalytic depth model pioneered by Fredric Jameson in The Political Unconscious (1982). But Horton moves easily among all these different strategies, treating them not as secular gospel, but simply as tools by which to better dissect his chosen texts. ... Any reader willing to read for the larger picture will walk away with hard evidence that literary study, contrary to its frequently expressed contemporary malaise, is actually more alive and methodologically vibrant than ever. This book is an impressive achievement, and fully lives up to the claim of providing new directions for its discipline.”
Comparative Literature Studies

“The subject of this excellent and interesting book is translatability … Impeccably researched and with excellent use of sources, this book is written with exemplary clarity … This book’s scholarship, clarity, wealth of detail, and insight into translating one of the most difficult of authors should give all translators pause. It deals with important and knotty problems that must be confronted.”
Translation Review

“Horton's archival research unearthed much little-known information about the remarkable triangle of Mann, Lowe-Porter, and Knopf … Highly Recommended”
Choice

“Thomas Mann in English makes us aware of the daunting task that Mann’s translators face when approaching his work, and gives us a new appreciation for their creative solutions to seemingly intractable problems … [A] book that not only offers meticulously close and sensitive readings of Thomas Mann and his translators, but also serves as a model for future studies of translations.”
Translation and Literature

“Horton’s subject is thus an important one. He approaches it with great expertise in the fields of translation studies and cross-linguistic and intercultural transfer. His analysis is grounded not only theoretically, but also in a thorough knowledge of Mann’s works. Anyone interested in Mann and the literary and linguistic aspects of the transformation a text undergoes in the process of translation will profit from this meticulously argued study.”
Jens Rieckmann, Emeritus Professor of German, University of California, Irvine, USA

“David Horton's Thomas Mann in English is a sophisticated and well-researched attempt to pierce the film of ignorance and commonplaces surrounding the field of literary translation, in the context of a specific author whose works became classics thanks largely to the popularity of their translations into English … Taken together, Horton's book provides an excellent introduction for the uninitiated to the field of practical translation studies … For translators, Horton points out many potential minefields, and illustrates a number of approaches translators have taken to sidestepping them; and students of Thomas Mann will enjoy the discussion of Mann's years in America, and his partnership with his American publisher in a very deliberate and ultimately successful quest to become one of the signal voices of his time.”
Asymptote

“Horton’s clearly written, well-researched study is an important contribution both to the fields of literary translation studies and Thomas Mann scholarship. Especially those interested in the intersection of linguistic and literary analysis and in the psychology of literary reception will find this in-depth study of Mann’s English translations thought-provoking. The volume is well-edited with an extensive index and scholarly bibliography and will attract experienced scholars and those new to translation studies equally.”
Monatshefte

“Horton is a great scholarly stylist, and his erudite and deeply theoretically grounded book is a pleasure to read. It is also enormously informative, adding to our knowledge of Mann’s manifestations in English as well as to our acquaintance with the latest thinking within the field of contemporary translation studies.”
Pacific Coast Philology

“This study not only provides a history of the translations and editions of Mann's works in English, but also offers an analysis of the stylistic and intercultural aspects of Lowe-Porter's versions ... Written with genuine expertise, Horton's book has closed a serious gap in the secondary literature.”
Germanistik

“Horton’s study shows the merits of descriptive translation studies. The sustained close readings make it a valuable resource for anyone interested in the specific stylistic qualities of Mann’s work … It is to be hoped that these close readings will assist readers in articulating their own responses to Mann’s work.”
Orbis Litterarum 

“This volume will not only be of considerable interest to anyone involved with Mann and his reception, but also to all those engaged in the translation of German literature.”
The Year's Work in Modern Language Studies 

 

If you’re heading to GSA, stop by our booth September 29^th through October 2^nd to pick up your copy of Thomas Mann in English and browse the rest of New Directions in German Studies. We hope to see you there!

Late Walter Benjamin and On Modern Poetry - "Highly Recommended"

We were delighted to see a bumper crop of Bloomsbury titles reviewed in the latest issue of Choice, the review journal of the Association for College & Research Libraries. We were particularly delighted to receive the coveted "highly recommended" rating for not one but two of our books.

