MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW最新文献

{"title":"Old English Tradition: Essays in Honor of J. R. Hall ed. by Lindy Brady (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907851","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907851","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Old English Tradition: Essays in Honor of J. R. Hall ed. by Lindy Brady Andrew Breeze Old English Tradition: Essays in Honor of J. R. Hall. Ed. by Lindy Brady. (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 578) Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies. 2021. xxiv+ 339 pp. $90. ISBN 978–0–86698–636–6. Twenty-one items make up this tribute to Jim Hall of Mississippi, a scholar known for scrupulous work on Beowulf and the like. The results are serious and worthy, with professionalism everywhere. We start with an editorial note on how the contents 'were written and submitted in 2014'; then an Introduction by Fred C. Robinson (d. 2016) and bibliography of the honorand's publications; thereafter eighteen studies in five sections. First is 'Old English Poetics' with four pieces: Roberta Frank on the semantics of Old English wine 'friend' (and its cognates in Old Norse and Old Saxon); Jane Roberts on personification of Death in Guthlac and beyond; Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe on The Wife's Lament-, Thomas Cable on new aspects of Old English metrics. Longer is 'Old English Christianity', a matter dear to the heart of Jim Hall. A. N. Doane expounds the iconography of Enoch in the Junius Manuscript of Genesis and Exodus; Frederick M. Biggs attends to Apparebit repentina' as source for Christ III; Paul E. Szarmach relates Alcuin of York to Latin homilies in Cambridge, Pembroke College, MS 25; Thomas D. Hill explains the eucharistic dance of angels mentioned in laws of King Cnut; R. D. Fulk edits (from Bodleian manuscripts) two Old English homilies, on the deadly sins and on Lent. Section 3, on Beowulf, has three contributions. A characteristic study by Eric Stanley (d. 2018) has as subject a possible confusion in the text of words for 'thrive' or 'determine' or 'intercede' or 'oppress'. Lindy Brady writes on the poem's 'swords [End Page 603] of doomed inheritance'; Howell Chickering offers clarification of its lines 3074–75. After that, codicology, with David F. Johnson on the Worcester 'tremulous hand' in a manuscript of the Old English Bede at the University Library, Cambridge; and Gregory Heyworth on ruinous attempts to elucidate the Vercelli Book with chemicals vis-à-vis better ones with modern technology. Last are observations on pioneer scholars of Old English: Daniel Donoghue on Junius and The Metres of Boethius; Carl T. Berkhout on Laurence Nowell and the Old English Bede; Dabney A. Bankert on how Benjamin Thorpe influenced Joseph Bosworth as lexicographer and as editor of the Old English Orosius (by an unknown Cornish cleric) and Gospels. John D. Niles provides a satisfying close on an unsigned essay of 1851 (about the Anglo-Saxon race) as 'very likely' by the poet Longfellow. Much progress is made here on Early English, reflecting that elsewhere (the Chronicle, Riddles, Battle of Brunanburh). Others may now take further what is to be found in this book. Here is one instance. While recommending it as useful for getting a se","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134933771","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Gastronomical Arts in Spain: Food and Etiquette ed. by Frederick A. de Armas and James Mandrell (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907869","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907869","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: The Gastronomical Arts in Spain: Food and Etiquette ed. by Frederick A. de Armas and James Mandrell Rebecca Earle The Gastronomical Arts in Spain: Food and Etiquette. Ed. by Frederick A. de Armas and James Mandrell. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2022. vii+ 288 pp. $75. ISBN 978–1–4875–4052–4. Olla podrida was a complex stew, fashionable during the early modern era in Spain and elsewhere; the English called it an olio. It consisted of a great number of meats roasted and boiled, together with vegetables and other seasonings, which were then served on separate platters. The Gastronomical Arts in Spain is a bit of an olio. Individual chapters examine a diverse range of topics, from the symbolism of honey in medieval Spanish verse to the gastronomical writings of Manuel Vázquez Montal- bán (1939–2003). There is even a chapter on the olla podrida itself. As with an olio, the structuring principles are loose. According to the Introduction, the chapters are organized in 'three courses'—looking at foodstuffs, how and what to eat, and 'modern appetites and culinary fashions'—but unsurprisingly many contributors in all three sections touch on attitudes towards how and what to eat, or discuss individual foodstuffs. What, then, do we learn? Ryan Giles examines the religious symbolism associated with honey and wax in Alfonso X's thirteenth-century Cantigas de Santa Maria. Carolyn Nadeau traces the emergence of a concept of 'Spanish' cuisine in the sixteenth century, in part by studying 'gastrotoponyms' (Alberto Capatti's term for recipe