MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW最新文献

{"title":"Idealizing Women in the Italian Renaissance ed. by Elena Brizio and Marco Piana (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907868","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907868","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Idealizing Women in the Italian Renaissance ed. by Elena Brizio and Marco Piana Alex E. Tadel Idealizing Women in the Italian Renaissance. Ed. by Elena Brizio and Marco Piana. (Essays and Studies, 55) Toronto: Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies. 2022. 305 pp. $49.95. ISBN 978–0–7727–1106–9. This edited volume brings some valuable contributions to the study of Italian Renaissance women. Examining women's idealization between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries from various and sometimes complementary angles, it contains case studies in visual art, literature, philosophy, and theatre. The editors' Introduction outlines some of the issues at stake, describing the idealization of women 'both as a form of oppression and as a tool for social recognition' (p. 9) and positing a 'paradigm shift in the ideal of woman' (p. 10) in the Renaissance, while missing the opportunity to address some important questions, such as whether and how idealizations of women differ from the widespread Renaissance discourse of exemplarity. The editors state that their intention is to showcase the range of the debate on women, yet additional theoretical reflection together with more focus on idealization in some of the essays might have further clarified the specific issues involved in the study of this topic. Judith B. Steinhoff's 'Mandates for Women's Mourning in the Early Renaissance: Paintings and the Law in Trecento Florence and Siena' compares male and female [End Page 629] mourners in depictions of the Lamentation by Giottino and Ambrogio Lorenzetti to the gendered regulation of mourning in Sienese law. Sandra Cardarelli's A Depiction of Virtue and Beauty: The Patronage of the Saint Ursula Fresco in the Church of San Giorgio at Montemerano' analyses the only known example of female patronage in a church in the Maremma region in the fifteenth century and discusses Saint Ursula as a model of female piety. In 'Idealizing the Female Hero: Representations of Judith in Seventeenth-Century Italian Painting', Mathilde Legeay surveys the treatment of the problematic motif of the heroic female warrior and seducer in the work of artists such as Giovanni Baglione, Caravaggio, and Virginia Vezzi. Benedetta Lamanna's 'A Good Woman, a Good Wife: Strategies of Idealization in Sperone Speroni's Dialogo della dignità delle donne' examines the dynamics between patriarchal and proto-feminist discourses on women in Speroni's dialogue, whose ambiguities in this matter she compares to Castiglione's Il cortegiano. Francesca D'Alessandro Behr's 'Philosophy, Religion and the Praise of Women in Lucrezia Marinella' discusses the recurrent presentation of women as ethically and intellectually competent across Marinella's œuvre and focuses on her engagement with Neoplatonism. In 'Female Exemplarity, Identity and Devotion in Lucrezia Marinella's Rime Sacre (1603)', Sarah Rolfe Prodan explores female saints as models of meditation in Marinella's spiritual verse, with ref","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":"146 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":"134934835","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":"#MeToo and Literary Studies: Reading, Writing, and Teaching about Sexual Violence and Rape Culture ed. by Mary K. Holland and Heather Hewett (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907850","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907850","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: #MeToo and Literary Studies: Reading, Writing, and Teaching about Sexual Violence and Rape Culture ed. by Mary K. Holland and Heather Hewett Julie Anne Taddeo #MeToo and Literary Studies: Reading, Writing, and Teaching about Sexual Violence and Rape Culture. Ed. by Mary K. Holland and Heather Hewett. London: Bloomsbury Academic. 2021. xiii+ 415 pp. £90 (pbk £24.99). ISBN 978–1–5013–7274–2 (pbk 978–1–5013–7273–5). Twice a year, students on my university campus participate in the Clothesline Project using T-shirts to reveal, perhaps for the first time, their own experiences as [End Page 601] sexual assault survivors. Thousands of students, faculty, and staff walk by, some stopping to read and photograph the shirts, and perhaps recognize themselves in these brief accounts from mostly young women, but also some men, about what happened to them as children and/or young adults. The Clothesline Project was created in 1990 by the Cape Cod Women's Defense Agenda; its website explains that 'during the same time 58,000 soldiers were killed in the Vietnam War, 51,000 U.S. women were killed by the men who claimed to love them' (<https://clotheslineproject.info/about.html> [accessed 20 January 2023]). More than three decades later, it remains an example of what Mary K. Holland and Heather Hewett propose in their Introduction to this edited collection: that we use literature in its varied forms—whether it is a medieval text, digital hashtags, or brief stories on T-shirts—to critique rape culture and act to end it. As Holland and Hewett remind