EBRO Review Archives

Gillian Skinner's Sensibility and Economics in the Novel makes an important and compelling contribution to the new economic criticism that has gained so much interest in our field in the last few years.

Captivity narrative scholarship has exploded over the past several years, with the steady publication of new studies of the genre and new anthologies of the narratives themselves. As a result, the genre and its significance within an increasingly international literary history have undergone almost continual redefinition.

In her ambitious and fruitful exploration of gender portrayal in Italian theater, Maggie Günsberg avails herself of an eclectic, interdisciplinary approach, drawing on semiotics and psychoanalysis, women studies, dramatic theory and audience-reception theories.

Zakiya Hanafi's The Monster in the Machine is a fascinating "guided tour" of developments and transformations in the Western (most of the examples are from Italian sources) conceptualization of monsters from the late sixteenth century to the mid-eighteenth century, ending with the death of Giambattista Vico in 1744 (x).

In this elegantly written, provocative and impeccably researched book, Elizabeth Wanning Harries argues that our commonly held expectations about fairy tales are based on repression and myth.

Jocelyn Harris and Michael Kramp share an interest in the way Jane Austen responded to other writers, especially her contemporaries and immediate predecessors.  Differing dramatically in all other respects, the two books indirectly complement each other.  Both are well researched, capably written, and illuminating.

In 1784, Austrian Franz Josef Haydn received a commission to compose for an influential concert series in France. The six symphonies that resulted (Nos. 82-87) are the subject of Bernard Harrison’s book Haydn: The ‘Paris’ Symphonies.

During the past three decades D. W. Hayton has established himself as one of the leading authorities on post-Glorious Revolution Irish history.

Soon after the phenomenal success of Eliza Haywood's last part of Love in Excess in 1720, her publisher William Chetwood announced that a collection of new Haywood works-The Danger of Giving Way to Passion, in Five Exemplary Novels- would soon appear. The collection failed to materialize.

If asked to supply a pertinent example of each genre of Eliza Haywood's writing, what would you choose? Haywood was an amatory novelist, poet, translator, playwright, journalist, political satirist, conduct book writer, periodical writer and domestic novelist, writing more than 72 works over four decades.

In his Short History of Irish Literature (1986), Seamus Deane makes short work of the dramas of Anglo-Irish playwrights from George Farquhar to Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and from the lesser lights of John O'Keefe to Hugh Kelly.

In the very last lines of Adieu les philosophes: Que reste-t-il des Lumières?, Jean M. Goulemot recounts a Damascene moment of illumination that he had on a road near the Rastro in Madrid.