names that reference a specific place). John Slater's chapter on maize shows, inter alia, how nineteenth- and twentieth-century French and US scholarship on its origins ignored Spain's role in disseminating this now global crop. Fernando Serrano Larráyoz examines the dietary advice proffered in four sixteenth-century regimens, including one composed by the patient himself. Several chapters study representations of eating in Golden Age theatre, and James Mandrell considers anti-French sentiments in varied eighteenth-century sources, some linked to food. Íñigo Sánchez-Llama and Dorota Heneghan examine how two nineteenth-century authors (Mariano José de Lara and Benito Pérez Galdós) used food to advance their critiques of Spanish society. José Colmeiro's concluding chapter reviews the extensive gastronomic writings of Vázquez Montalbán. Most chapters focus on cookbooks and literary sources, which, some contributors suggest, led ordinary people to adopt elite attitudes towards food etiquette. As with an olio, the individual components are presented side by side, but on separate platters. The absence of a Conclusion reinforces the reader's sense that the chapters, interesting though they are, do not add up to something greater than the sum of their parts. As the editors themselves observe, 'we only seek to provide a taste of some of the many ways in which food, etiquette, medicine, and taste develop in Spain ove","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134935200","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Attention and Distraction in Modern German Literature, Thought, and Culture by Carolin Duttlinger (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907873","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907873","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Attention and Distraction in Modern German Literature, Thought, and Culture by Carolin Duttlinger Anne Fuchs Attention and Distraction in Modern German Literature, Thought, and Culture. By Carolin Duttlinger. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2022. xvii+ 437 pp. £90. ISBN 978–0–19–285630–2. The overabundance of self-help books about mindfulness and mental resilience underlines the topicality of in/attention in the twenty-first century. ADHD is now classified as a neurological condition and diagnosed in an increasing number of children and adults. Carolin Duttlinger's authoritative and scholarly study places the perceived crisis of attention in the longue dureé of this trope. Rather than singling out the contemporary economy of attention (Georg Franck, Ökonomie der Aufmerksamkeit: Ein Entwurf (Munich: Hanser, 1998)) or new modes of perception and modern subjectivity around 1900 (Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perceptions: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001)), her study covers the far-reaching discourse on attention from the late eighteenth century to the present day, straddling pedagogy, anthropology, experimental psychology, sociology, psychoanalysis, psychotechnics, philosophy, and aesthetics. At the core of this vast transdisciplinary enquiry is her discerning engagement with modernism in the writings of Kafka, Musil, Benjamin, and Adorno, and in Weimar culture more broadly. Chapter 1 lays a historical foundation by touching on Enlightenment debates of self-care in writings by Georg Friedrich Meier, Kant, and Karl Philip Moritz, who advocated practice, alertness, targeted distraction, or self-observation. Against this backdrop she then explores the paradigm change in nineteenth-century experimental psychology; attention was now subjected to quantification in the laboratory. However, while William James, Hermann von Helmholtz, and Wilhelm Wundt aimed to turn attention into a scientific phenomenon, their experiments with measuring devices ultimately highlighted the fickleness of attention; inflected by various environmental factors, it was unstable and flipped over into distraction. Moving on to modern debates about psychic life in the writings of Ribot, Nordau, Simmel, and Freud, Chapter 2 illuminates how the debate on attention contributed to the modern reconceptualization of subjecthood: by contrast to the anthropocentric subject of the Enlightenment, modern subjectivity was in need of continual 'Reizschutz' against the threat of sensory overload. Chapter 3 shows that Kafka's engagement [End Page 638] with attention as a challenge facing Kafka the writer as well as his protagonists was influenced by Johann Friedrich Herbart's and Gustav Lindner's dynamic theory of the mind. An internationally established Kafka expert, Duttlinger skilfully explores Kafka's profound ambivalence towards attention across a wide range of fictional and non-fictional texts, including his report for the Workers' Insura","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":"28 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134935202","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Dante's Arethusa and the Art of Transition","authors":"Lachlan Hughes","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907833","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907833","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This article examines Dante's allusion in