MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW最新文献

{"title":"'Sing me a lullaby': Tenderness and Trans Mothers in the Work of Camila Sosa Villada","authors":"Ben Bollig","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2024.a916730","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2024.a916730","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT: This article examines Camila Sosa Villada's book Las malas (2019), a tale of trans or travesti sex workers in Córdoba, Argentina. Sosa is perhaps the most recognized trans writer in Argentina, and a notable feature of her writing is its portrayal of trans maternity. This essay addresses the depiction of tenderness in Sosa's work in the context of questions about motherhood and trans rights in contemporary Argentina. The formal and technical choices made in her work offer insights into the political potential of creative writing to destabilize literary genres while engaging in pressing debates about gender and human rights.","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139394873","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":"'Nous aimons les spectacles exotiques': Queerness, Jewishness, and the Performance of Normality in Proust's Recherche","authors":"Eli Zuzovsky","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2024.a916728","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2024.a916728","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT: The nexus between Jewishness, queerness, and performativity runs throughout Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27). I argue that by foregrounding the theatricality of Jewishness and queerness, Proust reveals their social construction. In doing so, he destabilizes the concept of normality, exposing its factitiousness in a seemingly reformed society still dominated by exclusionary dictates. Examining instances of spectacle and unmasking, I demonstrate how the failure of the performance of normality challenges its myth of naturality. Proust's use of a dramatic lexicon to deconstruct identity offers a powerful response to the budding discourse of French fascism.","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139395211","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":"Russia's Cultural Statecraft ed. by Tuomas Firsberg and Sirke Mäkinen (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907878","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907878","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Russia's Cultural Statecraft ed. by Tuomas Firsberg and Sirke Mäkinen Muireann Maguire Russia's Cultural Statecraft. Ed. by Tuomas Firsberg and Sirke Mäkinen. (Studies in Contemporary Russia) Routledge: New York and Abingdon. 2022. £29.95. xiv + 250 pp. ISBN 978–0–367–69436–4. This timely, wide-ranging collection surveys Russian cultural influence in the twenty-first century. In their Introduction, co-editors Tuomas Firsberg and Sirke Mäkinen argue plausibly that Joseph Nye's distinction between 'hard' and 'soft' power is ambiguous and over-used, since 'power' is not necessarily achieved by cultural influence; another common term, 'cultural diplomacy' (as used in another recent edited volume, Louise Hardiman's Courtly Gifts and Cultural Diplomacy: Art, Material Culture, and British-Russian Relations (Paderborn: Brill, 2023)), is confusingly adjacent to high-level ambassadorial exchanges. Therefore Firsberg and Mäkinen propose 'cultural statecraft' as an alternative term for cultural activity undertaken to further a given state's reputation or interests, without any guaranteed goal or outcome. The latter clarification is necessary because, as this volume testifies, there are few cultural fields or political zones where Russian cultural statecraft has in fact attained lasting success (with the possible exception of participation in the Eurovision Song Contest, which Mari Pajala and Dean Vuletic, in their chapter, call 'Russia's biggest success story in popular music as cultural diplomacy' (p. 179)). Even in regions where Russian aesthetic and educational opportunities were once eagerly accepted by students and other consumers, such as Africa, India, and Latin America, this influence has waned drastically since the fall of the Soviet Union. As statistics presented by Sirke Mäkinen in her separate essay 'Higher Education as a Tool for Cultural Statecraft' show, more than half of the international students attending Russian universities are citizens of former Soviet nations: student recruitment from Africa and the Middle East has plunged to single percentage points, while European and North American recruitment is fractional. This is because Russia's academic and scientific reputation no longer outweighs its widespread (and objectively accurate) perception as corrupt, inefficient, and monolingual. Under Vladimir Putin, the Russian state has actively