We’ve had a lot of new books coming through the EFL’s doors this April – along with our readers, of course, who are finally back in the library!

Below is a taster of some of the newest additions to the EFL, and we’ve got something for everyone – essay enthusiasts, fiction fans and poetry… patrons? (Still working on that last one.)

As usual, you can see the full list of our latest acquisitions here at EFLOxford’s books | LibraryThing.

Dennis R. Cutchins & Dennis R. Perry (eds.). 2018. Adapting Frankenstein: the Monster’s Eternal Lives in Popular Culture.

The essays in this book cover the cultural afterlife of one of the most well-known novels in western literature: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Given the novel’s fame, it’s no surprise that the story has undergone so many transformations in the two hundred years since it was first published in 1818 – from YA novels to nineteenth-century stage productions to 1950s sci-fi such as Fred M. Wilcox’s film Forbidden Planet. The essays in this collection explore the intertextualities at play between these different adaptions.

Zadie Smith. 2018. Feel Free.

It might be easier to list the topics these essays don’t touch upon than those they do. Smith, as well as engaging with all kinds of culture from high to pop (and encompassing the various genres of art, film and music), also turns her attention towards subjects as diverse as climate change, Brexit, libraries, seasons and social media. As acknowledged in the foreword, the essays in this collection were written during the Barack Obama administration, prior to the election of Donald Trump, and so provide an interesting snapshot of a recent period of time that nevertheless reads as distinctly different from today’s current climate.

Hilary Mantel. 1995. An Experiment in Love.

An Experiment in Love is Mantel’s seventh novel, published in 1995 and awarded the Hawthornden Prize. Set in 1970, the story follows Carmel McBain, moving between the protagonist’s present-day life attending university in London and her childhood growing up in the north of England. Themes addressed include women’s education, mother-daughter relationships, and social class.

Yaa Gyasi. 2020. Transcendent Kingdom.

Science, faith and grief are key themes in Gyasi’s second novel, Transcendent Kingdom, which tells the story of Gifty, the twenty-eight year old daughter of Ghanaian immigrants. A PhD candidate studying neuroscience at Stanford University in California, Gifty’s research involves studying addiction through experiments with lab mice. Her dedication to her work and to understanding addiction is rooted in her family’s tragic past.

David Morley. 2020. FURY.

The poetry in this collection highlights the natural world, stretching from emerald hummingbirds to peat-bogs, with the lyrebird acting as a returning motif. The collection also provides a platform for marginalised voices. Several of the poems are written in Romani, and the eponymous poem ‘FURY’ refers to professional boxer Tyson Fury. In the poem, Morley adapts extracts taken from interviews where Fury discusses the racial abuse he has received owing to his traveller heritage. The poem ‘Cherry Pickers’ addresses the Dale Farm traveller site eviction which occurred in 2011.

Tracy K. Smith. 2011. Life on Mars.

Tracy K. Smith served as the US Poet Laureate from 2017 to 2019, and Smith’s collection Life on Mars won the Pulitzer Prize in 2012. Its wide-ranging lens moves from the frontiers of space to closer-to-home studies of death and love. The collection itself is an elegy to Smith’s father, who was one of the engineers who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope.

New eBooks August 2020

In this blog post we explore a selection of the latest eBooks to our collection. The eBooks explored in this post tackle a variety of subject matters including; queer cultures in 1930s prose, Nordic Noir, representations of Vikings, wartime writing and comedy in contemporary British literature.

A full list of new acquisitions can be found on the EFL LibraryThing Catalogue.

Charlotte Charteris. 2019. The Queer Cultures of 1930s Prose: Language, Identity and Performance in Interwar Britain.

In this text Charteris re-evaluates the representation of queer cultures in 1930s British prose writing.  The book mainly focuses on examining the fictive work of Christopher Isherwood, Evelyn Waugh and Patrick Hamilton alongside autobiographical works and other literary contemporaries. Through examining these works Charteris seeks to establish how and why queer lives and identities were shaped during this period. Charteris shows how the authors self-consciously produced their own masculinities through language.

Linda Badley, Andrew Nestingen, Andrew, Jaakko Seppälä (eds.). 2020. Nordic Noir, Adaptation, Appropriation.

