Spotlight on Legenda

Legenda is published jointly by Maney Publishing and the Modern Humanities Research Association. It publishes a rich and diverse array of texts spanning European literatures, cultures & thought.

Desire in Dante in the Middle AgesThe Blue Series is where Legenda began. Legenda was founded in 1995 by Malcolm Bowie, who was Marshal Foch Professor of French at the University of Oxford and subsequently became Master of Christ’s College, Cambridge. At a difficult time in Modern Languages publishing, the series was designed to promote and disseminate original research. From the first, Legenda was governed by working scholars, and until 2004 it was housed, staffed and sponsored by Oxford University’s European Humanities Research Centre. As time went on Legenda’s activities grew, a number of more specialized series were inaugurated, and the present partnership between Maney Publishing and the Modern Humanities Research Association was established to secure the growth of the imprint as a national and international institution. More than 900 researchers have published with Legenda, covering not only the universities of UK and Ireland, but much of Europe and the wider world.

Selected Essay of Malcolm Bowie IBooks by first-time authors are published alongside the latest works by some of the best-known figures in the field.

The Blue Series remains a central part of the Legenda project, dedicated to publishing first-class peer-reviewed research. It has a particular focus on larger-scale projects and those with wide interdisciplinary range. In 2013, as the Blue Series reaches its 18th anniversary, we are proud to be publishing two volumes of Selected Essays by our founder Malcolm Bowie (Dreams of Knowledge I; Song Man II) . This represents a tribute to our origins, a sign of current vitality, and an ongoing commitment to the future of the Humanities.

Gothe's Visual WorldGermanic Literatures is a new series publishing monographs, and occasionally also collections of essays, on a wide range of literary subjects. It covers studies of German literature from the Middle Ages to the present, but, as the series title indicates, it publishes studies in the literatures of other Germanic languages, notably Dutch and the Scandinavian languages, both ancient and modern

Holocaust IntersectionsMoving Image books aim to reflect the strongest of current trends in writing on film, television and visual culture. The dominant focus is on the screen media and cultures of Europe, Africa, and Latin America, and on transnational and cross-regional work beyond these territories and it is particularly open to projects that are interdisciplinary in conception and innovative, and daring, in their historical and theoretical approaches.  The series offers a space for ground-breaking work by early-career researchers as well as established scholars.

The Art of Ana ClavelIn conjunction with the Association of Hispanists of Great Britain & Ireland, Legenda have launched this new series in Hispanic and Luso-Brasilian Studies. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures seeks to publish the best new research in all areas of the literature, thought, history, culture, film, and languages of Spain and Spanish America (Castilian, Catalan, Galician, and Basque), as well as Portugal, Brazil, and Portuguese Africa and the Orient, although it will not cover native American languages. The aim of the series is to reflect the richness and range of our disciplines, via a diversity of theoretical, critical, literary, historical, and multidisciplinary approaches. As well as research monographs, scholarly critical editions and collections of papers will also be considered provided that they fall within the remit of the series and meet the principal objectives of quality and innovation. The primary language of writing in Legenda books is English, but in a book of contributed chapters on Hispanic or Lusophone studies a small number of selected chapters may be in one of the languages covered by the series.

Joseph OpatoshuStudies in Yiddish has a unique and wide-reaching focus: it is the only English-language book series solely dedicated to Yiddish scholarship, and encompasses monographs and edited collections on a diverse set of subjects, periods and approaches. Through its chronological and topical breadth, the series offers a wide platform for engagement with a ‘major literature in a minor language’, and promotes interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research on questions of history, politics and visual culture. Studies in Yiddish is indispensable to anyone interested in Ashkenazi Jewish life and cross-national cultural exchanges.

Dante and EpicurusItalian Perspectives is a flourishing series that publishes both monographs and collections of essays on Italy and its culture from a range of different scholarly perspectives. The vitality of the series is reflected in its chronological breadth – from Dante to the twenty first century – its openness to a range of approaches (including work that is historicist, theoretically inflected, and comparativist as well as work on reception and material culture) and its desire to include a rich range of fields of enquiry, from Italian literature in all its forms in all periods to works concerned with politics, art and media, artistic and philosophical movements, theatre, film, and anthropology.

Furetière's Roman bourgeois and the Problem of ExchangeResearch Monographs in French Studies are selected, edited and supported by the Society for French Studies. The series seeks to publish the best new work in all areas of the literature, thought, theory, culture, film and language of the French-speaking world. Its distinctiveness lies in the tight focus and relative brevity of its publications (50,000-60,000 words). As innovation is a priority of the series, volumes should predominantly consist of new material, although, subject to appropriate modification, previously published research may form up to one third of the whole.

This month Legenda is Maney Publishing’s Feature of the Month and you can visit their website for more information on the different series as well as the chance to download free sample chapters.

All Legenda titles are also 50% off for the entire month of October.  For US pricing, please click here and for UK pricing, please click here.