us in their Introduction, #MeToo began in 2006 with Tarana Burke's revelation on MySpace of her own sexual assault, but it took the star power of actors such as Alyssa Milano and Ashley Judd to make the hashtag go viral in 2017, in the aftermath of the arrest of Harvey Weinstein. Since 2017, academic scholarship has responded with special journal issues and monographs that largely re-examine canonical works through the lens of #MeToo. Holland and Hewett's edited collection, however, stands out not only for its intersectional and international approach to texts that span two thousand years—from Ovid to Roxane Gay, from medieval England to postcolonial India—but also for the book's second half, which offers readers pedagogical approaches and practices, with examples of both successful and unsuccessful classroom instruction. In such a brief review, it is difficult to single out any particular chapter among the twenty-eight contributions, but all of them highlight the potential for literary studies to effect change in and beyond the university classroom. Holland and Hewett observe that hashtag activism 'has its roots in over two centuries of activism, advocacy work, and writing about sexual violence' (p. 3). Likewise, hashtag activism invites scholars and students to engage in new interpretations of old texts; one such example is described in Chapter 8, in which twenty-first-century Indian college students, respon","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":"23 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":"134934966","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":"Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study by John Guillory (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907849","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907849","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study by John Guillory Ritchie Robertson Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study. By John Guillory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2022. xvi+ 407 pp. $29. ISBN 978–0–226–82130–6. In these loosely linked essays, John Guillory uses his deep familiarity with the history of scholarship, teaching, and rhetoric to view the modern university from 'a certain orbital distance' (p. 71). He begins with a sociologically informed account of how the teaching of English in American universities became, in the nineteenth century, an organized profession which issued its own credentials (the Ph.D.). Professionalization gave academics a degree of autonomy and social standing. Departments of English and modern languages inherited two traditions: that of belles-lettres (descending from Hugh Blair's occupancy of the Chair of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at Edinburgh in 1762–83) and philology, imported from Germany. After long contests between scholars and critics, the two reached an accommodation in the mid-twentieth century. Their subject was understood as 'literary criticism', and their approaches could be reconciled in the person of the 'scholar-critic'. Some academics, however, felt a lack of purpose, and were impelled by the new social movements of the 1960s to politicize their courses in the hope of effecting social change. While such teaching has probably strengthened liberal attitudes among the college-educated, it has not changed the world, nor has it resolved a widespread uncertainty about the point of teaching literature. Guillory diagnoses a persistent tendency in literary studies to overestimate the potential impact of one's work and then be disappointed when such impact is not visible. To make matters worse, the role of literature in people's lives has diminished as that of other media, especially film, has increased: Guillory mentions this topic several times without exploring its implications. What should literary academics do? Guillory does not put forward an agenda for literary study, but he does his best to clarify what teachers of literature can and should do. The essay 'Monuments and Documents' starts from the continual need to justify the study of literature (and the humanities generally) by contrast especially with STEM subjects. Rather than making implausible claims for the social value of the humanities or exaggerating their power to teach critical thinking, we should be clear about what humanities departments actually study. Whereas the sciences are defined by their method, the humanities are defined by their object. Borrowing his terms from an essay by Erwin Panofsky, 'The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline' (1938), Guillory argues that the humanities study monuments surviving from the past in which we are interested for whatever reason, and study them by means of documents. Panofsky's example is a fifteenth-century German altar","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":"34 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":"134935209","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 Women Who Invented Twentieth-Century Children's Literature by Elizabeth West (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907845","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907845","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: The Women Who Invented Twentieth-Century Children's Literature by Elizabeth West Yuanyuan Zhang and Haifeng Hui The Women Who Invented Twentieth-Century Children's Literature. By Elizabeth West. London: Routledge. 