Nordic Noir, Adaptation, Appropriation explores a variety of topics to demonstrate how adaptation and appropriation are fundamental characteristics of Nordic Noir. Using the fundamentals of adaptation studies, the chapters in the work take intermedial and transcultural approaches. The scholars featured in the book demonstrate how adaptation and appropriation are essential to the longevity and the branding of Nordic literary and television traditions as Nordic Noir. The work shows how the continual adaptation and appropriation helped establish Nordic Noir as an enduring global phenomenon.

Tom Birkett & Roderick Dale (eds.). 2019. The Vikings Reimagined: Reception, Recovery, Engagement.

The Vikings Reimagined explores the perception of and engagement with the Vikings across a variety of media and cultures. The interdisciplinary approaches taken in the book seek to revaluate the influence of Old Norse Viking culture to the present day. Some of the topics explored in the book include; the representations of the Vikings in contemporary picture books, Comedic reimaginings, Icelandic sagas and Hemmingway.

Alice Kelly. 2020. Commemorative Modernisms: Women Writers, Death and the First World War.

In Commemorative Modernisms, Kelly considers the work of women writing in the First World War and postwar period, and the connections to Modernism through attitudes to death. Kelly examines the work a variety of writers including Edith Wharton, Katherine Mansfield, H.D., and Virginia Woolf, alongside visual and material culture. Through studying representations of death and the culture of war commemoration in women’s writing, Kelly shows how these themes underline British and American literary Modernism.

Beryl Pong. 2020. British Literature and Culture in Second World Wartime: For the Duration.

In this study, Pong explores the relationship between late British Modernism and Second World Wartime with a focus on chronophobia – the fear of both the past and future. It is split into three parts looking at the tropes of time capsules, time zones and ruins. The work takes an interdisciplinary approach through considering a variety of literary sources, including life-writing, alongside film, photography and painting to illuminate chronophobia in 1940s wartime.

Huw Marsh. 2020.The Comic Turn in Contemporary English Fiction: Who’s Laughing Now?

The Comic Turn in Contemporary English Fiction explores comedy’s importance in contemporary literature and culture. Marsh argues that comic writing is not a consistent genre and prompts complex responses from the reader. To explore this, Marsh focuses on discussing the work of authors including Martin Amis, Nicola Barker, Julian Barnes, Jonathan Coe, Howard Jacobson, Magnus Mills and Zadie Smith. The book argues that there is comic tendency in contemporary literature, and this use of comedy can be used in interesting ways. Marsh shows that when comedy is analysed in these works, new understandings of fiction and the present can be brought out.

New eBooks July 2020

In this blog post we explore some of the latest eBook acquisitions from July. The topics covered by these books include gender studies, queer literature and feminism. Browse all new eBooks acquired by the English Faculty Library on our LibraryThing catalogue here. As always, you can make recommendations for new material on the EFL website.

Tyler Bradway. 2017. Queer Experimental Literature: The affective politics of bad reading.

Bradway’s Queer Experimental Literature focuses on how post-war writers queer the affective relations of reading through experimenting with the literary form. Bradway describes the ‘good reader’ as an individual who reads appropriate subject matters. Bradway goes on to explore the subsequent idea of a ‘bad reading’. When the rules of good reading are broken, moments of social transgression occur. Through closely studying a variety of authors including Kathy Acker and Jeanette Winterson, Bradway explores how queer experimental literature uses form to reimagine the affective and social relations within the heteronormative public sphere.

Elena Cordero-Hoyo and Begoña Soto-Vázquez. 2020. Women in Iberian Filmic Culture: A Feminist Approach to the Cinemas of Portugal and Spain.

Women in Iberian Filmic Culture focuses on the films of Spain and Portugal to explore women and their roles in Iberian filmic culture. The work shows how the historical context influenced Iberian cinema. This includes the censorship in the early twentieth century, and the arrival of democracy in the 1970s. The cinema of both countries is analysed both individually and in relation to each other. The work engages with ongoing debates about the role of women within these films, and the interdisciplinary and feminist approaches which can be taken. It also considers the relatively unexplored relationship between Iberian cinema and visual culture, particularly in the twentieth century.

