MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW最新文献

{"title":"To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice, and African American Authorship by Elizabeth Mchenry (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907862","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907862","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice, and African American Authorship by Elizabeth Mchenry Rachel Farebrother To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice, and African American Authorship. By Elizabeth Mchenry. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2021. xv+ 295 pp. $27.95. ISBN 978–1–4780–1451–5. To Make Negro Literature provides an original, meticulously researched account of concepts of Black authorship and efforts to define (and debate) the terms of an [End Page 620] African American literary tradition from the legalization of segregation in 1896 to 1910. Laura Helton, Barbara McCaskill, Caroline Gebhard, and James Smethurst, among others, have rectified the critical neglect of Black expressive culture during the period that Rayford Logan called the 'nadir' of race relations. However, Elizabeth McHenry contends that a tendency to group the years from 1877 to 1919 has obscured the 'unsettledness of the category of Black literature at the turn of the century' (p. 9). African Americans were excluded from social, political, and cultural institutions to such an extent that it is necessary to explore 'an aspect of literary culture that is all too rarely the subject of study: failure' (p. 5). Shifting critical attention from the crossover success of Charles Chesnutt and Paul Laurence Dunbar towards unpublished texts, unfinished projects, and uncelebrated authors and genres transforms understanding of Black literature at the turn of the century. It emerges as a period when writers and intellectuals laboured behind the scenes to establish the infrastructure for the appreciation and serious study of African American literature (p. 11). Four case studies examine aspects of Black literary culture that could be dismissed as marginal or insignificant (subscription bookselling, bibliographies, ghostwriting, and cover letters to publishers) to highlight the extensive labour involved in establishing 'Negro literature' during the era of Jim Crow. First, McHenry interprets subscription bookselling as part of a tradition of Black self-education through which readers across the South and the Midwest could 'both revalue their Blackness and see themselves as a literary, which is to say, an intellectual, people' (p. 62). The second chapter explores how bibliographies of 'Negro' literature compiled by Daniel Murray (for the Library of Congress and 1900 Paris Exposition) and W. E. B. Du Bois made Black literature visible and accessible, establishing 'the scope and parameters of Negro authorship and writing about race' (p. 81). The second half of the book pivots from curatorial practices to concepts of authorship that have gone unexamined in Black literary history. Booker T. Washington's reliance upon a team of ghost-writers is well known, but McHenry's meticulous reconstruction of T. Thomas Fortune's creation of Washington's public authority as an author is revelatory. Fortune was motivated by an awareness of Washington's potential as","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":"43 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":"134933799","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":"Incomparable Realms: Spain during the Golden Age, 1500–1700 by Jeremy Robbins (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907870","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907870","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Incomparable Realms: Spain during the Golden Age, 1500–1700 by Jeremy Robbins Roy Norton Incomparable Realms: Spain during the Golden Age, 1500–1700. By Jeremy Robbins. London: Reaktion. 2022. 367 pp. £25. ISBN 978–1–78914–537–3. In recent decades few scholars have contributed as valuably as Jeremy Robbins has to our understanding of the world-view of Golden Age Spaniards. Incomparable Realms builds on his already classic studies on the 'uncertainty' and the 'epistemological mentality' of the age, with a focus on early modern Spaniards' sense of existing between heaven and earth, the two realms alluded to in this book's title. The culture of Golden Age Spain is envisioned here as one defined by its creators' unusually sharp awareness of their liminal existence, with its attendant dualities of secular and religious, body and soul, appearance and reality, transient and eternal, or the acá and allá, in the words of Teresa of Ávila. But, as Robbins observes, 'despite being shaped by these rigid binaries', Golden Age culture 'is far less one of either/or than of both/and' (p. 26), although the two realms are 'incomparable' and the heavenly cannot be accurately portrayed. This remarkably rich and readable study does an excellent job of exploring many of the subtle and fascinating complexities (and occasional paradoxes) of a culture that is easily caricatured and thereby misunderstood. Robbins's cultural history is divided into three parts, each blending a crisp account of relevant details of the period's geopolitical history