2022. vii+ 260 pp. £120 (ebk £36.99). ISBN 978–1–032308–27–2 (ebk 978–1–003306–87–0). For children's literature, the decades from the 1930s to the 1960s are traditionally dismissed as the mundane 'Brass Age' (p. 4), overshadowed by the Golden Ages preceding and succeeding this period. In this book, however, Elizabeth West conducts an insightful reinvestigation of this period and testifies to its significant impact on modern children's literature. West concentrates particularly on the 'forgotten' (p. 1) dedication of a group of female writers, illustrators, editors, and librarians, or, in her collective term, the 'bookwomen', active in Britain and the United States between the 1930s and the 1960s. Their commitment to ensuring the quality of children's books in terms of both content and material form not only aided the production of classics still warmly received today, but also laid the foundation for some of the most crucial criteria for children's publishing, and 'invented', as the title of the book suggests, children's literature in the twentieth century. West resurrects the contributions of these bookwomen in an ambitious total of nine chapters. In the Introduction she explains her research focus and presents the principal preoccupations in children's literature and inter-war socio-cultural frameworks that form the basis for her subsequent chapters. In Chapter 1 the author gives a comprehensive overview of the representative British and American bookwomen and their interconnections. Chapters 2–7 each focus on a different aspect of children's literature or on a specific genre, featuring one or several bookwomen relevant to each topic. Chapter 2 concerns children's editors, highlighting the work of Eleanor Graham, the prominent founding editor of Penguin's Puffin [End Page 593] books. Chapter 3 uses Eileen Colwell's librarianship at Hendon Public Library to discuss the evolving role of children's librarians. Chapter 4 concentrates on how female children's authors managed to shine in the inter-war period by examining the successful career of Ursula Moray Williams, who managed to combine her writing talent with sound commercial sense so as to maintain long-lasting popularity. Chapter 5 centres on materiality and how bookwomen collaborated to negotiate content, design, wartime shortages, and commercial considerations of cost and profit. Chapter 6 examines picture books, concentrating on Kathleen Hale and her enduring Orlando series. Chapter 7 explores radical children's literature and records Amabel Williams-Ellis's efforts in embedding unconventional ideas in her works for the young. In the concluding chapter, West once again lauds the undervalued endeavour of the bookwomen. West's enquiry brings to light a largely neglected","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":"17 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":"134935210","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":"Identification and Empathy in Perpetrator Fiction on the Spanish Civil War","authors":"Samuel Donoghue","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907834","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907834","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This article analyses the ethically suspect processes of identification and empathy mobilized by Miguel Dalmau's 2009 work of perpetrator fiction, La noche del Diablo . It draws on narratological perspectives on character identification and narrative empathy and on philosophical discussions on the necessity of attempting to comprehend the motivations of those who commit evil acts. Informed by these narratological and philosophical insights, the article argues that perpetrator fiction about the Spanish Civil War is a psychologically useful tool for expanding our understanding of how individuals commit atrocities and for enhancing our awareness of ourselves as potential agents of perpetration.","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":"1 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":"134935217","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":"Teaching Nabokov's 'Lolita' in the #MeToo Era ed. by Eléna Rakhimova-Sommers, and: Reimagining Nabokov: Pedagogies for the 21st Century ed. by Sara Karpukhin and José Vergara (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907877","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907877","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Teaching Nabokov's 'Lolita' in the #MeToo Era ed. by Eléna Rakhimova-Sommers, and: Reimagining Nabokov: Pedagogies for the 21st Century ed. by Sara Karpukhin and José Vergara Alisa Ballard Lin Teaching Nabokov's 'Lolita' in the #MeToo Era. Ed. by Eléna Rakhimova-Sommers. London: Rowman & Littlefield. 2021. ix+ 187 pp. £73. ISBN 978–1–7936–2838–1. Reimagining Nabokov: Pedagogies for the 21st Century. Ed. by Sara Karpukhin and José Vergara. Amherst, MA: Amherst College Press. 