the opening lines of Purgatorio to Ovid's account in the Metamorphoses of the song contest between the Muses and the Pierides. It argues that the Ovidian episode's pervasive concern for transition, seen in its many embedded and digressive tales, informs and amplifies Dante's negotiation of the textual border between Inferno and Purgatorio . In particular, it claims that the nymph Arethusa, whose journey from the underworld to 'see the stars again' occupies the lowest level of embedded narration in Ovid's poem, serves as an important but hitherto unacknowledged model for the pilgrim's arrival in Purgatory.","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134935246","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Laurence Sterne and the Eighteenth-Century Book by Helen Williams (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907856","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907856","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Laurence Sterne and the Eighteenth-Century Book by Helen Williams Shaun Regan Laurence Sterne and the Eighteenth-Century Book. By Helen Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2021. x+ 217 pp. £75. ISBN 978–1–108–84276–1. In this illuminating and often ingenious monograph, Helen Williams extends our understanding of the most striking visual and textual features of Sterne's Tristram Shandy, as they would have appeared to readers of its first edition (published in five instalments between 1759 and 1767). Six chapter-length case studies present forensic analyses of the novel's material and graphic devices: its 'manicules' (printed images of pointing hands); textual interpolations (notably the 'Abuses of Conscience' sermon in Volume 11); black, marbled, and other illustrated pages; and playful manipulation of catchwords and footnotes. If some of the textual effects under consideration here might easily seem small-scale, Williams's focus is nevertheless broad as well as narrow, as she situates these features in relation to an array of contemporary discourses and objects ranging from literary fiction to botanical illustrations, funereal iconography, and medical wrappers. Such novel contextualizations generate fascinating accounts of Sterne's creative practice with textual design, which confirm the author's close involvement in the printing and illustration of his narrative. A key aspect of Williams's method lies in separating particular devices into their constituent parts, her superb discussion of [End Page 611] the marbled page being a case in point. Before turning to the technique of marbling itself, Williams shows how unexpected any coloured page would have been, at a time when even the most prestigious works of literature rarely ventured beyond a touch of red ink to enliven a title-page, and always highlighted the (expensive) inclusion of colour as a distinctive selling point. As Williams observes, 'to include coloured ink and not advertise the fact', as Sterne does, constituted 'a lavish act of book design' (p. 105). The chapter goes on to present a complex contextual web—of medical packaging, obstetrics, and eighteenth-century rhinoplasty—as informing the meaning of the marbled page, situated as it is within an instalment of Tristram Shandy concerned with Tristram's safe delivery and the emasculating, nose-crushing efficacy of Dr Slop's forceps. Elsewhere, a chapter on the interpolated sermon shows how Sterne comically reverses the conventions of printed plays by placing the 'main dialogue', rather than stage instructions, within square brackets (p. 94). Throughout the study, Williams is not afraid to take analytical risks, pinpointing precursors that initially seem tangential but which ultimately reveal the provenance of particular effects. This is not least the case in a final chapter that aligns Trim's famous 'flourish', and the diagrammatic lines used to convey Tristram's narrative progress, with developing conventions ","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":"123 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134933785","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Contemporary Fiction in French ed. by Anna-Louise Milne and Russell Williams (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907865","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907865","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Contemporary Fiction in French ed. by Anna-Louise Milne and Russell Williams Maeve McCusker Contemporary Fiction in French. Ed. by Anna-Louise Milne and Russell Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2021. xii+ 289 pp. £75. ISBN 978–1–108–47579–2. Anna-Louise Milne and Russell Williams have brought together in this superb collection some of the most commanding voices writing on contemporary fiction in French today. In their Introduction, the editors establish the inclusive parameters of their project: over twelve chapters, the diffracted, polycentric land- and cityscapes of contemporary fictions are showcased and celebrated, and the binaries of centre/periphery, metropole/ex-colony, French/Francophone undermined. Indeed, this commitment to decentring is palpable even in the volume's internal architecture. The collection opens with Edwige Tamalet Talbayev's 'Mediterranean Francophone