attempted to recapture global hearts and minds through new (often hybridized) processes. In the new global knowledge hierarchy, the ability to sow misinformation—through, for example, the Kremlin's infamous troll farms—is more effective than teaching Tolstoy to farmers in Timbuktu could ever be. Firsberg and Mäkinen's Introduction examines key milestones in this transformation: the launch of the Russia Today (RT) television news channel in 2005; the creation of the Russkii Mir Foundation, dedicated to sponsoring Russian language-learning and Russophone culture across the globe, in 2007; Putin'","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134933790","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":"Blood of Others: Stalin's Crimean Atrocity and the Poetics of Solidarity by Rory Finnin (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907875","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907875","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Blood of Others: Stalin's Crimean Atrocity and the Poetics of Solidarity by Rory Finnin Katya Jordan Blood of Others: Stalin's Crimean Atrocity and the Poetics of Solidarity. By Rory Finnin. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2022. xiv+ 352 pp. $80. ISBN 978–1–4875–0781–7. In recent years, the question 'Chei Krym?' ('To whom does Crimea belong?') has become a litmus test for differentiating Russian political liberals from conservatives. [End Page 641] It has inspired two neologisms which have since become viral slogans: 'Krymnash' ('Crimea is Ours') expresses satisfaction with Russia's brash annexation of Crimea, and 'Ikhtamnet' ('They aren't there') captures Russia's refusal to admit to a military presence outside its own borders, as in Crimea and Donbass. These linguistic phenomena reflect both Russia's contemporary imperial ambitions and its long-standing interest in neighboring territories, not least the Crimean peninsula. Rory Finnin's new book demonstrates the lengths to which some Russian rulers are willing to go in order to realize that interest. Yet Finnin's monograph also shows the power of resistance and solidarity exercised by the Crimean Tatars in defiance of Russia's colonizing presence. Blood of Others offers a compelling reading of Crimean dissident literature in the context of Stalin's genocidal policies. It spans nearly two and a half centuries of Russian imperialism—from Empress Catherine II's annexation of Crimea in 1783 to the precarious situation on the peninsula today. Finnin's monograph appeared in March 2022, just one month after Russian troops officially crossed the border of sovereign Ukraine, and eight years after Russia had annexed Crimea for the second time. As he shows, both events, although celebrated in state media as a reunification or even a 'return home', remain both politically and culturally controversial in Russia. Finnin aims to understand 'the textual conditions' for those 'inconsistent, infrequent, even rare' moments 'when the work of the imagination makes us more attuned and responsive to the welfare of strangers' (pp. 8–9). Deriving his methodology from comparative literary analysis, he conceptualizes past events as 'vibrational phenomena organizing and reorganizing human relationships across cultural surfaces' (p. 9). He avoids representing any form of cultural nationalism in isolation, instead striking a delicate balance between critical analysis of historical events and intimate narration of private lives. In order to show just how deeply impersonal political decisions can affect individuals and shape the fates of generations, Finnin opens his narrative with the story of Liliia Karas, an ethnically Jewish woman displaced to Siberia from Kharkhiv during Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union. In 1963 she returns to Kharkiv, where she meets the poet Boris Chichibabin, whose readings sent 'shivers up her spine' (p. 3). Their private lives are among many to be shaped by the actions of Hitl","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134934005","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":"British Children's Literature and Material Culture: Commodities and Consumption 1850–1914 by Jane Suzanne Carroll (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907859","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907859","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: British Children's Literature and Material Culture: Commodities and Consumption 1850–1914 by Jane Suzanne Carroll Catherine Butler British Children's Literature and Material Culture: Commodities and Consumption 1850–1914. By Jane Suzanne Carroll. (Perspectives on Children's Literature) London: Bloomsbury Academic. 