2022. xxi+ 207 pp. $21.99. ISBN 978–1–943208–50–0 (open access 978–1–943208–51–7). Students are changing. The pandemic, Black Lives Matter, and racial justice awareness (especially in the United States), the effects of the 2017 #MeToo movement, transgender and disability activism, the politics of right-wing extremism, new media and technology—all of these factors have made university student organizations [End Page 645] far more attuned to evaluating fairness and to sniffing out privilege than those we taught even a decade ago. In the literature classroom, instructors work to diversify and decolonize our syllabuses, to practise student-centred teaching, and to judiciously consider the new technologies we might bring into the classroom. But in our efforts to balance appeal to the social moment with our sense of responsibility to our discipline, academics frequently run into dilemmas over how to handle canonical texts or authors who have, rightly or wrongly, fallen under the axe of contemporary cancel culture. One such sticky author is Vladimir Nabokov. His Lolita may often be deemed one of the greatest American novels of the twentieth century, but it also urges its reader to identify with the perspective of a paedophile and rapist, leading us through florid descriptions of illegal and non-consensual sexual acts. Further, as Galya Diment writes in her Foreword to one of the titles under review, Reimagining Nabokov: Pedagogies for the 21st Century, 'Nabokov had not only his share of strong opinions, he also had his share of strong prejudices, among them what my students perceive as obvious sexism, discernible racism, and unmistakable homophobia' (p. xiv). Today's students are also often suspicious of Nabokov's multiple domains of privilege as a white male academic raised in an aristocratic family. From childhood, Nabokov was trilingual, including fluency in English, which would enable his flourishing international career as a writer in emigration. Fortunately, despite the subject matter of Lolita, no stories have surfaced of Nabokov himself exhibiting sexually inappropriate behaviour, a point that saves the author from compulsory cancellation but which makes more complex and ambiguous the questions of whether and how to teach his work in today's classroom. Both of these edited volumes on teaching Nabokov take up these concerns in the light of the changing needs of today's students. Teaching Nabokov's 'Lolita' in the #MeToo Era, edited by Eléna Rakhimova-Sommers, has ","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":"100 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":"134935215","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":"Who Speaks for Wales? Nation, Culture, Identity: The Centenary Edition by Raymond Williams (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907863","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907863","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Who Speaks for Wales? Nation, Culture, Identity: The Centenary Edition by Raymond Williams M. Wynn Thomas Who Speaks for Wales? Nation, Culture, Identity: The Centenary Edition. By Raymond Williams. Ed. by Daniel G. Williams. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. 2021. xviii+ 398 pp. £18.99. ISBN 978–1–78683–706–6. Reviewing The Oxford Companion to the Literature of Wales in 1986, Raymond Williams deeply regretted that British literary specialists had habitually ignored the country's rich vernacular literature stretching back to the sixth century. This could be explained, he added, only by 'the fact of several centuries of political domination, and of a consequent cultural indifference, often punctuated by aggression' (p. 279). It is tempting to reach for the same explanation when confronted with the enduring obstinate refusal of British critics to take Williams's Welshness seriously. When Williams entitled his celebrated semi-autobiographical novel 'Border Country', he correctly identified the character of his native region in the Welsh Marches, where two societies and their cultures confronted and cross-fertilized each other. 'It was a place to find intimations of complexity', he wrote (p. 65), a perfect incubator for a mind that progressed to complex meditation on the social formations subtly and decisively inflecting individual identities. And it alerted him to the bewildering variousness and hybridity of modern Welsh identity. It was in 1979 that Williams emerged from his political closet and roundly declared himself to be a 'Welsh European', confessing that he had come to sympathize less with the English Left than with a European Left that had shown far greater understanding of the claims not only of marginalized classes but of marginalized peoples, such as the Basques and the Welsh. It is Williams's readiness to align himself with such that provides the solid basis for Daniel G. Williams's claim that he had developed into an anti-colonial thinker. Any attempt to comprehend this radical realignment of allegiance needs to be set in the context of political events in Wales, as well as in England, at that particular time. The phrase 'Welsh Europeanism' seems to have been first used in the 1930s by Saunders Lewis, the Catholic leader of a Plaid Cymru that was deeply conservative in outlook. For him, it was part of a project of recreating the religious and cultural unity that Europe had enjoyed before the Protestant Reformation and its bastard offspring, the individual nation state. [End Page 622] By the 1970s, however, Plaid had been reborn as a party well to the Left of Labour that was devoted to a kind of decentred communitarian socialism, and it actively sought solidarity with similar nationally based movements