Writing', a bracing incipit which identifies the Mediterranean as a decentring paradigm enabling us to understand 'new forms of social and cultural transactions which bypass the usual pattern of dominance between France and its ex-colonies' (p. 17). This post-postcolonial conviction complements Charles Forsdick's interrogation of the shifting borders between French, Francophone, and world literature. Forsdick traces, in the interval between three manifestos, Pour une littérature voyageuse (1992), Pour une littérature-monde (2007), and 'Nous sommes plus grands que nous' (2017), the increasing prominence of the transnational and the translingual writer. Simon Kemp's After the Experiment', on the much-vaunted return to the story/subject/world in French fiction after 1980, argues that experimentation and play remain nonetheless crucial in terms of narration and genre. Russell Williams analyses the anxious, occasionally exuberant embrace of American culture (crime fiction, cinema, music) by a wide range of novelists, while Laurence Grove's essay charts a series of revolutions catalysed by the graphic novel. Helena Duffy examines works by 'Russophile' authors Andreï Makine and Antoine Volodine, showing how uncomfortable political realities (notably of the Putin era) are sidestepped in their fiction in favour of the nostalgic tropes of the classic nineteenth-century Russian [End Page 625] novel. Taking as her springboard the 'orientation' process enshrined in French post-16 education, Anna-Louise Milne brings a welcome consideration of class and cultural capital in astute close readings of Ernaux, Kaplan, and Guène. In 'Fictions of Self' Shirley Jordan zeroes in on Jacques Roubaud and Marie Ndiaye, whose 'restless experimentation' (p. 166) exploits the elasticity of truth and fiction in life-writing. Jordan concludes that, while the truth/fiction binary so prevalent in 1990s scholarship 'has lost some of its critical purchase' (p. 165), the particular appeal of self-fictionalization in women's writing is often rooted in trauma. Max Silverman also consi","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":"153 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134933803","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Nabokov Noir: Cinematic Culture and the Art of Exile by Luke Parker (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907876","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907876","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Nabokov Noir: Cinematic Culture and the Art of Exile by Luke Parker Roman Utkin Nabokov Noir: Cinematic Culture and the Art of Exile. By Luke Parker. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2022. xiii+ 272 pp. $47.95. ISBN 978–1-50176652–7. Luke Parker masterfully blends literary criticism and history of film in his book on Vladimir Nabokov's wide-ranging engagement with cinema. Nabokov Noir shows how the experience of filmgoing, participating in film production, and contending with the narrative possibilities of film converge into a pivotal force in Nabokov's famously transnational career. Although Nabokov is the book's central figure, Parker situates his inter-war œuvre and his tactics of self-promotion in the broad discursive environment of 'cinematic culture' and 'the art of exile', reminding the reader that 'Nabokov's coming-of-age paralleled the linguistic and conceptual working out of cinema' (p. 65). 'Cinematic culture' here stands for a historicized [End Page 643] understanding of a cultural environment profoundly influenced by the burgeoning film industry. Parker frames film as 'the art of exile' because it 'supplied the means not only of thinking through and representing exile but of surviving it' (p. 185). A statement Parker makes about the role of film in The Luzhin Defense can be applied to Parker's own project: whereas in the novel 'Nabokov brings into focus questions of celebrity, international markets, the role of the print media, the power of spectacle, and the variety of occupations open to Russian émigrés' (p. 93), Parker methodically elucidates all those aspects in Nabokov Noir. Accordingly, Parker discusses film's impact on literary poetics not in isolation but with equal attention to the pragmatic considerations of a given novel's adaptability for the screen. Supported by impressive archival research, Parker traces Nabokov's 'strategic involvement with the promotional apparatus of the international movie industry', aiming to 'reconstruct a practical answer to the paradox of exile' (p. 119). It is Parker's focus on exile and his use of archival materials that make the book such a qualitative leap forward from the earlier generation of scholars who have written on Nabokov and film. Parker is less interested in the formal aspects of film influences and the impact of cinematic devices on fiction and essays. He tells instead the story of Nabokov's career trajectory from Berlin to New York, via Paris and London, as a journey thoroughly conditioned by film as artistic medium and a form of popular entertainment. Consisting of four chapters, an Introduction, a Coda, and an Appendix, Nabokov Noir is as much about Russian émigré culture as it is about Nabokov. The first two chapters reveal both familiar and forgotten émigrés, such