Rob Cover. 2019. Emergent identities: New sexualities, genders and relationships in a digital era.

Emergent Identities explores how traditional binary understandings of gender and sexuality- especially in relation to language and categorisation – are being transformed by fluidity and the non-binary in the digital landscape. The work examines how digital communication has influenced this emergence of a new taxonomy, and the implications of this on a range of subjects including identity, individuality and social belonging. The book seeks to offer an initial understanding of these shifts in sexuality and gender and the implications it has upon society. Through these new taxonomies, Cover suggests that new creative readings can be applied to media and older literary texts.

Mary Eagleton. 2018. Clever Girls and the Literature of Women’s Upward Mobility.

In Clever Girls and the Literature of Women’s Upward Mobility Eagleton follows ‘the clever girl’ from post-war to present through considering the memoirs, plays and fiction of contemporary British women writers. Eagleton particularly focuses on the ideas of social mobility and meritocracy. Eagleton explores the struggles with moving away from traditional ideas of femininity, and the pressures of race, status and austerity. Writers considered in the work include Zadie Smith, Hilary Mantel and Andrea Levy.

Elizabeth Ettorre. 2017. Autoethnography as Feminist Method: Sensitising the Feminist ‘I’.

In Autoethnography as Feminist Method Elizabeth Ettore explores how autoethnography, qualitative research using self-reflection, is one way of performing feminism in society. Autoethnography is used to describe ‘the cultural dynamics that an individual confronts’ (Ettore 2017: 2). Through examining their own experiences, Ettorre examines how feminists negotiate agency and the effect this has upon an individual’s political sensibility.

Juno Roche. 2020. Gender Explorers: Our Stories of Growing up Trans and Changing the World.

Gender Explorers is a collection of interviews carried out by Juno Roche with young trans individuals (aged from five to early twenties). The individuals offer their perspective and experience growing up trans. The interviews describe the generally joyous process of exploring gender for these young individuals. The work also features input from the parents and carers of the interviewees. Roche concludes the book with an imaginary interview with their younger self.

This blog post explores some of the newest ebook additions to the collection from June. The books selected have a focus on theatre and performance. The full list of new ebooks is available on the EFL LibraryThing and is regularly updated. You can continue to recommend new books on the EFL webpage. 

Derek Dunne. 2016. Shakespeare, revenge tragedy and early modern law: vindictive justice. 

Shakespeare, revenge tragedy and early modern law by Dunne seeks to reveal how Shakespeare, Kyd and their Early Modern contemporaries critically engaged with the legal system in their revenge tragedies. Dunne explores how the ‘crisis of justice’ within their plays reflected the crisis occurring in the Early Modern legal systems (2016: 2). The public nature of legal trials at this time is seen in the representation of trials on the stage. The work concludes that revenge tragedy is reflective of the troublesome relationship between the citizens and their legal system. 

Mark Albert Johnston, & Jennifer Higginbotham. 2018. Queering Childhood in Early Modern English Drama and Culture.  

Modern English Drama and Culture explores depictions of children and childhood in Early Modern narratives ‘through the lens of queer theory’ (Johnston & Higginbotham 2018:1). The chapters in the volume consider various topics to assess the queerness in depictions of children and childhood in Early Modern drama and culture. Topics explored include asexuality, tomboys and female apprentices.  

Simon Smith. 2020. Shakespeare/sense : contemporary readings in sensory culture.  

Shakespeare/Sense brings together contemporary Shakespeare and sensory studies to ask what sensory studies can tell us about Shakespeare, as well as how Shakespeare interacted with the sensory in his literay craft. The work contains fifteen essays which explore every sense in relation to Early Modern life and literary culture. The varied chapters allow each author to take their own approach which demonstrates the diversity of current work in the field.  

Jonathan Walker. 2017. Site Unscene: The Offstage in English Renaissance Drama. 

Site Unscene explores the role of scenes which occur offstage in English Renaissance dramatic productions. Walker illustrates how these offstage scenes offer an alternative way of storytelling which transcend the temporal and spatial limits of the stage. Whilst the performance is occurring in the present the audience is able to move back in time and space with the retelling of these events. Walker uses a variety of playwrights to explore these ideas alongside material evidence such as archaeology, architecture and woodcuts. 