of the Left across Europe. Williams accordingly sought refuge from the moribund centrism of the English Left and the rise of a xenophobic Thatcherite neo-Liberalism in the company of intellectuals of the alternative Left in","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":"34 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":"134935249","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 Turning Point: A Year that Changed Dickens and the World by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907858","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907858","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: The Turning Point: A Year that Changed Dickens and the World by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst John Batchelor The Turning Point: A Year that Changed Dickens and the World. By Robert Douglas-Fairhurst. London: Cape. 2021. 355 pp. £25. ISBN 978–1–78733–070–2. This is an extraordinarily clever book. For a reader who is completely new to Dickens, the whole story of his relationship with his age is set out in a full and comprehensible form. David Copperfield is a mirror of Charles Dickens. The 'CD' of Dickens's initials are a reversal of David's initials. His history is the history of the whole of Victorian society taking 1850 as its midpoint. 1850 was a triumphal central year in Victorian culture, the year of Dickens's 'story of my own life', of Tennyson's great autobiographical elegy 'In Memoriam', and also of the first publication of Wordsworth's masterpiece, The Prelude. The 'turning point' of this book's title also is a physical structure, the Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace, opened 1 May 1851, which for this study embodies the material success of the British Empire at its most affluent and resplendent. By 1851, this little island, with its industries, [End Page 614] its navies, and its command of much of the underdeveloped world, was arguably the most powerful civilization that the world had ever seen. Dickens was at the heart of it. Dickens's personal life story had been one of steady social advancement, and the British class system provided the spine of many of his plots. Pip in Great Expectations lives the dream of many a young, ambitious, and socially disadvantaged man of the period. At the same time, his story shows, shockingly, that sudden and unexpected access to great wealth can be a disastrous social evil. The plotting of this novel, with its elaborate network of hidden relationships, displays another of Dickens's leading preoccupations. Hidden relationships form a network which sustains the plot of several of Dickens's masterpieces, and this is particularly true of Bleak House, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend. In his writing life, Dickens was both harnessing the energies of the previous century that drove the Bildungsroman, the novel of initiation and development as practised by Fielding, and following the bigger and broader traditions of narrative which drove Don Quixote. The novels which centre on the life of a single figure, David Copperfield and Great Expectations, are themselves phenomenal ragbags of narrative, packed with incidents all of which are part of a significant pattern. Bleak House does more than that, and this book shows that its tumult of incident disappointed and mystified some of its first readers. The fog which dominates some of the early narrative is presented in a sequence of verbal fragments which refuse to form discrete sentences. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst unpicks Dickens's prose here and in so doing demonstrates that a new kind of narrative writing has been evolved. He throws in the fasci","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":"47 17 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":"134933737","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":"Transcultural Memory and European Identity in Contemporary German-Jewish Migrant Literature by Jessica Ortner (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907872","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907872","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Transcultural Memory and European Identity in Contemporary German-Jewish Migrant Literature by Jessica Ortner Stuart Taberner Transcultural Memory and European Identity in Contemporary German-Jewish Migrant Literature. By Jessica Ortner. Rochester, NY: Camden House. 2022. 285 pp. £85. ISBN 978–16–401–4022–6. There is much to recommend this volume. In it, Jessica Ortner examines recent German-language writers with a Jewish background whose lived experience of the Soviet Union (or, in the case of Barbara Honigmann, the former East Germany) introduces Eastern European histories into a historical narrative that has largely been [End Page 636] shaped by Western institutions. Whether it is Stalinist crimes, Soviet antisemitism, or less familiar sites of the Nazi genocide, these writers offer an important corrective, Ortner argues, to dominant social, political, and cultural discourses that tend to construct 'Auschwitz' as the single most significant memory around which Europe could—or should—shape a unified identity. Ortner thus offers an important contribution to the scholarly literature on the 'Eastern turn' (Brigid Haines: see 'Introduction: The Eastern European Turn in Contemporary