Describing the book as "at once inventive and conceptually rich", Michael Uebel of the University of Texas writes of John Schad's The Late Walter Benjamin: "This is a witty, smart novel that combines literary criticism with philosophy and local history... [It] will delight and challenge readers and admirers of Benjamin and it will intrigue anyone interested in intellectual and social history."

In a similarly glowing review of another of our recent books, On Modern Poetry by Robert Rowland Smith, R.T. Prus of Southeastern Oklahoma State University writes: "[Smith] presents a lucid, delightful approach to reading modern poetry... He brings an intense clarity to the issues, supporting his discussion with close readings of poems by Keats, Tennyson, Arnold, Hardy, Tennyson, Symons, Larkin and Prynne."

Obviously we all thought these we were great books already, but it's always nice when other people think so too. Do check out the links above if you want to find out more about either of these books.

Beckett and Death in the Journal of Beckett Studies

The Journal of Beckett Studies have been very kind to us lately - first, this review of Beckett and Phenomenology, and now this excellent article and review of Beckett and Death:

As Barfield and Tew note in their insightful critical foreword to Beckett and Death, it is almost unbelievable, given the central place of death in Beckett’s work, that such a volume has not appeared before. Beckett and Death addresses an underexplored area in Beckett criticism, or at least one which, despite its inescapability, has received few booklength treatments. Noting the exceptional status of Critchley’s and Ricks’s work in this context, Barfield and Tew go on to observe that death is ‘so uncannily, so uniquely productive in such different ways in Beckett’s texts, that it almost seems pointless to talk of it as a mere preoccupation’. The volume goes on to document a dizzying range of the modes of deathly production in Beckett, ranging from All That Fall and More Pricks than Kicks to the legacy of Jung, Mauthner and Augustine within Beckett’s work.

Augustine is the subject of Elizabeth Barry’s rich essay on the rhetoric of dying, and Barry aptly notes the ongoing enigma which Augustine represents within Beckett criticism, ‘often cited but not yet completely understood’. In particular, Barry’s analysis highlights the crucial but so far underdocumented correspondence between the imaginative use of narrative voice in their work. There are fascinating insights here into the parallel between Augustine’s circuire and the Unnamable’s journey back to the fold, both of which involve rhetorical, as well as spatial, round-aboutness. Most telling of all, though, is the material on the figure of distentio in Augustine, and Augustine’s perplexity with the verb moritur itself. As Barry says, there follows a pun worthy of Beckett: ‘as the thing it signifies [death] cannot be declined in fact, so the word itself [ie, the verb] cannot be declined in speech’. One has the sense here of new territory opening up, as Augustine continues to shed important light on the physical decline which so dominates the Beckett oeuvre and the rhetorical declensions through which it is articulated. Augustine is revisited in Paul Stewart’s essay on ‘Sterile Reproduction’, which focuses on the hope in All that Fall that suffering can be brought to an end by not renewing the species. Dan Rooney’s desire to kill some ‘young doom’ is recontextualised by reference to Schopenhauer and, via Jonathan Dollimore, the early Christian fathers and Augustine. For Julie Campbell, meanwhile, All That Fall exemplifies the specific connection between the omnipresence of death and the possibilities of radio drama. Campbell links the ‘dark comedy’ of the play to another form of darkness, that of the listener who, alone in the dark, constructs the fictive world of All that Fall from a soundscape with no form of visual corroboration. As she argues, ‘sound has the ability to portray a truth hidden by the “mask” of the visual, physical image’. That ability has significant implications for our reading of the play which, as Campbell notes, also contains the first unmistakable reference to the lecture by Jung attended by Beckett in 1935. Peter Fifield’s essay turns from Jung to neuropsychology, providing important evidence of Beckett’s knowledge of specific forms of clinical memory loss. Noting the status of ‘confabulation’ as a clinical term, Fifield links Beckett’s amnesiacs to ‘temporal morbidity’ and the imaginary creation of the past as a response to amnesia. The result is an original reading of the Trilogy, and new parallels are drawn with Korsakoff’s syndrome and A.R. Luria’s The Man with a Shattered World.