Fintan Walsh. 2020. Theatres of Contagion : Transmitting Early Modern to Contemporary Performance.  

Theatres of Contagion investigates how theatre is a contagious cultural practice through the way in which it can spread medical, psychological and cultural conditions. Through taking interdisciplinary approaches when exploring performance from the Early Modern period to the present, the work shows how contagion operates, as well as the real and imagined effects it can have upon audiences. As Walsh writes in the opening chapter ‘with contagion the literal and the metaphorical…often overlap and blur’ (2020: 5). A number of dramatic pieces are considered in the study including musical adaptations, queer adaptations and immersive theatre. The collection of chapters in the work demonstrate the power of theatre as a transmitter.  

Carina Westling. 2020. Immersion and participation in Punchdrunk’s theatrical worlds.  

This study by Westling examines the work of the contemporary Punchdrunk theatre company and their innovations in immersive theatre performances. This is achieved through exploring the company’s productions and historical contexts. It sets out how immersive theatre is created with physical and technological elements. Through closely examining the company, their producers, actors and audiences, the book closely analyses the relationships between interaction and the immersive experience in Punchdrunk’s work. 

Over 21,000 ebooks in Humanities published by Cambridge University Press are available from 12 May 2020 to 31 May 2021 via their EBA (evidence-based acquisitions) programme.  All books on the list, together with new publications as they come out during the year, are available online to University members via SOLO during this period. 

You can also directly search on the Cambridge Core Website after logging in with your SSO. On the website you can then filter the collection by subject, such as Literature. From here you can then explore books by topics of interest such as Anglo Saxon and medieval literature, Literary theory and English literature 1700-1830.

At the end of the period, we will make a selection of about 500 books based on appearance on reading lists and heavy use during the period.  These selections will be added permanently to the ebook collection of the Bodleian Libraries.

This blog post will highlight some of these new ebooks from the CUP which have recently been made accessible. The books cover a variety of subjects demonstrating the variety of new material which is now available. 

Bauer, D. (2019). Nineteenth–century American Women’s Serial Novels.

Bauer’s Nineteenth-century American Women’s Serial Novels focuses on the careers of four novelists; E. D. E. N. Southworth, Ann Stephens, Mary Jane Holmes, and Laura Jean Libbey. In particular, Bauer focuses on the serial formula and the idea of repetition to explore the issues faced by American

women. Bauer writers in the introduction, ‘serial novels thus serve as models of representing women’s lives in transition from their traumas to their transformations’ (p.10). Through exploring these authors Bauer expands the understanding of women’s writing in the nineteenth century.

Desmarais, J., & Weir, D. (2019). Decadence and Literature.  

Decadence and Literature explores how the idea of decadence has developed from the Roman times as meaning artifice or declining morals into a major cultural trope which has been used in a number of ways. Decadence is used in literature in response to advancing modernity. The essays in the book are organised under three sections; origins, developments and applications. The book takes an interdisciplinary and chronological approach. The text also considers a variety of mediums as well as literature including visual arts, music cinema, popular culture. A particular focus of the work is the relationship of decadence with LGBTQ+ individuals and culture, including drag. Through this study, decadence is shown to be key to understanding contemporary anxieties. 

Jucker, A. (2020). Politeness in the History of English : From the Middle Ages to the Present Day.  

‘The British have a reputation for being excessively polite’ (p.1). This statement opens Jucker’s study of the phenomenon of politeness in the English language. Politeness in the History of English tracks the concept of politeness from the Middle Age to the present day through detailed case studies of mostly literary texts. The diachrony explores politeness in changing social contexts to show how politeness is shaped by culture and history. 

Lewis, A. (2019). The Brontës and the Idea of the Human: Science, Ethics, and the Victorian Imagination.

The Brontës and the Idea of the Human evaluates the Brontës’ engagement with the idea of what it means to be a human – or outside the limits of humanity. The contributors take an interdisciplinary approach through examining how the Brontës responded to wider legal, political, scientific and philosophical concerns in their approaches to humanity. The book explores how ‘Science, ethics, and the Victorian imagination jostle for attention as the richness and complexity of ideas about, and attempted definitions of, ‘the human’ assert their dominance in the fiction of the Brontës’ (p.24). 

