New Distributed Titles Fall 2009 - Oxbow Books

literary studies Maney Publishing
ETA Hoffmann and Alcohol
Biography, Reception and Art
by Victoria Dutchman-Smith
Throughout critical debates on E.T.A.
Hoffmann, discussions of alcohol, and in
particular its influence on and significance
within E.T.A. Hoffmann’s creative output,
have been recurrent, impassioned and frequently
divisive. Victoria Dutchman-Smith
uses the specific fate of alcohol as a topic
in literature, biography and criticism as a
prompt for the reevaluation of Hoffmann’s
changing identities over the past two
centuries: as artist, critic, Romantic, preemptive
modernist, canonised great and,
not least, as drinker. The role of alcohol
in Hoffmann’s life and works cannot be
separated from wider cultural and critical
narratives, and Dutchman-Smith’s enthusiastic
exploration of these sheds dramatic
new light on the use and abuse of categorization,
not just in past and present
responses to Hoffmann’s works, but in the
very structures of literary debate.
200p, hardback, 9781906540234, $82.00,
Maney Publishing, September 2009, MHRA
Texts and Dissertations 75, Bithell Series 35.
80
A Cultural Citizen of the World
Sigmund Freud’s Knowledge and Use
of British and American Writings
by S S Prawer
Based on an intensive study of the original German text of Freud’s writings, letters
and journals, this is the first book to make a full and systematic map of Freud’s use
of English literature. The great psychoanalyst has long been acclaimed as a polymath,
as a practical doctor who was also a theoretician, as a writer of non-fiction which
was also a counterpoint to the great novels of the early twentieth century, and as an
essayist who absorbed all of the cultural world around him. Freud was fascinated by
writings from many nations and languages, and his use of English shows the great
range of his reading: from Shakespeare to Bernard Shaw, Henry Fielding to George Eliot, Mark Twain to Thornton Wilder;
from scientific works by Maxwell and Darwin to the economics of Adam Smith, Malthus and Keynes, and from psychology
and anthropology to the origins of religion. Though he was a reader par excellence, he was also a case study in how world
literature can be used by men and women who are not professional literary scholars or critics -- and of how much it can
come to mean to them, and for their sense of who they are.
200p, hardback, 9781906540425, $89.50, Maney Publishing, July 2009, Legenda Main Series.
New in paperback!
Selfless Cinema?
Ethics and French Documentary
by Sarah Cooper
In Selfless Cinema, Sarah Cooper maps out the power relations of making and viewing
documentaries in ethical terms. The ethics of film making are often examined on
largely legalistic terms, dominated by issues of consent, responsibility, and participants’
or film makers’ rights, but Cooper approaches four representative French film makers –
Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, Raymond Depardon, and Agnès Varda – in a far less juridical
way, drawing on the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. She argues that, in spite
of Levinas’ iconoclastic, anti-ocular thinking, his concept of visage is richly applicable
to film, and especially to documentary.
112p, paperback, 9781906540302, $65.00, Maney Publishing, June 2009, Legenda
Research Monographs in French Studies 20.
A Culture of Mimicry
Laurence Sterne, His Readers and the Art of Bodysnatching
by Warren L Oakley
After his death in 1768, the famous novelist Laurence Sterne did not rest undisturbed in his grave. While rumors of the theft
and dissection of Sterne’s corpse circulated in the anatomy schools, numerous writers took possession of his literary body
of work. New forms of Sternean entertainment were produced by literary mimics who impersonated the author through
the medium of print, impersonations which included startling and unique interpretations of Sterne’s character and fiction.
Warren Oakley introduces two new critical concepts to eighteenth-century literary study, bodysnatching and mimicry, to
understand these texts that have been neglected and overlooked in Sterne studies. This lucid account reveals the personal
stories of such literary mimics, the creative techniques they employed and the consequences of their actions upon the
posthumous perception of Sterne, the man and his cadaverous goods.
200p, hardback, 9781906540210, $82.00, Maney Publishing, September 2009, MHRA Texts and Dissertations 73.
The David Brown Book Company – Fall 2009