EBRO Review Archives

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.

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.

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.

Sudipta Sen’s Distant Sovereignty is an ambitious attempt to reexamine the characteristics of British power in the Indian subcontinent during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

This volume consists of fifteen essays by different authors, an introduction by the editors, several illustrations, extensive bibliographical material, and an index. It is praised by the publisher's blurb as a book that would radically change our understanding of the Enlightenment.

Le Jeu de la Sphinge consists of five chapters preceded by a short introduction. The link between these chapters is the materialist philosophy of Sade, "le matérialisme intégral" as Sclippa calls it, which is associated with subjects as diverse as mythology, libertinage, nature, violence, coprophagy and tragedy.

British Romanticism has generally been understood as an English movement, associated primarily with a handful of lyric poets. Scotland, in this definition, was a Romantic place, but not a site of Romantic production. At best, Scotland produced only an ‘inauthentic Romanticism’—the Highlandisms of James Macpherson and Walter Scott.

Eliza Haywood's Female Spectator (1744-46) is celebrated as the first journal written for women by a woman. Until recently, it has been available only in Mary Priestley's quaint and quirky 1929 collection and Gabrielle Firmager's 1993 slim but scholarly selection of tales.

It has now been more than three decades since the publication of Horst Möller’s study of Friedrich Nicolai, a pioneering work that rescued the Berlin Aufklärer, bookseller and journal editor from the condescension of his contemporaries and the neglect of posterity.[1] Möller’s study challenged the caricature of Nicolai as arch philistine, intellectual…

Memory’s Daughters reflects a number of recent trends in eighteenth-century scholarship, including ever-increasing interest in material culture, the mundane, interdisciplinary research, and the recuperation of women’s lives and works. The book’s contributions are significant and many.

Why do restaurants exist? Why do we go to restaurants? Reading Rebecca Spang's Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture does not directly answer these questions on a personal level but it does, with many insights, help illuminate the history and sociology of eating out.

Randy Sparks’s The Two Princes of Calabar is an engaging read demonstrating literal and scholastic efficiency. In a mere one hundred and forty seven pages, Sparks paints an ethnographic portrait animating the Euro-Afro-American Exchange responsible for creating the hybrid culture he calls “Atlantic Creoles,” a phrase borrowed from Ira Berlin (3).