2022. xi+ 189 pp. £85. ISBN 978–1–350–20178–1. British Children's Literature and Material Culture is an invaluable exploration of an aspect of children's literature that is often overlooked, even though (or perhaps because) it lies in plain sight. That aspect is the world of material objects by which the characters of that literature are surrounded and with which they are in constant interaction: furniture, tools, clothes, and so on, both handcrafted and [End Page 616] mass-produced. The material world has numerous aspects, the distinctions between which are often undefined: from physical objects subject to no laws but those of physics, to manufactured goods bearing the stamp of human labour and intent, to commodities owned and exchanged for money or social currency. This is the complex territory that Jane Suzanne Carroll sets out to map. The book begins with the Great Exhibition of 1851, an event apparently planned without reference to the possibility of child visitors. The lack of official materials precipitated a flurry of books attempting to educate children about the objects and to advise them on the best way to appreciate and interact with the various displays—mentally and emotionally, if not physically. The Exhibition was a new kind of experience for adults, too, and the quasi-religious hush of the crowds that trailed daily through the Crystal Palace (itself a name evoking fairy tale) witnessed to a general uncertainty about the proper relationship to be taken to manufactured goods. 'It-narratives', in which inanimate objects tell their story from manufacture to dissolution (or some portion thereof), arguably have a history at least as old as the Exeter Book riddles, but Carroll's focus in her second chapter is on nineteenth-century examples for children, which often combined factual information (for example, about processes of manufacture) and moral content (such as object lessons in fortitude or valuing one's possessions)—narrative functions not always in harmony. This is a fascinating account of a neglected literature and does much to illuminate the material surroundings of nineteenth-century homes of all classes, as well as the nature and immense scale of manufacturing in British factories and workshops. (However, the clearly erroneous claim of Asa Briggs that by 1900 '500 million tons of pins were being made weekly in Britain' (p. 65)—which amounts to fifteen tons of British-made pins annually for every human being on the planet—should probably not have been repeated without comment.) In an especially intriguing chapter, Carroll draws parallels between the nineteenth-century popularity of table-turning spiritual","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134935267","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":"Exile, Diplomacy and Texts: Exchanges between Iberia and the British Isles, 1500–1767 ed. by Ana Sáez-Hidalgo and Berta Cano-Echevarría (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907839","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907839","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Exile, Diplomacy and Texts: Exchanges between Iberia and the British Isles, 1500–1767 ed. by Ana Sáez-Hidalgo and Berta Cano-Echevarría Andrew Hiscock Exile, Diplomacy and Texts: Exchanges between Iberia and the British Isles, 1500–1767. Ed. by Ana Sáez-Hidalgo and Berta Cano-Echevarría. (Intersections: Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture, 74) Leiden: Brill. 2021 232 pp. €105; $126. ISBN 978–90–04–27365–8. This 74th instalment in Brill's Intersections series is endlessly fascinating from start to finish. It constitutes yet another valuable contribution to early modern studies designed to urge Anglophone audiences to look more ambitiously among the documentary evidence from continental Europe to gain a richer understanding of the island nations during the Tudor and Stuart centuries. The editors' Introduction establishes the critical mood for the whole volume iii both signalling received thinking concerning sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Anglo-Spanish relations and then proceeding to complicate, to nuance, and finally to unsettle long-standing assumptions. The volume's quarry remains matters religious, political, and diplomatic in the chosen period and recruits not only British and Spanish lines of vision on the subject, but also notably those of Irish and Portuguese witness. One of the key emphases of the volume is to challenge lazy critical formulations of 'the Other' when approaching this area of study, and this ambition is amply fulfilled in the discussions which follow. Glyn Redworth draws upon sketches of Antoon Van Den Wijngaerde in the first chapter to re-evaluate the presence of Tudor military forces at the 1557 siege of Saint Quentin (as well the capture of the fortress town of Ham). Mary Tudor would send a force of 4000 foot soldiers, 1000 cavalry, and 1500 military engineers and sappers to support her husband Philip II's war against France. Red-worth demonstrates that