with thoroughly illuminating analyses of many of its most representative artistic achievements in the fields of literature, painting, sculpture, tapestry, architecture, and performance, dramatic and musical. Part 1 focuses on Spain's Habsburg rulers and their self-conceptualization and self-presentation, especially as heirs to the Roman emperors and chief defenders of Catholicism. Part 11 considers the 'encounters' that helped [End Page 632] shape the global world-view and the hybrid art of a nation some have thought of as homogeneous and isolated, encounters with the Italian Renaissance, with Jews, Muslims, and enslaved Africans, for instance, and with God. Finally, Part iii, entitled 'Journeys and Reflections', considers two motifs that Robbins argues had a special place in Golden Age Spaniards' conceptualizations of life and of themselves, the journey and the mirror. This brief overview of the book's structure hardly does justice to the dazzling breadth and variety of the material treated, invariably with the impeccable judgement and clear-sightedness that Robbins's erudition allows him to bring to bear. Two things stand out as especially valuable here. First, Robbins's desire 'to present something of the diversity and multiple narratives and perspectives of this pivotal period' (p. 32) certainly bears fruit. Alongside discussion of works that feed into Golden Age Spain's image in the popular imagination as one cons","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":"134934999","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":"Adaptations: Critical and Primary Sources ed. by Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907844","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907844","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Adaptations: Critical and Primary Sources ed. by Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan Kate Griffiths Adaptations: Critical and Primary Sources. Ed. by Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan. 3 vols. New York: Bloomsbury. 2022. x+ 357 pp. (vol. i); xi+ 426 pp. (vol. ii); xi+ 466 pp. (vol. iii). £495. ISBN 978–1–5013–1540–4. Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan's three-volume set of critical and primary sources on adaptation is a much-needed addition to the discipline of Adaptation Studies. It traces, via a compellingly contrastive range of critical voices, the complicated relationship between source texts and their afterlives in an ever expanding range of different media. Ranging from Vachel Lindsay in 1915 to Thomas M. Leitch in 2019, Cartmell and Whelehan set themselves the daunting task of compiling the cacophonous voices commenting on and theorizing the much-disputed art of adaptation between those dates. The value of their compendium is clear. The range and diversity of their coverage maps the plethora of thinkers contributing to the discipline that is Adaptation Studies, documenting its evolution, definitions, and development. The conversations between these different thinkers take us, as readers, to the heart of the existential questions which both power and haunt Adaptation Studies: What is adaptation? What are the formative forces shaping its outputs? What is the value of those outputs? What is Adaptation Studies? How might we theorize it? Where does Adaptation Studies sit as a discipline? How do we map its borders and boundaries? Cartmell and Whelehan's collection offers no simplistic, finite answer to any of those questions. Rather, it embraces the wealth of possible responses to them, exploring the ways in which different historical moments, thinkers, creative practitioners, political contexts, and theoretical turns have answered these and other questions in intriguingly diverse ways. The compendium's focus is the history of adaptation from the early twentieth century. It deliberately takes the birth of film, the medium which would impact so powerfully on adaptation and its study, as its starting point. Subsequently, the progression is chronological. Volume i covers the period 1900–93, volume ii 1996–2007, volume iii 2007–20. The greatest space by far is allocated to the years from 1993 onwards, reflecting the acceleration and accumulation of research in this area as Adaptation Studies turned and re-turned in different theoretical directions. This collection of essays does not over-privilege the years from 1993 onwards, though. Rather, it underlines, in the telling intersections between each of its three volumes, the ways in which the present of Adaptation Studies speaks to and is shaped by its past, and itself actively shapes that past. [End Page 591] The collection offers valuable correctives to our vision of adaptation history. It has become a commonplace that Adaptation Studies began with George Bluestone's 1957 'The Lim","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":"73 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":"134935005","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":"From Puppet to Cyborg: Pinocchio's Posthuman Journey by Georgia Panteli (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907846","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907846","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: From Puppet to Cyborg: Pinocchio's Posthuman Journey by Georgia Panteli Kelly Mckisson From Puppet to Cyborg: Pinocchio's Posthuman Journey. By Georgia Panteli. (Studies in Comparative Literature, 40) Cambridge: Legenda. 