MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW最新文献

{"title":"Latin Jazz: The Other Jazz by Christopher Washburne (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907843","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907843","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Latin Jazz: The Other Jazz by Christopher Washburne Jessica Sequeira Latin Jazz: The Other Jazz. By Christopher Washburne. (Currents in Latin American and Iberian Music) Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2020. xi+ 216 pp. £75. ISBN 978–0–19–537162–8. Christopher Washburne begins his lively book with an excerpt from Jorge Luis Borges's 'The Cruel Redeemer Lazarus Morell', quoting it as he traces the effects of the African presence in the United States, and the 'remote cause' for phenomena such as the popularity of the song 'The Peanut Vendor'. Washburne frames his work as a 'sonic ecology' (p. 110) and an 'exploration of Latin jazz through the lens of Borgesian entangled histories' (p. 3); he describes how bandleader Don Azpiazú brought Cuban rhythms into the mainstream through this song, despite its suggestive Spanish lyrics about eating peanuts from a cone. A 1930 version by Louis Armstrong reworked it with a 2/3 clave pattern, change of maní (peanuts) to Marie, and castanets in the foreground; quickly on its heels came a 1931 Duke Ellington version mixing Cuban rumba, Trinidadidan calypso, and Harlem stride, expanding a black musical archipelago (Havana, Port of Spain, Harlem). Washburne approaches Latin jazz as a global music, a 'nexus of intercultural exchange where African American traditions are blended with Latin American cultural ones' (p. 3). Alternative terms are Afro-Latin, Afro-Cuban, Caribbean jazz, jazz latin, Cubop and (per Jelly Roll Morton) 'the Spanish tinge'. Indeed, despite [End Page 589] his title, Washburne argues that Latin jazz is not 'other' but a tree in a shared grove, aspens with an interconnected root system (p. 177). Latin jazz survives as an efficient label to help musicians get gigs. Giving some history of jazz roots, Washburne makes the case for layered history including Latin American—not just African American—elements. Emerging from New Orleans, with Congo Square as symbolic place of origin, it is a 'confluence of slavery, colonialism, plantation life, postcolonialism, emancipation' (p. 9). New Orleans was aligned with French and Spanish colonies, and imported slaves from Senegambia (West Africa); slaves also had connections first with Haiti and then with Cuba, where they migrated after the 1790s slave uprisings of the Napoleonic Wars. All of these moments can be heard in jazz rhythms. In the 1920s and 1930s Spanish Harlem—with its own immigration history—became the industry recording capital. The 'rumba' (actually son pregón, mislabelled by record executives) took off. New instruments such as the flute and conga drum became popular in jazz as a result of Latin American influence, as did rhythms such as the tresillo, cinquillo, and clave. In 1931 the Gretsch Percussion Company began to produce bongos, clave, aracas, güiros, cowbells, and timbales. Cuban influences also brought limb independence to jazz drumming, solos over static chord progressions, non-functional harmonies, and Afro-Cuban modal tona","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":"134933718","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":"Scripting the Nation: Court Poetry and the Authority of History in Late Medieval Scotland by Katherine H. Terrell (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907853","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907853","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Scripting the Nation: Court Poetry and the Authority of History in Late Medieval Scotland by Katherine H. Terrell Emily Wingfield Scripting the Nation: Court Poetry and the Authority of History in Late Medieval Scotland. By Katherine H. Terrell. (Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture) Columbus: Ohio State University Press. 2021. viii+ 232 pp. $99.95 ISBN 978–0–8142–1462–6. Katherine H. Terrell's richly inventive study positions a range of fourteenth- to sixteenth-century Scottish chronicle material alongside the works of poets connected to the court of James IV, and she deftly explores how this material both appropriates and subverts English literary and historiographical models in order to assert—often simultaneously—literary and territorial sovereignty. Indeed, Terrell's work is unique in juxtaposing—and demonstrating the close relationship between—Scotland's historiographical tradition and the works of those writers commonly labelled 'Scots Chaucerians'. Scripting the Nation significantly advances scholarship in both areas as a result. Terrell begins