The contributions by Mark Nixon, Seán Lawlor and Steven Matthews address the place of death in Beckett’s body of work as a whole. Nixon’s essay links the advertisedly uncertain textual status of many works, such as From an Abandoned Work, to the troubled thematics of dying: ‘Beckett’s attempts to “fail better” as he puts it, are thus signposted by titles such as “For to End Yet Again”, so that it is now quite common to view Beckett’s entire oeuvre as a work in progress’. These are important questions in discussions of Beckett’s body of work, which continue to be dogged by Beckett’s reflexive titles and emphasis on the oeuvre as serial (one might add the bodily thematics of the titles and their imperfect correspondence between languages). For Nixon, ‘Beckett viewed the act of writing as comparable, even concomitant with, the process of living’, hence the textual instability which accompanied Beckett’s search for means of expression for declining life. The corpus as a whole is also at stake in Seán Lawlor’s essay, ‘ “O Death where is thy sting?” Finding words for the big ideas’, albeit in a different sense. Lawlor is concerned with More Pricks than Kicks, a corpus which both reflects the thematics of death and itself poses questions of life and corporeality.

Steven Matthews, meanwhile, is concerned with Beckett’s ‘late style’, applying the framework of Edward Said’s On Late Style to Beckett’s late work. Said’s is an appropriately subtle model, identifying in some authors a reconciliation between ‘bodily condition and aesthetic style’ and in others a refusal of harmony and resolution. Beckett, for Matthews, is of the latter camp, producing a late phase whose emphasis on speaking of and to the dead produces singular dilemmas of voice: ‘in these late works, to speak is to become posthumous to oneself, to become “no longer oneself”. The act of speaking, especially when speaking “close to death”, opens the self, andwords themselves, to repetition as a plurality of deaths, to the inability to speak of the dead as single and unique at the very moment when it is necessary and responsible to do so’. The analysis is an important one, and produces further parallels between Beckett and Derrida’s analysis of mourning.Matthews refers in detail to the Sottisier Notebook, and there are rich ‘late’ pickings here, although one sometimeswonders whether the problematic of voice and death in fact stretches back to earlier phases of Beckett’s career too. Shane Weller’s essay considers the ‘politics of death’ in Beckett’s work, revisiting Adorno’s reading of Beckettian suffering and its later consideration by Terry Eagleton and H. Porter Abbott. For Adorno’s Beckett, Weller argues, death takes on a radical political charge, as it comes to represent the dream of a world without suffering: ‘through his “pictures” of death, through his making of death a condition devoutly to be wished, Beckett would offer us the only tenable critique of both totalitarianism and capitalism’. Following this critique, Eagleton becomes an advocate of a ‘Beckett of the Left’, while Porter Abbott sees in Beckettian death a form of utopia, so that death’s political charge is countered by a metaphysical charge. Weller’s conclusion transcends the dichotomy, linking Beckett’s work to that of Sade via the conception of the ‘republic’, and a radical reconfiguration of the relation between suffering, pleasure and freedom. This, then, is an important volume which boldly tackles the near-omnipresence of death in Beckett, and sensitively accounts for the multiple forms it takes. One senses, inevitably, that Beckett’s dead still have much to say.

- Beckett and Death, edited by Steven Barfield, Matthew Feldman and Philip Tew, analyses a number of Beckett's poems, plays and short stories through consideration of mortality and death. It is now available to buy in paperback - you can find out more by visiting our website.

Beckett and Phenomenology reviewed in Journal of Beckett Studies

We are delighted with this excellent book review for Beckett and Phenomenology (and all-round excellent piece of writing on Beckett and Philosophy) by Russell Smith in the Journal of Beckett Studies:

It’s easy to see why Beckett looked like a phenomenologist to earlier generations of critics: many of his characteristic preoccupations – the nature of consciousness, sensory perception and embodied experience – mirror phenomenological themes, while Waiting for Godot was virtually a case study of the existentialists’ problem of meaningful action in a meaningless world. Then again, it’s easy enough to see why the generations reared on deconstruction developed an intolerance to even minute traces of phenomenology: in their passion to construct a deconstructionist Beckett, phenomenology –with its subject-centredness and its neglect of language – seemed incapable of accounting for Beckett’s decentred subjects adrift among self-reflexive linguistic aporias.