2022. xi+ 178 pp. £85. ISBN 978–1–781887–12–7. When in 2023 Guillermo Del Toro's stop-motion adaptation of Pinocchio won the Oscar for best animated feature, audiences were again captivated by the adventures of the now one-hundred-and-forty-year-old mischievous puppet. Carlo Collodi's classic, first serialized in an Italian children's magazine in 1881–82, and then expanded and published as a novel in 1883, has been so widely translated and adapted that it remains 'one of the most famous texts in the world' (p. 1). So proclaims the first line of Georgia Panteli's slim book, From Puppet to Cyborg. Panteli's comparative project tracks contemporary retellings of the Pinocchio myth and analyses how they reinterpret and revise the original's concern with a desire to be human. The pleasure of reading Panteli's book comes not from one centrally sustained argument but instead from thought-provoking insights revealed by unearthing Pinocchio elements in multiple recent reimaginings, across three media forms and multiple languages. As the title suggests, Panteli's survey makes a suitable case for the Pinocchio myth, and especially the wooden boy's desires, as an early precursor to posthuman narratives—here, readers should expect the posthumanism aligned with Nick Bostrum's Tn Defense of Posthuman Dignity' (Bioethics, 19.3 (2005), 202–14), which refers to the transhuman or superhuman extension of the human category. Panteli moves from cyborg Pinocchios in science fiction film and television to ironic Pinocchios in postmodern metafiction and then to subversive Pinocchios in contemporary graphic novels, making new use of Collodi's original myth in each instance. The structure and analysis of From Puppet to Cyborg resemble the picaresque journey of Pinocchio's adventures: with few sections longer than fifteen pages, the book's Introduction and Conclusion bookend three parts that are divided into prefatory pieces and nine short chapters. The Introduction is one of the longest sections, providing an overview of the contexts for Collodi's original and subsequent international translations, as well as twentieth-century stage and film adaptations. Here, Panteli makes a case for understanding Pinocchio's part in the fairy-tale tradition, following Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folk Tale (Russian original 1928), as well as Pinocchio's function as modern myth, fitting Joseph Campbell's formula from The Hero with a Thousand Faces (first edition 1949). Outlining the themes and archetypes of the Pinocchio myth—for example, fairy and talking animal characters; moments of confrontation and transformation; the hero's journey [End Page 595] of separation, initiation, and return—allows Panteli to engage these elements as connections for compar","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":"134935009","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":"Selected Letters: A Bilingual Edition, 1523–1546 by Vittoria Colonna (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907866","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907866","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Selected Letters: A Bilingual Edition, 1523–1546 by Vittoria Colonna Maria Serena Sapegno Selected Letters: A Bilingual Edition, 1523–1546. By Vittoria Colonna. Ed. by Veronica Copello; trans, by Abigail Brundin. (The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series, 88) New York: Iter Press. 2022. xiv + 186 pp. $48.95. ISBN 978–1–64959–028–2. This volume completes the string of texts dedicated to Vittoria Colonna in the same series, The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe—Sonnets for Michelangelo: A Bilingual Edition, ed. and trans. by Abigail Brundin (Chicago, 2005); Poems of Widowhood: A Bilingual Edition of the 1538 'Rime', ed. and trans. by Ramie Targoff (Toronto, 2021)—in a remarkable achievement. A larger public is now in a position to evaluate the significance of a complex personality and a writer who was a unique model for European women in her time: the first to have a book of poetry printed in her name. [End Page 626] The historical-critical Introduction helps to situate Vittoria Colonna's epistolary activity within a public and private life that was complicated and intense, and not without difficult or even dramatic moments. Her life, after the untimely death of her husband in 1525, was always traversed by a tension between, on the one hand, the allure of meditative withdrawal into a regime of prayer and writing and, on the other, the need to fulfil family and social commitments related to her position as a member of the ruling class. Colonna's collected letters, which, thanks to intense research in recent years, now stand at about 270 documents and may grow further, reflect the richness and variety of her life and interlocutors, as manifested in the plurality of stylistic registers and variety of content. For these reasons, the undertaking presented the two editors with the far from straightforward task of making a selection that would preserve this richness and make sense of it in