Anglophone assessments of this engagement have been [End Page 581] repeatedly governed by expectations of reluctance and marginality (and by critical neglect), concluding persuasively that 'to assume that negative comments must outweigh all praise is to normalise an already tainted view of this war' (p. 17). In all, the Spanish-led force would number as many as 50,000 men (or more) and Redworth draws innovatively on engravings of Wijngaerde's sketches circulating shortly after the Saint Quentin victory to explore new perspectives on the profile and engagement of Mary's forces. In the next discussion, Susanna Oliveira considers Portuguese diplomatic relations with the Tudor realm, most particularly in the context of Thomas Wilson's mission to England's oldest ally in 1567. The name of Thomas Wilson may be best known to those engaged in early modern studies in the context of his published discussion of rhetorical practice. However, here Oliveira unveils a polyglot diplomat who would be the first envoy that Elizabeth sent to Portugal after a ser","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134933769","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 Politics of Realism by Thomas Docherty (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907841","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907841","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: The Politics of Realism by Thomas Docherty Charlotte Jones The Politics of Realism. By Thomas Docherty. London: Bloomsbury. 2022. 288 pp. £90. ISBN 978–1–350–22853–5. The 'unreality' of contemporary politics has become something of a truism, but what does it mean for politics to 'keep it real'? Thomas Docherty's wide-ranging, spirited account of the role played by a contested aesthetic weaves examples from literature, visual arts, and film in a discursive, even meandering, manner. There is a deftness of touch that makes such breadth of reference feel light but tangible. What I am less convinced by is whether all of the vignettes Docherty brings together fit coherently under the narrative about realism he offers. Part i begins in 1857, with Flaubert and Baudelaire in legal difficulties over alleged indecency and a new Obscene Publications Act in England. Docherty suggests that the way 'censorship was used to divert attention from real conditions of human [End Page 585] life, to banish these conditions from representation and from easy availability to a public assembly or society' (p. 228) is linked to the operations of realism, an aesthetic vested in control over what constitutes reality, in the sense of giving credence to what is 'realistic' or established as non-controvertible. Gustave Courbet, to take one instance, challenges conventional notions of propriety by identifying the real with irreducibly material conditions of the human body: labour, sex, death. Realism's 'mimetic adequacy' (p. 165) thus obtains a political charge, though as Docherty engages with more examples it should become clear that nineteenth-century realism involves more than mere verisimilitude. In Chapter 4, realism in Dickens's Bleak House and Hard Times 'operates as a mechanism for calling into question the idea of a single authoritative account of what constitutes reality itself' (p. 98). In Part ii, an opening interlude on Henry James gives way to discussions of Zola, Turgenev, the documentary film-maker Jane Anthony Grierson, Anatoly Lunacharsky's Soviet Socialist realism, and the ways in which realism seeks to catalyse change, which Docherty frames in terms of a reader's 'education'. Docherty's characterization of realism unfolds heuristically as the book advances, which allows readers to feel themselves into his train of thought. In one way or another, we are told, all of these works 'orient us towards indeterminacy, and away from the certainties that are grounded in any fundamentalist belief-system' (p. 228). In Part iii, Docherty explicitly pitches realism against fascism, wherein 'the reality that we seek lies hidden under a fictionalized or mythic account of what constitutes the real world' (p. 228). Chapters parse the abolition of theatrical censorship in England in 1968, shadowed by Mary Whitehouse's moral purity campaigns, and cast realism as 'resistance' in Italian neo-realism and against Leni Riefenstahl's Nazi propaganda, where reality exists l","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134933775","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":"Words of her Own: Women Authors in Nineteenth-Century Bengal by Maroona Murmu (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907860","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907860","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Words of her Own: Women Authors in Nineteenth-Century Bengal by Maroona Murmu Máire ní Fhlathúin Words of her Own: Women Authors in Nineteenth-Century Bengal. By Maroona Murmu. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. 2020. xvi+ 439 pp. ₹1395; £26.99. ISBN 978–0–19–949800–0. The tradition of women's writing in colonial Bengal has been historically undervalued, only recently becoming the topic of literary and historical scholarship. Maroona Murmu's book, an impressive project of retrieval and contextualization, focuses primarily on the second half of the nineteenth century, a period when women writers published, by her estimate, over three hundred books. Murmu's subjects are educated, Westernized, Hindu and Brahmo women; she excludes those she terms 'their religious others—Muslim and Christian women authors—as well as regional others—Oriya and Marathi women writers' (p. 20). The first chapter uses archival research to locate these elite women among and against those of 'lower caste and class' who nevertheless shared some of their experiences of family life and culture. Later chapters aim to supply through genre-based case studies 'all that the official archive left unmentioned' (p. 66). In Chapter 2, essays by Kailashbashini Debi and Swarnamayee Gupta both take issue with the ideology of domestic femininity; Kailashbashini's work is subtitled 'Hindu Female: Miseries of Hindu Women', although she credits her husband Durgacharan Gupta for its publication. Other chapters focus on life-writing by Kailashbashini Debi (not to be confused with her namesake) and Saradasundari Debi, novels by Kusumkumari Roychoudhurani and Swarnakumari Debi, and travel narratives by Krishnabhabini Das and Prasannamayee Debi. A final note examines the reception of women's writing by a predominantly male reading public (excluding most women by virtue of their low levels of literacy), whose normative gaze exerted its own pressure on the form, substance, and conditions of production of these works. One of the strengths of Murmu's detailed, thoughtful research is her delineation of these writers' social and political milieu. The cultural impact of colonialism is pervasive, as are the ways in which both colonial and indigenous norms prescribed women's roles. Krishnabhabini Das's narrative of her encounter with Britain, Englande Bangamahila (1885), reverses the colonial gaze, but as Murmu points out, print technologies had long before her journey brought British culture to Bengal. In the pedagogy of domesticity, exemplary figures include 'the daughters of the Empress Victoria' as well as the Hindu deities Draupadi and Sita—all reminding 'modern women' of the importance of cooking (p. 124). Both these cultural forces are evident in the figure of Swarnakumari Debi, whose literary work spanned the fields of fiction, poetry, drama, and journalism, among others. Her writing bears the traces of her wide reading in English—Gray, Shelley, Shakespeare, Byron—and 'Mary Evans who ma","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134934008","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":"Enlightenment at Court: Patrons, Philosophes, and Reformers in Eighteenth-Century Europe ed. by Thomas Biskup et al. (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907840","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907840","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Enlightenment at Court: Patrons, Philosophes, and Reformers in Eighteenth-Century Europe ed. by Thomas Biskup et al. Roberto Quirós Rosado Enlightenment at Court: Patrons, Philosophes, and Reformers in Eighteenth-Century Europe. Ed. by Thomas Biskup, Benjamin Marschke, Andreas Pečar, and Damien Tricoire. (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment) Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, University of Oxford. 2022. xi+ 367 pp. £65. ISBN 978–1–80085–507–6. The Enlightenment, one of the key pillars in the construction of Europe in the early modern age, is the axis of this collective book. Despite the usual divergences in the quality of the chapters included in this type of work, the four editors offer the reader—both in the arrangement of the chapters and through the hierarchy of ideas and debates in an extensive Introduction—the opportunity to engage with a multiplicity of views on the political, cultural, religious, and social connections of this intellectual phenomenon as it played out in what we can call the 'court ecosystem'. Through the aforementioned Introduction and its eleven contributions divided into four large blocks, a multifocal analysis of the historiographical issues covers [End Page 584] the major areas of development of political culture in the eighteenth century: from monarchical patronage to the (not always victorious) reformism of the Enlightenment, passing through the mechanisms of individual or collective representation and the emergence of a real public sphere. One of the greatest merits of the volume is how, for the first time, it brings together