But as Maude and Feldman point out, this dismissal of phenomenology ‘has often stemmed from misreadings of deconstructive theory’ which have misconstrued the influence of Husserl on Derrida and overlooked later developments of phenomenology itself. Husserl’s ‘transcendental phenomenology’ sought, through the famous epoché, to establish the a priori conditions under which phenomena appear to the consciousness of a perceiving subject. But long before Derrida launched his critique of Husserl’s ‘phenomenology of presence’, the ‘big three’ post-Husserlian phenomenologists had begun to address these blind-spots: Heidegger on the temporality and ‘enworldedness’ of the subject, Sartre on the ethicality of the subject as both in-itself and for-itself, and Merleau- Ponty on the embodied nature of subjectivity and the many ways in which the body fails to be present at its own experiences.

This volume (Beckett and Phenomenology) is divided into two parts. The first four essays consider Beckett’s work in the light of each of the ‘big four’, while the remaining seven essays consider various phenomenological themes in relation to Beckett’s work, both in terms of its internal thematics (such as Paul Sheehan’s fascinating essay on the paradoxes of the Beckettian ‘phenomenology of sleep’), and in terms of the theoretical elaboration of a ‘phenomenology of reading’ (via Ingarden, Iser and Hirsch) capable of dealing with the unique interpretive challenges of Beckett’s prose...

Of the many excellent pieces in the second part of the book, two in particular stand out. Daniel Katz’s ‘What Remains of Beckett: Evasion and History’ returns to a topic that has received sustained attention in recent years: the relation of texts such as Endgame and The Lost Ones to the historical event of the Nazi genocide, and in particular to Adorno’s notion of an ‘image ban’ governing its representation. Following David Houston Jones’s excellent recent work, Katz draws out affinities between Giorgio Agamben’s elaboration of Primo Levi’s ‘paradox of the witness’ – the true witness cannot bear witness – and Beckett’s own sense of the impossible obligation of expression. Katz shows how Beckett responds ‘through a not-saying, although such a not-saying implies a pointing not only to the place where the image does not appear, but to the ban which prohibits it’. What is most productive in Katz’s essay is his rigorous interrogation of the more slippery moves in Agamben’s reasoning, especially its use of Levinas’s account of shame, and Katz ends by opening up questions for further work concerning Beckett’s bilingualism, the ethics of speaking by proxy, and the shameful impossibility of escaping one’s own subjectivation.

Finally, Chris Ackerley’s essay provides a fascinating introduction to the ‘phenomenology of annotation’ and the grounds by which, according to E.D. Hirsch, an annotator determines the ‘validity’ of an interpretation based on ‘a distinct context of relevant knowledge’. Ackerley is, of course, the pre-eminent annotator of Beckett’s works, and this engaging account offers a behind-the-scenes look at the annotator’s work, both the invisible hosts of factual minutiae that crowd the margins of the text, and the annotator’s triage of validity and relevance, in working towards, not a ‘correct’, but a ‘better’ interpretation. Ackerley stresses in particular its essential relation to ‘ordinary reading practice’, shuttling between a ‘divinatory moment’ or ‘imaginative guess’, and a critical activity of ‘raising interpretive guesses to the level of knowledge’.

Beckett and Phenomenology inevitably returns us to the indispensable chestnut of ‘Beckett and Philosophy’, and what that particular ‘and’ might mean. I would argue, along with some of the contributors here, that Beckett’s writing is most interesting in the ways that it refuses philosophy, keeps it at arm’s length where it provides material but never method. But when Beckett told interviewer Tom Driver in 1961 ‘I am not a philosopher’, he made it clear that the particular kind of philosopher that he was not was a Sartre or a Heidegger. Phenomenology has a special status in this refusal, and as Shane Weller points out here, Beckett knew their work well enough to insist on its categorical difference from his own project. This ‘not’ is a useful counterbalance to the implied intimacy of the ‘and’ in Beckett and Phenomenology. The nec tecum nec sine te of Beckett’s relation to philosophy, and phenomenology in particular, remains an open question to which this book makes, after all these years, an inaugural contribution.

- Edited by Ulrika Maude and Matthew Feldman, Beckett and Phenomenology compares and contrasts Beckett’s work with key figures in phenomenology and analyses phenomenological themes and their dramatization in his work. It is now available to buy in paperback. You can read the first 30 pages of the book for free here!