an already complex and fast-moving historical and cultural context. Incidentally, this is precisely the period when, thanks to the press, epistolary writing was on its way to becoming a literary genre in its own right, through the publication of model texts and collections by various authors, among whom Colonna herself finds a place. Pietro Aretino, her correspondent and admirer, published the first printed collection of letters in 1538. The edition comprisese forty letters covering the period from 1523 (before her husband's death) to 1546 (shortly before her own death in 1547). This selection, although limited in number, manages to give an idea of the social position of the writer, her authority, and her wide network of relationships, to provide an insight into her interests, her passions, and, last but not least, her opinions in diverse fields and subjects. Many of these letters are in fact among her most famous. Each letter has its own introduction that explains its importance and meaning, references the critical bibliography, and, ver","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":"67 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":"134935010","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":"Art, Theory, Revolution: The Turn to Generality in Contemporary Literature by Mitchum Huehls (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907848","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907848","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Art, Theory, Revolution: The Turn to Generality in Contemporary Literature by Mitchum Huehls Peter Sloane Art, Theory, Revolution: The Turn to Generality in Contemporary Literature. By Mitchum Huehls. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. 2022. 198 pp. $69.95. ISBN 978–0–8142–1524–1. Mitchum Huehls sets himself a difficult challenge in his deeply thoughtful and philosophically astute study of the relationship between literary form and politics in the contemporary period, more specifically the post-period following the various playful and often exaggerated nihilisms and endings attendant on the postmodern. On the one hand he makes a sophisticated series of claims about the ways in which current literary fiction continues to exploit forms' potential for various kinds of resistance (even to resistance itself) by engaging with what he describes as the 'form-politics homology' (p. 6); on the other, in a series of insightful close readings of the specifics of his chosen figures—including Chris Kraus, Percival Everett, Zadie Smith, and Rachel Kushner—he argues that some have instead 'turned to the single-general relationship' (p. 6). Either one of these might warrant a monograph, [End Page 598] but the point of Huehls's study is that these interrogations work together to give rise to a peculiarly post-postmodern set of entanglements between art, theory, and revolution. Intriguingly, as I suggest below, though this is not stated explicitly, the study is fundamentally interested in the work performed by the hyphen in these two conjunctions, the relationships, dependencies, and linkages implied by that, and by its possible erasure or refiguration. The Introduction is extensive, wide-ranging, and if at times hard to follow because it goes in at the deep end, worth reading closely because the theoretical framework is both rewarding in itself and vital if sense is to made of the following chapters. Much of the hard work takes place here, Huehls outlining the case that he will reinforce in his Conclusion, that his subjects 'develop generalized forms of value production irreducible' to the 'homological thought' of their predecessors in the modernist or pre-modernist periods (p. 153). Chapter 1 is concerned with 'Art, Life-Writing, and the Generic', focusing on Sheila Heti and Chris Kraus, arguing that they explore 'the problem of being a person in the world' and reconceive the 'nature of female selfhood' (p. 40). Chapter 2 turns to 'Theory, Metafiction, and Constructivism', asking the question that, if theory is 'supposedly dead', why is it still so 'alive and well in contemporary fiction?' (p. 75). Finally, Chapter 3 gets to grips with 'Revolution, Historical Fiction, and Gesture', to propose that Peter Carey, Viet Nguyen, Dana Spiotta, and other writers of recent historical fiction use 'their own forms of realism to think through the formal impasses that beset the various revolutionary activities that their content comprises' (p. 113). As I hint","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":"63 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":"134935196","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":"Imagining the Soul in Premodern Literature by Abe Davies (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907854","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907854","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Imagining the Soul in Premodern Literature by Abe Davies David Parry Imagining the Soul in Premodern Literature. By Abe Davies. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. 