German-Language Literature', German Life and Letters, 68 (2015), 145–53 <https://doi.Zorg/10.1111/glal.12073>) in recent German-language writing and inflects this with an emphasis on the migration of Jewish memories from east to west following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. This also relates, of course, to the spectacular revival of the Jewish community in Germany following the arrival after 1990 of around 200,000 people from the former Soviet Union able to claim Jewish heritage. Ortner's book is organized into three sections. The first gives a detailed overview of and engagement with the 'mnemonic divide' between Eastern and Western Europe, with countries that once belonged to the Soviet bloc tending to their victimization under communism while Western European countries focus on the Nazi genocide. This section also attends to recent scholarship in memory studies and identifies the volume's original contribution to this literature. Section 11 examines three contemporary authors, Vladimir Vertlib, Katja Petrowskaja, and Barbara Honigmann, and specifically their endeavours to parallel Stalinism with Nazi crimes—without, however, relativizing the Holocaust. Section in then examines two writers, Olga Grjasnowa and Lena Gorelik, who more explicitly contest Germany's dominant memory culture, by de-emphasizing the uniqueness of the Holocaust and placing it within a multidirectional, transcultural framework alongside other atrocities and injustices—for example, the Armenian genocide or even Israel's military interventions in the West Bank and Gaza. The close readings are detailed, generally sound, and occasionally excellent. The chapter on Petrowskaja, then, is highly illuminating in its detailed and nuanced focus on the memory politics of","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":"15 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":"134933774","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":"Comics and Graphic Novels by Julia Round, Rikke Platz Cortsen, and Maaheen Ahmed (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907847","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907847","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Comics and Graphic Novels by Julia Round, Rikke Platz Cortsen, and Maaheen Ahmed Lise Tannahill Comics and Graphic Novels. By Julia Round, Rikke Platz Cortsen, and Maaheen Ahmed. (Readers' Guides to Essential Criticism) London: Bloomsbury. 2023. xi+ 268 pp. £65 (pbk £21.99; ebk £19.79). ISBN 978–1–350336–10–0 (pbk 978–1–350336–09–4; ebk 978–1–350336–08–7). This collaborative work is an impressive effort to offer an overview of the development of the field of comics and graphic novel studies from its early beginnings to today, an interdisciplinary field that the authors note 'has only really developed in the last century (p. 1) but which is now expanding at an exponential rate. Given the breadth and continuing development of this field, production of a guide of this type may seem a daunting task, but it is one which the authors approach in a comprehensive and considered way, producing a key reference volume for those new to and familiar with comics scholarship alike. Over twelve chapters arranged in four overarching parts ('Approaching Comics', 'Histories and Cultures', 'Production and Reception', 'Themes and Genres'), the authors present a wide-ranging survey of key texts in comics scholarship. While they are clear that this survey is not exhaustive, the stated aim is one of international scope, 'beyond the anglophone' (p. 1); included is scholarship from the Francophone world, Japan, Chile, and Sweden, to give just a few examples. Chapters within these four parts are loosely grouped thematically: Approaching Comics' contains chapters on formalist concerns (early scholarship, semiotic approaches, comics as language) along with chapters on ideology (colonialism, superheroes, cultural legitimacy) and the materiality and sensory experience of comics. 'Histories and Cultures' discusses early criticism, censorship, and legitimization in American, British, Francophone, and other global contexts, and offers a snapshot of historical accounts of comics, from the global scale to the more geographically specific. 'Production and Reception' includes discussion of publishers and creators of comics in various forms, but also fan culture, reader identity, and fan studies. 'Themes and Genres' is necessarily wide-ranging, providing overviews of scholarship on documentary, memory, and children in comics, genres such as romance, superheroes, and horror, and the underground comics context in the Anglophone and Francophone spheres. This last section also includes a chapter on general reference works and textbooks for making or teaching comics. Alongside bibliographical information, the authors detail key themes and arguments of the works discussed in each chapter. Summaries are concise and informative, expressing often complex ideas in clear language, without oversimplifying. Given the inclusion of works written in languages other than English, this approach is helpful in disseminating, if only partially, scholarship which is not easily accessible to Ang","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":"49 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":"134933777","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}