Cavell and Improvisation in The Wallace Stevens Journal

Two very nice reviews in the Spring 2012 issue of The Wallace Stevens Journal"

“Stanley Cavell and Literary Studies: Consequences of Skepticism marks a fruition of the available criticism on Cavell’s relation to literary studies. It conveys the sense of a thorough assimilation of Cavell’s project that reflects a deep—and sometimes long—acquaintance with it on the part of many of the contributors. [...] This volume is specialised but accessible, and evinces a real companionship of endeavour without being protective or exclusive. More in the spirit of Cavell’s work than to the letter of it, this companionship permits disagreement, divergence of opinion, and even critique. Such an attitude is a better compliment than reverence, showing both seriousness of engagement and, for some, true intellectual influence. [...] The collection as a whole is a rich exploration of Cavell’s relation to literary studies, and a broader statement of belief in the dividends of reading.” – The Wallace Stevens Journal (Rachel Malkin, Cambridge University, UK).

“In his Improvisation and the Making of American Literary Modernism, a deft and skilful close listening to the works and experiences of canonical modernist poets Ezra Pound, Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, and Wallace Stevens, Rob Wallace (a professor of literature and a drummer as well) intercedes in a vexed field of collaboration. He attempts to realign the terms of the conversation between poetry and jazz, and to understand improvisation as a discipline. [...] In structure and principled intent, Wallace’s intervention recalls no book to my mind more than Frank Lentricchia’s classic study Modernist Quartet. As a method, Wallace’s work more expertly answers Henri Lefebvre’s inimitable call for a textual/contextual rhythmanalysis. [...] The book seems to jettison (to the good, I think) a formalised system of modernist improvisational theory and practice derived from the work and lives of Pound, Hughes, Stein, and Stevens, and their critics. Wallace achieves instead a brilliant and tactful method of listening to the work of these writers as each reaches for their unique sense of sense. [...] Listening over his shoulder in Improvisation and the Making is a rare, informative pleasure.” – The Wallace Stevens Journal (Ed Pavlić, University of Georgia, USA)

“To dismantle the old dilemma of Borges studies…”

A fiery endorsement from the novelist and critic Alan Pauls for Hernán Díaz’s forthcoming Borges, Between and Eternity (due out in August):

“Just when all seemed lost, Borges, Between History and Eternity proves there’s still life in the Borges studies galaxy. Life of the best kind, which in the world of literary criticism means precision, intellectual agility, microscopically close reading and, above all, the will to go against the grain of the most respected conventional wisdom. To dismantle the old dilemma of Borges studies—Borges, universal or local? Metaphysical or down-to-earth? Abstract or political?—Hernán Díaz exhumes a critical dagger that in his hands shines as though drawn for the first time: the chiasmus. Which is to say the swinging operation that requires crossing and interchanging the terms of an opposition that once seemed ironclad. Thus Díaz finds the Borges most engaged with history in his most conceptual texts, and the most conceptual Borges in those fictions most deeply rooted in national identity. History and eternity, as Díaz sees them in Borges, are no longer antithetical terms: they are poles linked by a healthy and diabolic reciprocal equivalence that can’t help but disquiet us. To take a writer about whom we thought we knew everything and render him disquieting—what more can we ask from a book of criticism?” -- Alan Pauls

Times Higher Education Textbook Guide

We did a little dance of celebration around the office this week as 4 of our books were recommended in the Times Higher Education textbook guide! Below I have listed all 4 books, along with the quotes from the Times Higher Education, and specially created exclusive previews of the introduction and first chapter of each book. if you are a lecturer and interested in seeing any of these books on inspection, then please do contact the relevant member of the marketing team (details here!).

Children's Literature in Context by Fiona McCulloch

'Through close readings and a consideration of their critical and popular afterlives, this book takes students through well-known texts. It considers key issues involved in the study of children's literature and its social, cultural and literary contexts. Works by C.S. Lewis, Lewis Carroll, J.K. Rowling and Philip Pullman are examined to highlight major themes.'

The Life in Sonnets by David Fuller

'In this controversial text, David Fuller works to recover the life in Shakespeare's sonnets, and argues that the emotion that criticism often ignores should again become a central concern. First, he engages with the poems through feelings fundamental to the "young man" sequence of sonnets as presented in other writing and art by figures such as Plato, Michelangelo, Thomas Mann and Derek Jarman. Second, he recommends reading the words aloud without translating them into other terms, which brings out their expressivity and leads to a fuller understanding of their form, structure and meaning.'