as Georgy Gessen, Pavel Muratov, Andrei Levinson, Vladislav Khodasevich, and Evgeny Znosko-Borovsky, as astute film critics grappling with the significance of cinema for the émigré cultural identi","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":"72 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134935247","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Chekhov's Children: Context and Text in Late Imperial Russia by Nadya L. Peterson (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907874","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907874","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Chekhov's Children: Context and Text in Late Imperial Russia by Nadya L. Peterson Melissa L. Miller Chekhov's Children: Context and Text in Late Imperial Russia. By Nadya L. Peterson. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press. 2021. xiii+ 402 pp. can $75. ISBN 978–0–228–00625–1. Nadya L. Peterson's book is a unique and welcome addition to Chekhov scholarship. Firmly anchored in theories of child-rearing and pedagogy which emerged during the nineteenth century, Peterson's study provides the first full-length analysis of Chekhov's child characters. In so doing, she also exposes the nuanced role human development plays in Chekhov's art as a whole. Part i, 'The Child in Chekhov's Time', richly describes the three most important critical lenses through which children were understood in the second half of the nineteenth century, while Part ii, 'The Child in Chekhov', uses these lenses to examine children and their emerging personhood within Chekhov's creative work. The three chapters that comprise Part i, 'The Child Imagined: The Literary Canon', 'The Humanization Project: Pro/Contra', and 'The Child Examined: Pedagogical Psychology', successively offer literary, pedagogical, and psychological approaches to childhood. In many ways, the background presented in Part i exceeds the boundaries of Chekhov studies: it introduces readers not only to the literary models of childhood that [End Page 640] inspired Chekhov, such as memoirs and fiction by Leo Tolstoy, Sergei Aksakov, and I. A. Goncharov, but also to the research of many Russian pedagogues, child development specialists, and psychologists unfamiliar to most Anglophone readers. Alongside the work of more familiar figures, such as Vissarion Belinsky and N. I. Pirogov, Peterson also investigates scholarly contributions from such thinkers as K. D. Ushinsky, N. Kh. Vessel', I. A. Sikorsky, P. F. Kapterev, and perhaps most notably, two ground-breaking women in the field of Russian child studies, Maria Manasseina and E. N. Vodovozova. Part ii contains five chapters charting the evolution of Chekhov's child characters from his emergence as a writer for the penny press through the development of his more mature work. A particular strength of this section is Peterson's robust framework for understanding the ways in which Chekhov's stories for the small press responded to typical genre expectations for pieces that appeared in such publications. Insightful close readings of less commonly studied stories such as 'Naden'ka N.'s Summer Holiday Schoolwork', 'The Big Event', and Chekhov's handwritten and hand-illustrated tale for the children of his friends, entitled 'Soft-Boiled Boots' ('Sapogi vsmiatky', an idiomatic phrase meaning 'nonsense') appear in dialogue with interpretations of more prominent Chekhov stories featuring young protagonists, such as 'Van'ka' and 'Sleepy'. As Chapter 7, 'Farewell to Childhood: The Steppe', eloquently argues, Chekhov's novella about the nine-year-old Ego","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":"44 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134933726","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Literary Beginnings in the European Middle Ages ed. by Mark Chinca and Christopher Young (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907838","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907838","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Literary Beginnings in the European Middle Ages ed. by Mark Chinca and Christopher Young Wendy Scase Literary Beginnings in the European Middle Ages. Ed. by Mark Chinca and Christopher Young. (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2022. xii+ 339 pp. £75. ISBN 978–1–108–47764–2. The contributors to Literary Beginnings in the European Middle Ages were asked to address the question 'When and how did literature begin in your vernacular?' (p. xi). The essays, covering literatures from Arabic to Welsh, address this brief in different ways. Some speculate on the social, linguistic, and material conditions that shape literary emergence. Stephen G. Nichols's Foreword sets the scene with a case study of the famously multilingual Strasbourg Oaths (ce 842), in which multilingualism, Nichols suggests, marks 'sociocultural hierarchies, a phenomenon that becomes ever more pronounced with the subsequent advent of court culture' (p. 3). Laura Ashe argues that the emergence of Old English literature was 'reliant on the highest levels of society for both audience and patronage' (p. 77), whereas Middle English appeared 'in a strange combination of ephemerality, necessity, and ambition' (p. 84). Fritz van Oostrom tells