2021. xiv+ 244 pp. £109.99. ISBN 978–3–030–66332–2 (pbk 978–3–030–66335–3). Abe Davies's Imagining the Soul in Premodern Literature is an ambitiously wide- ranging and earnestly but often delightfully quirky study of the literary representation of the soul. The definition of 'soul' is a vexed question to which this study repeatedly returns, but Davies has a persuasive working definition: 'the soul is the privileged part of the human that transcends embodiment, and […] represents and guarantees the integrity of selfhood' (p. 5). He suggests that the persistence of this idea over time across varied human cultures is due to the fact that it 'represents] a self […] that is separable from the body and its death' (pp. 14–15). However, this core definition of the soul leaves and to some extent, Davies argues, generates numerous ambiguities. Much of Davies's study is dominated by the teasing out of these ambiguities as they manifest themselves in literary texts. Despite the title gesturing towards a broader premodernity, the texts analysed are primarily from the early modern period. Although his opening introductory chapter offers a broad survey of the history of the soul in classical, biblical, and medieval sources, the one medieval text Davies treats at length is the Old English Soul and Body from the Exeter Book, which Chapter 2 of the book pairs with Marvell's 'A Dialogue between the Soul and Body' as early and late examples of [End Page 608] the body/soul debate genre. Another provocative pairing is found in Chapter 3, which pairs Donne's Anniversary poems with Descartes's Discourse on Method as 'travelogues' of the soul, both using the subjective inner experience of the soul as a reassuring anchor to restore meaning to a cosmos threatened by the 'spatial turn', in which bodies with a fixed place in the order of things had been replaced by bodies with no fixed boundaries extending into an infinite space. Chapter 4 explores the address to the soul in didactic religious writing through the lens of a close reading of Shakespeare's Sonnet 146 ('Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth'), structuring its discussion around the sonnet's images of the soul as military rebel, painted harlot, and prodigal son. Shakespeare is also the key focus of Chapter 5, which develops an innovative argument linking the 'nothingness' of the ghost of Old Hamlet to scientific debates around atomism in which the universe is made up mostly of void space. A brief concluding chapter notes how premodern debates around the body and soul relationship persist into present-day debates surrounding the nature of human consciousness. Davies highlights the early modern period as a transitional one in which classical and Christian notions of a soul that transcends materiality and mortality coexist with emerging challenges fr","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":"73 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":"134935244","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":"Zola's Painters by Robert Lethbridge (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907864","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907864","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Zola's Painters by Robert Lethbridge Claire Moran Zola's Painters. By Robert Lethbridge. (Research Monographs in French Studies, 68) Cambridge: Legenda. 2022. xiii+ 230 pp. £85. ISBN 978–1–83954–079–0. 'It is difficult to dispute the oft-made claim', as Robert Lethbridge writes in his engaging and meticulously researched monograph on Émile Zola, 'that with the possible exception of Baudelaire, no other nineteenth-century writer enjoyed such a close relationship with the art of his time' (p. 24). What Lethbridge reveals, however, over the course of six chapters on Zola's art criticism, discussions on Cézanne, Courbet, Manet, landscape painters, and, interestingly, the Old Masters, is the complexity of, as well as the many paradoxes and contradictions that define, that relationship. The book could easily have borne a subtitle borrowed from one of the chapter subheadings such as 'tensions and contradictions' or 'reflections and refractions', since what Lethbridge unearths is the complicated history of nineteenth-century art and the figures which shaped it. Zola is important not only as a critic but also as a chroniqueur, although these roles were largely self-defined. In his articles for the annual Salons, he details facts and figures that remain historically significant. In 1876, for example, he notes 104,775 visitors in the opening week of the Salon, with 50,000 visitors on the final day, a Sunday, when there was no entry fee (p. 12). But it is Zola's role as critic that Lethbridge scrutinizes. Through careful reading of Zola's correspondence from the 1860s to the 1890s, Lethbridge questions Zola's artistic 'apprenticeship' and the relationships and personal and professional motives that moulded it. The writer's self-belief is never in doubt as from the outset, in 1859, shortly after moving from Aix-en-Provence to Paris, he distinguishes himself from 'des personnes qui se piquent de se connaître en peinture et [qu'il voit] au Salon prendre des ânes pour des vaches' (p. 16). Zola's immense contribution to nineteenth-century criticism is well known (between 1863 and 1869 alone he penned almost four dozen reviews on aesthetics, scholarly books by art historians, and illustrated editions), yet it is his writing on