Although largely unknown to English-speaking readers, Marie-Catherine Desjardins was one of the most popular writers of her day, and The Royal Favourite was the only play by a woman that was performed for Louis XIV and the court at Versailles. Desjardins incorporated dangerous themes into the story, but she balanced these against terrific comedic sketches that softened the seriousness of the content.

This line-by-line translation, rendered for the first time in rhymed English couplets, allows readers to understand the original text and experience its musical qualities. The inclusion of an extensive Introduction and in-text notes are intended to create a ‘thick’ translation that avoids the illusion of transparency while still providing a workable script for researchers and theatrical troupes.

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Cécile Sauvage: Translation as desiring practice makes a wide-ranging selection of Sauvage’s poetry available in English for the first time and draws upon the poet’s recently discovered manuscripts and correspondence. It brings translation into interdisciplinary conversation with topics such as fan studies, genetic criticism and literary genre. Ultimately, it advocates for creativity in translation and a reappraisal of scholarly modes of working, arguing on behalf of rigorous scholarship that is unafraid to confess the desiring and subjective position from which it operates.

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Critical Thinking for the Arts and Humanities avoids promoting a view of critical thinking as a set of generic skills that apply across academia. Instead, it encourages students to understand the skills they will be expected to demonstrate in their own study of the arts and humanities. Approaches to knowledge vary across academic disciplines – and this book equips students with the ability to think critically in their own work.

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Through a comparison of case studies from multiple national backgrounds, Hosts, Hospitals and Hospitalities shows how the concept of hospitality shapes the way in which we relate with the Other in diverse – as well as changing – cultural, political, social and environmental contexts. By examining the issues of hospitality from a post-pandemic standpoint, which revised the roles of our private and public spaces in the aftermath of Covid-19, by dwelling on novel issues of climate emergency and by focusing on current developments in terms of migration and displacement, the book adds new light and significant theoretical and methodological perspectives to previous debates about hospitality.

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The book argues that contemporary fiction develops emergent mediations of neoliberal dynamics, with the affective crises the latter yield. It studies this affective crisis in relation to central themes as identity and climate crisis, and through prevalent contemporary genres as autofiction and coming-of-age narratives. The book explores a transnational corpus, including authors Heike Geissler, Ben Lerner, Édouard Louis, Valeria Luiselli, Ling Ma, Lieke Marsman, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, Niña Weijers and Alejandro Zambra, amongst others.

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The volume considers the role of storytelling and experimental, creative and often collaborative interventions across, between and beyond disciplines. Contributions include reflections on the uses of poetry in youth and climate justice work, conversational life stories as a research method in sociological studies of kinship formation, analysis of the potentials and pitfalls of centring researcher positionality and lived experience as a basis for scholarly analysis, relationality and the ethics of ethnographic work with radical political movements, speculative imaginings of the future of political organising and notions of rigour and care for the living and the dead in racialised archives.

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Cue Walter Benjamin’s Ark which re-reads the life and work of Walter Benjamin via the curious life of his only child. The focal point is Stefan’s dramatic voyage from England to Australia in 1940, a voyage rich in intellectual suggestion, shared as it was with obscure men with famous names such as Wittgenstein, Kafka, Marx and Wilde. Central to the book is the one substantive text that can be ascribed to Stefan: Benjamin’s meticulous transcription of Stefan’s utterances as an infant. This fascinating text has been largely overlooked, despite the insistence of Benjamin’s biographers that ‘it continued to play a role in Walter Benjamin’s writing until the end of his life’. This book thus seeks not only to bring into view the intriguing figure that is Stefan but also to identify him as that most crucial of Benjaminian spectres, namely, the secret ‘you’ or addressee of Benjamin’s writings.

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Contributors from different fields explore and advance debates in literary geography from diverse transnational perspectives through close readings of canonical and less familiar cultural and literary productions in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian and Japanese, in locales spanning Africa, the Americas, Asia and Europe. In this way, Space, Affect, Memory decentres the anglophone bias of established scholarly approaches in literary geography, probing terminologies and methodologies from different national traditions.

Finally, Space, Affect, Memory interweaves the visual arts by engaging with photography, performance and architecture. As a result, the volume offers a fresh, comparative perspective on the intermingling of space, affect and memory that lies at the heart of literary geography and comparative literature. These efforts converge in a shared attempt to pluralize the field (geographies) and to showcase the numerous possibilities of creative, transdisciplinary interaction between media, performance and representation, across cultures.

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Considering the interconnectedness of their narratives for the first time, the book explores unexamined patterns of dialogue among Coetzee, Kundera, Roth and Vargas Llosa while also contextualising their writing in the light of the European literary tradition inaugurated by Cervantes’s Don Quixote and continued by Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Rather than building on conventional theoretical approaches to literary studies, Stefano Rossoni develops a fresh and engaging approach by looking at these two works not only as narrative texts but most importantly as theories of literature. In dialogue with critical contributions that examined men’s emotional illiteracy and struggle to develop a language for self-reflection, the book argues that the narratives of Coetzee, Kundera, Roth and Vargas Llosa engage with the tradition of the self-reflexive novel and its ramifications to reflect on masculinity as a socio-cultural construction. Ultimately, their writing reveals men’s novelistic self-reflexivity as a site of unintelligibility.

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This epistolary history provides a reflection on the question of correspondence and literature, particularly the subject of lost correspondence, gender, the question of address and the performance of identity. Simon Wortham frames the letters with an extensive critical biography about the life and writing of Robert Walser, whose work has enjoyed a resurgence in recent years. As her side of the exchange no longer survives, the book concludes with a fictional reimagining of Mermet’s response to Walser’s letters. This creative part is carefully introduced by chapters on epistolary writing in a range of critical settings from modernism to literary theory and deconstruction, as well as exploring what is at stake in creative engagements with a literary legacy of this kind.

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