the story of early Dutch literature in terms of language contact—which he suggests 'may well be a fundamental condition for any literary beginning' (p. 137). Denis Hult reflects on the conditions that led to the establishment of a French literary tradition in England 'at least a generation' before the foundation of one on the Continent (p. 118). Roberta Frank's lively essay on Scandinavia describes beginnings as a hybrid of European models of textuality and local traditions. Other contributors focus on terms and categories. For Mark Chinca and Christopher Young the beginnings of German literature depend on what one means by 'literature'. For Sarah Kay, 'beginnings' are recognizable only in hindsight, and are different from 'openings' that have many possible futures—or none. Occitan literature begins 'only after several centuries of openings' (p. 165). Marina S. Brownlee asks what counts as 'Spain' when cultural and political boundaries are shifting and porous. Certain chapters are concerned with the history of literatures for which there is no or little contemporaneous evidence. Barry Lewis's chapter on Irish and Welsh reconstructs the earliest literary activity in Irish using later evidence and cautious inference, but 'the evidence is too fragmentary' (p. 64) for this method to work for Welsh. K. P. Clarke treats fragments of early Italian vernacular poetry as evidence for literary beginnings, contrasting these serendipitous survivals (e.g. a fragment used as a book cover) with three songbooks from c. 1300 that mark the end of the beginning. Simon Franklin outlines the problematic evidence for a tradition of East Slavonic court literature. The Tale of Igor's Campaign 'laments the passing of a gol","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134933727","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Poetry and the Question of Modernity: From Heidegger to the Present by Ian Cooper (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907871","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907871","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Poetry and the Question of Modernity: From Heidegger to the Present by Ian Cooper Rüdiger Cörner Poetry and the Question of Modernity: From Heidegger to the Present. By Ian Cooper. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. 2020. 235 pp. £104. ISBN 978–0–367–89427–6. In poetry of all times, and in literary modernism in particular, language and the word as such find themselves exposed in their essence. Therefore, poetry remains [End Page 633] an indispensable indicator of how language is rated both in aesthetic and in social terms. With Ian Cooper's latest monograph, Poetry and the Question of Modernity, which is nothing short of a landmark achievement in contemporary poetology, we can trace the roots of this perception of poetry, namely in what I would call Heidegger's existential verbalism. In it, and through it, the word attained a particular defining status of what Being constitutes in poetical contexts. The (modern) poet regards Being always as an act of Saying, while the philosopher considers verbal emanations of Being as surrogates of pure' existence. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why modern philosophers are, by and large, poor poets, Heidegger very much included, and why poets are often more than respectable thinkers. Cooper's investigation into the nature of poetic Being as part of Heidegger's philosophical presence in Paul Celan and, more surprisingly, Seamus Heaney, Les Murray, as well as David Jones, complements his first monograph, The Near and Distant God: Poetry, Idealism and Religious Thought from Hölderlin to Eliot (London: Routledge, 2008). This is mainly evident in the last chapter of his new study, which is devoted to 'Poetry, Religion, and the Overcoming of Enlightenment', where he can also draw on his expertise as co-editor of the Cambridge University Press series 'The Impact of Idealism: The Legacy of Post-Kantian German Thought' (2013). But Cooper is right not to employ the overused concept of 'reception' in this context, for he is primarily interested in the workings of Heideggerian thought in contemporary poetry. Arguably, Cooper might have used the word 'analogy' more often when discussing Heideggerian traces, particularly in the works of Heaney and David Jones given their usage of language, which can be regarded, in places, as analogous to Heidegger's conception of language and Being. This is particularly important given the absence of an actual engagement of these poets with Heidegger's texts. Admittedly, there were poets who even wrote on Heidegger but did not allow his approach to thought to impregnate their poetry. The most famous case in mind is Ingeborg Bachmann, who is curiously absent in Cooper's study. It would have been of genuine interest, given his supreme insight into the 'mechanisms' of Heidegger's poetology of thought, most prominently expressed in his reflections on Hölderlin, to compare, say, Celan's various takes on Heidegger with Bachmann's strikingly formalistic approach to his conception of","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":"37 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134933729","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}