David Weinberg’s multi-national study, focusing on France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, offers a wide lens through which to view post-war efforts to help Jewish communal life recover its voice and its raison d’être. By underscoring the similarities in the situation facing Jews across borders, he demonstrates how the three communities with the aid of international … Continue reading
An introduction to: The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual by General Editor John D. Morgenstern
In 1975, a contributor to the short-lived T. S. Eliot Review characterized the state of Eliot scholarship as an incomplete mosaic, with “the primary materials for research [. . .] either in jumbled disarray or missing entirely.” While a glut of memoirs flooded the literary marketplace, serious scholars lacked the “fundamental research tools” to fill … Continue reading
Begging, Charity and Religion in Pre-Famine Ireland – In Conversation with Ciarán McCabe
Beggars and begging were ubiquitous features of pre-Famine Irish society, yet have gone largely unexamined by historians. Begging, Charity and Religion in Pre-Famine Ireland explores for the first time the complex cultures of mendicancy, as well as how wider societal perceptions of and responses to begging were framed by social class, gender and religion. The … Continue reading
Believing in an Age of Enlightenment
Editors of Belief and Politics in Enlightenment France, Mita Choudhury and Daniel J. Watkins argue that Enlightenment did not signal the end of religious tradition and show how religious belief in France continued to function in dynamic ways throughout the long eighteenth century. Over the past few decades historians have justly complicated the narrative of the … Continue reading
Middlebrow Matters – In Conversation with Diana Holmes
Middlebrow Matters is the first book to study the middlebrow novel in France. It asks what middlebrow means, and applies the term positively to explore the 'poetics' of the types of novel that have attracted 'ordinary' fiction readers - in their majority female - since the end of the 19th century. The book has recently … Continue reading