case studies that synthesize the rhetorics and practices of palatine networks, the links between reformers and philosophers, and the multiple facets of the cultural (understood as an eminently political means of dissemination on different scales). It does so not by making only timid links—e.g. between the French Lumières, Germanic Aufklärung, and British Enlightenment—but by opening up to spaces less known to general historiography, such as Spain, Russia, or Sweden. The divergences in the behaviour and sociability of some of these regions, such as the imperial, royal, and princely courts in the Holy Roman Empire (Berlin, Anhalt, Bayreuth, and Vienna), are examined in great detail. However, explorations of other essential spaces in this European melting pot, such as the three most important cities of the Italian Grand Tour—Rome, Venice, and Florence—or reformist Naples under the Habsburgs and Bourbons, are missing. Thanks to the results provided by Enlightenment at Court, we can observe the full validity of the court socio-political system in the face of the propagandistic criticism of its emulators in the transition to revolution and liberalism. We also see how palaces, gardens, and reserved cabinets constituted spaces of mimesis between the reformism of the ancien régime and the safeguarding of the essences of the absolutism of the eighteenth century. Finally, the collection","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134934965","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":"Words like Fire: Prophecy and Apocalypse in Apollinaire, Marinetti, and Pound by James P. Leveque (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907842","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907842","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Words like Fire: Prophecy and Apocalypse in Apollinaire, Marinetti, and Pound by James P. Leveque Willard Bohn Words like Fire: Prophecy and Apocalypse in Apollinaire, Marinetti, and Pound. By James P. Leveque. (Studies in Comparative Literature, 50) Cambridge: Legenda. 2021. x+ 221 pp. £85. ISBN 978–1–78188–443–0. This book is a welcome contribution to avant-garde studies in Europe and North America. Devoted primarily to poetry, it examines the early literary activities of three giants who helped shape our response to the twentieth century: Guillaume Apollinaire in France, F. T. Marinetti in Italy, and Ezra Pound in England and America. To my knowledge, this is the only book-length study of all three poets, each of whom—officially or unofficially—headed a major literary movement. Associated with Cubism, Futurism, and Imagism respectively, they strove to create a revolutionary poetry that reflected the values of the modern age. Unlike the Italian leader, who was the official head of the Futurist movement, the other two led largely by example, juxtaposing their revolutionary poems with articles defending the poetics in question. Alternating between prophecy and apocalypse (or combining the two), as James P. Leveque demonstrates, they drew on biblical literature to establish various religious parallels. In particular, the author claims, apocalyptic attitudes and prophetic poses were used by all three men 'to establish poetry as the authoritative voice on the meaning of [the First World War] and the potential for the post-war future' (p. 18). [End Page 587] The following three chapters consider the role played by prophecy in the poets' early works, which in Apollinaire's case was far from negligible. As Leveque is not the first to point out, the French author frequently refers to personages and themes in the Bible. Published in 1966, Robert Couffignal's L'Inspiration biblique dans l'œuvre de Guillaume Apollinaire (Paris: Lettres Modernes) has been a valuable reference for many years. However, since Leveque's biblical knowledge is much more exhaustive, he is able to paint a more detailed portrait of the poet's indebtedness. The prophetic bent of Marinetti's works is not as evident as Apollinaire's because it assumes a different form. Arguing that the Futurist leader considered his writings to be a form of prophecy, the author focuses on Le Monoplan du pape (The Pope's Monoplane) and several Futurist manifestos. In his opinion, the latter represent 'perhaps the modern prophetic mode par excellence' (p. 64). Marinettti hoped to become a modern Joshua, he explains, leading the Italian people into the conquest of a Promised Land. In a similar manner, Pound also viewed himself as a poet and something of a prophet. Unlike the previous leaders' works, which tended to be optimistic, his own were marked by pessimism and a profound sense of loss. Since he believed that modern poetry was vastly inferior to traditional poetry, his works were filled ","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134935194","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}