New Distributed Titles Fall 2009 - Oxbow Books

Maney Publishing
The Wallenstein Figure in German Literature
and Historiography 1790–1920
by Steffan Davies
Albrecht von Wallenstein (1583–1634), one of the most famous and controversial personalities of the
Thirty Years War, gained heightened prominence in the nineteenth century through Schiller’s monumental
drama, Wallenstein (1798–99). Schiller’s own fame, and the complexities he injected into his
dramatic character, made Wallenstein a potent, near-mythical, but also highly ambivalent figure. This
innovative and detailed study tests Schiller’s impact on historians as well as on later literary texts. It
traces Wallenstein’s part in the construction of identity in Germany, Austria and Bohemia, examining the
figure’s significance in events such as the Wars of Liberation against France, the 1859 Schiller festival, and
the First World War. The broad range of authors and historians studied includes Franz Grillparzer, Leopold
von Ranke, Ricarda Huch and Alfred Döblin.
200p, hardback, 9781906540289, $82.00, Maney Publishing, December 2009,
MHRA Texts and Dissertations 76, Bithell Series 36.
The Power of Disturbance
Elsa Morante’s Aracoeli
edited by Sara Fortuna and Manuele Gragnolati
Aracoeli (1982) was the last novel written by Elsa Morante (1912–
85), one of the most significant Italian writers of the twentieth
century. The journey, both geographical and memorial, of a homosexual
son in search of his dead mother is a first-person narrative
that has puzzled many critics for its darkness and despair. By
combining scholars from different disciplines and cultural traditions,
this volume reevaluates the esthetical and theoretical complexity of
Morante’s novel and argues that it engages with crucial philosophical
and epistemological questions in an original and profound way. Contributors explore the manifold
tensions staged by the novel in connection with contemporary philosophical discourse (from feminist/
queer to political theory to psychoanalysis) and authors (such as Emilio Gadda, Pier Paolo Pasolini and
Pedro Almodovar). The Power of Disturbance shows that by creating a ‘hallucinatory’ representation of
the relationship between mother and child, Aracoeli questions the classical distinction between subject
and object, and proposes an altogether new and subversive kind of writing.
200p, hardback, 9781906540500, $89.50, Maney Publishing, July 2009, Legenda Main Series.
Hamann’s Prophetic Mission
A Genetic Study of Three Late Works against the Englightenment
by Timothy Beech
literary studies
The Spirit of England
Selected Essays of Stephen Medcalf
edited by Brian Cummings
and Gabriel Josipovici
Stephen Medcalf (1937–2006) was an essayist, in the best
traditional sense of that calling: a writer not of books but of
substantial and justly celebrated essays, widely read in the
Times Literary Supplement and elsewhere. Medcalf’s abiding
question to the world was the Psalmist’s: ‘What is man
that thou art mindful of him?’ His was a Blakean sense of
Englishness, far from the chocolate-box painting or the television
adaptation, and for him the strongest writers were those
keenly aware of their roots in the classical, Anglo-Saxon or
Celtic past. By gathering together Medcalf’s most important
work, this volume shows the coherence of his thinking, and of
the elusive, complicated literary heritage he celebrated, one
which acknowledges the Greco-Roman strain, the Christian
strain, down-to-earth humor and sly irony.
200p, hardback, 9781906540371, $89.50, Maney Publishing,
October 2009, Legenda Main Series.
Johann Georg Hamann (1730–88) was one of the most radical and sophisticated critics of the German Enlightenment. The three late works Konxompax, Metakritik über
den Purismum der Vernunft and Golgatha und Scheblimini!, written between 1779 and 1784, are polemics against iconic texts by the Enlightenment luminaries Lessing,
Kant and Mendelssohn. This diverse and rich material, ranging from the Fragmentenstreit to Kant’s first Critique, is refracted through Hamann’s radical Lutheranism, with
freemasonry and the pagan mystery religions adding lurid apocalyptic highlights. Hamann’s idiosyncratic style and heavily intertextual manner of composition give his
works a fascinating and teasing complexity and put his writing at odds with the period’s preferred ideals of ease and elegance. For these reasons, he is a standing provocation
to our assumptions about the 18th century.
200p, hardback, 9781906540227, $82.00, Maney Publishing, September 2009, MHRA Texts and Dissertations 74, Bithell Series 34.
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