The Comic Mode in English Literature by Murray Roston

'Intended as a comprehensive guide to comedy in the English literary canon, it begins with a critical exploration of historical and philosophical theories of humour, and offers close readings of a wide range of major texts, authors and genres. Among those texts considered are Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Pope's The Rape of the Lock, Austen's Emma, Dickens' The Pickwick Papers, Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest and Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary.'

The Romanticism Handbook edited by Sue Chaplin and Joel Faflak

'Furnishing case studies for reading literary and critical texts, The Romanticism Handbook is conceived as a one-stop resource. Exploring the historical and cultural context of key authors, texts and genres, the collection seeks to provide a starting point for anyone beginning a study of Romantic literature. Essays on changes in the canon, interdisciplinary approaches, consideration of race and ethnicity, and a look at current and future directions in the field are offered, while guided further reading should serve to support independent work.'

 Many thanks to the Times Higher Education and their excellent books editor Karen Shook.

Improvisation as Art by Edgar Landgraf

Improvisation as Art, the first book in our new series “New Directions in German Studies”, has been insightfully and well-reviewed in the latest issue of the German Quarterly. An extract:

“Both students and scholars of 18th and early 19th-century German literature, as well as anyone interested in modern notions of art and improvisation will benefit highly from this erudite and clearly written study, which expands on Luhmann’s descriptive and avowedly value-free, sociological theory of art and makes it accessible to a wider audience. By including in the discussion also an opponent of systems theory, Jacques Derrida, who insisted on the ‘incalculability of the incalculable’ and on openness for the advent of ‘the other’ (19–29), Landgraf contributes to current debates on ideas of freedom and the role of art and/as improvisation in society, inviting our participation.” -- German Quarterly (Winter 2012, reviewed by May Mergenthaler, The Ohio State University)

Other recently published titles in this series: 

The German Picaro and Modernity by Bernhard Malkmus

Citation and Precedent by Thomas O. Beebee

The Shakespeare Blog

Google 'Shakespeare' and 'blog' and you are sure to be inundated with as much useless information as you are helpful. So take yourself first to The Shakespeare blog  and you will find a wealth of interesting articles about Shakespeare's plays and poems, and a really well thought out range of links to other brilliant online resources.

We were happy to see that the blog has reviewed one of our Continuum Shakespeare Dictionaries - Shakespeare's Medical Language describing it as a 'a successful addition to the literature on the subject, both a fascinating read and a valuable reference work'.

'Part glossary, part encyclopaedia, the book’s written in an easy to follow style, cross-referencing words with their own entries printed in bold, encouraging the reader to flip around the book. Most entries are in three parts: a medical description of the subject, Shakespeare’s references to it, and contemporary sources.

 It’s easy to get distracted by some of the fascinating snippets of information. Did you know, for instance, the “galled goose of Winchester” at the end of Troilus and Cressida, is a reference to prostitutes in Southwark?'

To read the full review click here

To see a full list of titles in our Continuum Shakespeare Dictionaries click here - nearly everything you could ever need to know about Shakespeare is covered from his insults, to his language of food and the role of women.

Jenny Tighe

Marketing Executive

Nine Lives of William Shakespeare - reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement

Nine Lives of William Shakespeare by Graham Holderness published last year and had some exciting and rather amusing reviews in the Times Higher Education (Book of the Week no less!) and the Daily Mail (who can forget the 'Very Saucy Life of William Shagspere'). Now the Times Literary Supplement have followed their lead and published an excellent review, praising the book and series - Shakespeare Now! - in today's edition:

'Nine Lives belongs to the Shakespeare Now! series, which is defined by its editors as “a rallying cry… for aesthetic immediacy” on the “premise that art is as much as subject as an object, less like aggregated facts and more like a fascinating person or persons”. Graham Holderness’s fictional experiments serve that argument in that they abandon the posture of objectivity, but more essentially in their enjoyment of the escape. He is scrupulous about the facts, but denies that “the more data we possess, the more solid and dependable will be our understanding of the life”, and instead offers Shakespeare biography as an exercise in negative capability: a form of storytelling which knows that, beyond interpretation, “Shakespeare keeps his silence”’.

To read more about this excellent book, click on the preview button below.

Jenny Tighe