Books to look out for in March 2019

A New Companion to Malory

Malory’s Morte Darthur is now a canonical and widely-taught text. Recent decades have seen a transformation and expansion of critical approaches in scholarship, as well as significant advances in understanding its milieux: textual, literary, cultural and historical. This volume adds to and updates on the influential Companion of 1996, offering scholars, teachers and students alike a full guide to the text and the author.

Liszt’s Representation of Instrumental Sounds on the Piano

Colors in Black and White

Liszt’s adaptation of existing music is staggering in its quantity, scope, and variety of technique. He often viewed the model work as a source that he strove to improve, rival, and even surpass. Liszt’s Representation of Instrumental Sounds on the Piano: Colors in Black and White provides a comprehensive survey of Liszt’s reworking of instrumental music on the piano, particularly his emulation of tone colors and idiomatic gestures. Joo Kim relates Liszt’s sonic reproductions to the widespread nineteenth-century interest in visual-art reproduction.

Nonconformist Writing in Nazi Germany

The Literature of Inner Emigration

Studies of literary responses to National Socialism between 1933 and 1945 have largely focused on exiled writers; opposition within Germany and Austria is less well understood. Yet in both countries there were writers who continued to publish imaginative literature that did not conform to Nazi precepts: the authors of the so-called Inner Emigration. They withdrew from the regime and sought to express their nonconformity through camouflaged texts designed to offer sensitized readers encouragement, reassurance, and consolation. This book provides a critical, historically informed reassessment of these writers.

The Boyce Papers

The Letters and Diaries of Joanna Boyce, Henry Wells and George Price Boyce

The first full edition of the correspondence, between three artists Joanna Boyce, her brother George P. Boyce and Henry Wells, who she eventually married. The three wrote constantly about techniques of painting and about the new colours that became available at this period, and about their visits to exhibitions both in Paris and London. They all contributed to the Royal Academy and other exhibitions. In addition, there is the extraordinary story of Joanna’s and Henry’s courtship and marriage, at first encouraged and then viciously opposed by Joanna’s recently widowed mother.

Urban Bodies

Communal Health in Late Medieval English Towns and Cities

Carole Rawcliffe continues with her mission to clean up the Middle Ages. This first full-length study of public health in pre-Reformation England challenges a number of entrenched assumptions about the insanitary nature of urban life during “the golden age of bacteria”. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach that draws on material remains as well as archives, it examines the medical, cultural and religious contexts in which ideas about the welfare of the communal body developed.

Inscription and Rebellion

Illness and the Symptomatic Body in East German Literature

The healthcare system of the German Democratic Republic, based on Soviet models, reflected the importance the socialist state assigned the health both of its citizens and of the metaphorical national body meant to represent and promulgate the nation’s political vitality. Yet many East German literary writers depicted characters ailing and under medical care, and even after the country’s dissolution in 1990, writers who had lived there continued to portray sickness and the GDR healthcare system prominently in their fiction. This book offers an innovative reading of such texts, employing historical research on the healthcare system and feminist and queer theory to get at socialism’s legacy.

Selected Works by J. M. R. Lenz

Plays, Stories, Essays, and Poems

Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz (1751-1792) is, after Goethe, the most important writer of the German Sturm und Drang. Crucial in the reinvention of German literature through the reception of Shakespeare, his works contain a scathing critique of the ethical, political, and sexual regimes then prevailing in German and Eastern European territories. Both aesthetically and politically, Lenz strongly influenced later German writers – most notably Georg Büchner and Bertolt Brecht. This volume contains new – and, in many cases, first – English translations of Lenz’s most important plays, stories, essays, and poems.

Castles and Space in Malory’s Morte Darthur

Castles play an integral part in Malory’s Morte Darthur, but despite this, Malory’s castles have received limited scholarly attention. As the first monograph to look extensively at either castles or space in Malory, this book aims to fill that gap. It reads the Morte through its castles – their architecture, structural and symbolic significance, and geographical locations, together with their political, communal, ritual, domestic, and martial functions.