Impressionism, most particularly directly and indirectly on Manet, as well as what has been largely understood as a veiled portrait of Cézanne in L'Œuvre, that has gained most critical attention. What Lethbridge's book does in a subtle yet convincing way is to question the relationships that underscore these texts, both critical and fictional. The figure of Claude Lantier looms large, and the mutually admiring yet thorny relationship of Zola and Cézanne could, as the author notes in his Introduction, merit an entire book. In this chapter, which stands out for its sensitive portrayal of a friendship that unravels, not, as art-historical and literary legend would have it, because of Zola's damning and wounding fictional portrait o","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":"143 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":"134935265","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":"Climate and the Making of Worlds: Toward a Geohistorical Poetics by Tobias Menely (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907855","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907855","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Climate and the Making of Worlds: Toward a Geohistorical Poetics by Tobias Menely Sophie Fordham Climate and the Making of Worlds: Toward a Geohistorical Poetics. By Tobias Menely. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2021. vii+ 269 pp. $27.50. ISBN 978–0–226–77628–6. Energized by Fredric Jameson's coinage in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Methuen, 1981), Tobias Menely's Climate and the Making of Worlds astutely locates the misty gradations of the 'climatological unconscious' in a sample of poems scattered across 140 years of fluctuating atmospheric conditions. Starting with John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) and closing with Charlotte Smith's Beachy Head (1807), this interdisciplinary and multidimensional critical text yearns to make visible the covert ways in which climate has shaped poetics, by tracing the vicissitudes of both and evidencing why the connection between them is not incidental but generative. It traces the development of poetic mode—from the allegorical, to the descriptive, to the lyrical—across a century-and-a-half of intense energy transition, where meaningful reliance upon a system of solar energy conditioned by the flux of sunlight, wind, and water is phased out by an emerging planetary system and mode of production fuelled by fossil energy. This intertwined poetic and planetary genealogy is sketched out in great detail, through meticulous interdisciplinary research over a decade in the making—and yet the text remains relevant, rehearsing a renewed critical approach to unconsciously climatological poetry that has the potential to transform and better connect the nexus of fields it contributes to. The first chapter leans on an understanding of Paradise Lost as allegory, in order to perform a geohistorical reading of its 'mimetic strata' (p. 48). A significant portion of the chapter is devoted to justifying the allegorical nature of Milton's epic, both responding to and pre-empting further critical resistance to characterizing the poem in a way that is often understood to insufficiently capture the sensitivities to mimetic relation and representation Milton was so consciously attuned to. Menely gets around this somewhat by framing allegory as an unstable and multivalent term in itself, the 'name' for Paradise Lost's 'refusal to offer the reader an interpretive code' (p. 47). The second chapter examines James Thomson's The Seasons (1730), a text which uses description to witness the workings of a natural world circumscribed by seasonal and diurnal patterns, rather than to express a sentimental attachment or [End Page 610] psychological relation to it. The third chapter looks at four industrial georgics which evidence the crisis of description that arose in the late 1700s, as new modes of industrial production—whether in mines, factories, or plantations—were in the process of decoupling from the temporal and geographic realities of an economy controlled by solar energy. The ","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":"134933778","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":"Destiny, Discretion, and the Demonic: On Isak Dinesen's 'Alkmene'","authors":"Peter Yoonsuk Paik","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907831","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907831","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: What kind of role does fate play in a world that denies its existence? This article explores this question in relation to 'Alkmene', a tale by Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), which depicts the relationship between a young nobleman and the title character, an orphan who resists the Christian faith of her adoptive parents. The article examines the mysterious events that conspire to thwart the budding romance between the two. The denial of destiny draws the nobleman into the grip of a demonic silence.","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":"2014 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":"134933788","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}