Suhr-Sytsma, N. (2017). Poetry, Print, and the Making of Postcolonial Literature.  

Poetry, Print, and the Making of Postcolonial Literature examines the history of relationships between poets and publishers from Ireland and Nigeria, as well as Britain and the Caribbean, during the twentieth century period of decolonization. The book focuses on the similar approaches in the work of Seamus Heaney, Christopher Okigbo, and Derek Walcott. It also explores how they gained the approval of local and London-based cultural institutions. Suhr-Sytsma considers how the poems of these poets appeared in print to track the transformation of the anglophone literary world.

Toner, A. (2020). Jane Austen’s Style : Narrative Economy and the Novel’s Growth.

In this recent publication Toner explores Austen’s interest in narrative form and the ‘economy of art’ in her style of writing. The book is split into three chapters which examine structure, language and dialogue. Toner argues that the concise nature of Austen’s work and use of contraction contributed to her innovations in the representation of thought and the depiction of consciousness.

Whilst the EFL is closed to readers, the library has been expanding its access to e-books. This post will explore some of the newest e-book acquisitions from the past month. The selection focused on are recent publications on a variety of subjects.

Alexandra Socarides. 2020. In Plain Sight: Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Poetry and the Problem of Literary History.
Recently acquired are several new e-books from the Oxford Scholarship Online series. From this series, Socarides’ In Plain Sight focuses on the erasure of female American poets from the nineteenth-century literary history. Socarides also explores why only Emily Dickinson’s work was remembered. The book analyses the conventions of American women’s poetry and how it was circulated, and how this influenced the erasure of their work.

Erin A. McCarthy. 2020. Doubtful Readers: Print, Poetry, and the Reading Public in Early Modern England.
Another new addition from the Oxford Scholarship Online series is McCarthy’s work Doubtful Readers. The work focuses on the print and publication of early modern poetry. It explores how publishers attempted to make work more accessible to readers who had been restricted by social circles in manuscript. McCarthy considers how poetry was shaped by printing traditions, and itself shaped by these traditions. The book demonstrates how the actions of publishers during this period had a longstanding impact on texts and literary histories.

Megan Cavell & Jennifer Neville (eds.). 2020. Riddles at work in the early medieval tradition: words, ideas, interactions.
Riddles at work features a variety of writers who examine the poetic tradition of riddles in Early Medieval England and its neighbours. Riddles are treated individually and as part of a larger culture. Through examining riddles both in Latin and Old English, new ways to consider riddles are highlighted. A variety of themes and approaches are considered in Riddles at work to demonstrate that there is no right way to read riddles, resultantly, there are many interesting approaches which can be taken.

Madeleine Callaghan & Anthony Howe (eds.) 2020. Romanticism and the letter.
Romanticism and the letter explores letter writing in Britain during the Romantic period. It contains essays from a range of contributors, who focus on a variety of topics including theories of letter writing, epistolary culture and specific authors including Wordsworth, Austen, Shelley and Byron. The work demonstrates how the usage of letters varies for individual writers and letters. It also shows how letters present interesting insights into the culture of the Romantic period.

Sandie Byrne. 2020. Poetry and class.
In this study, Byrne explores how class is represented in English poetry from the fourteenth century to present day through specific case studies. Byrne uses examples from all class levels, whilst also examining dialect and accent to explore how the role of class influenced production and reception of poetry. The work explores the factors which enable and obstruct the production of poetry such as patronage, print and education.

Barry Ahearn. 2020. Pound, Frost, Moore, and poetic precision: science in modernist American poetry.
Ahearn’s study examines the work of three American poets, Pound, Frost and Moore alongside the demand that poetry should aspire to maintain scientific precision. Through analysing the varying individual approach to this demand by each poet Ahearn explores how this influenced other areas of culture and twentieth-century modern American literature.

The full list of new e-books can be found on the new digital book display on the EFL LibraryThing catalogue which highlights the newest acquisitions: https://www.librarything.com/catalog/EFLOxford. The digital display is updated regularly with links through to the e-books, and the list can be refined by topics and series. In addition, you can continue to recommend and request books using our form at: https://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/english/collections/recommendations.