by outlining the War of Historiography which accompanied the physical battles of the period's Wars of Independence: Edward I and Edward II both seized upon Galfridian myths which traced English origins to Brutus and the Trojans in order to bolster their claims to lordship and ownership of Scotland; to counteract this, and prove Scotland's independence and superior cultural status, Scottish historians instead traced their origins to a Greek prince, Gaythelos, and his Egyptian wife, Scota. Terrell's theoretically informed readings of John Hardyng's Chronicle are a real highlight here: in focusing on his forgery of evidence to support England's claims to Scotland, and on the role in certain manuscript witnesses of additional maps and marginalia that assert and document an interest in the same claims, she demonstrates how Hardyng created a past tailor-made to serve the imperialist interests of his monarchs' (p. 24). Having observed that Scottish writers of the period regularly 'engage in a complex dance of deference to and defiance against their English models' (p. 5), in Chapter 2 Terrell explores how John of Fordun responded in his late fourteenth-century Chronica Gentis Scotorum to Geoffrey of Monmouth's use of the Trojan origin legend. She articulates how Fordun deliberately set Geoffrey's narrative against the alternative and genealogically focused Greek Scottish origin legend, whilst simultaneously leaving open the contradictions of his various source materials, in order to reveal 'history as contested political ground' (p. 61). In next demonstrating how Walter Bower found ways to assert the superior morality and hereditary lineage of the Scots in his mid-fifteenth-century Scotichronicon, and carefully attending to the text's actual and ideal readers, Terrell makes a strong case for viewing Bower's project as the 'creation of a textual community' (p. 66); history, she argue","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":"134933773","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":"Hubert Crackanthorpe: Selected Writings ed. by William Greenslade and Emanuela Ettorre (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907861","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907861","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Hubert Crackanthorpe: Selected Writings ed. by William Greenslade and Emanuela Ettorre Jessica Gossling Hubert Crackanthorpe: Selected Writings. Ed. by William Greenslade and Emanuela Ettorre. (MHRA Jewelled Tortoise, 7; MHRA Critical Texts, 71) Cambridge: Modern Humanities Research Association. 2020. viii+ 414 pp. £34.99. IBSN 978–1–78188–966–4. Hubert Montague Crackanthorpe (1870–1896) is well known among those interested in the fin de siècle, although unfortunately this is more to do with his mysterious death by drowning in Paris at the age of twenty-six than for his writing, which has remained predominantly out of print. Hubert Crackanthorpe: Selected Writings—the seventh volume iii Stefano Evangelista and Catherine Maxwell's Jewelled Tortoise series—is therefore a much-needed edition that successfully presents the range and importance of Crackanthorpe's writing. The volume comprises two critical introductory essays by the editors, a selection of Crackanthorpe's fiction and non-fiction, and a comprehensive bibliographic survey. William Greenslade's essay, 'Life, Context and Criticism', begins with the details of Crackanthorpe's death and the discovery of his decomposed body, recognizable only by his signet ring, before expanding on his connections with some of the most influential literary figures of the day (Henry James, William Butler Yeats, and Arthur Symons, to name a few), his establishment of the short-lived journal The Albermale: A Monthly Review (1892), and his lifelong interest in French culture and writing. As discussed by Emanuela Ettorre in 'The Stories and the Prose [End Page 619] Poems', this context enables a deeper understanding of Crackanthorpe's attraction to challenging, Zolaesque subject matter, and the artistic experimentation that led to him being considered 'as one of the exponents of \"new realism'\" (p. 35) at the beginning of his career. In three years, this realism rapidly developed into a darker and uneasy impressionism—a progression that is foregrounded in the organization of the short stories and prose poems in Selected Works. The first part, 'Fiction', takes a chronological approach to Crackanthorpe's more realist short-story collections. It includes six of the seven stories in Wreckage: Seven Studies (1893); all but 'Yew Trees and Peacocks' in Sentimental Studies (1895); two of the six in A Set of Village Tales (1895); and all three of the stories in Last Studies, collected and published posthumously in 1897. As justified by the editors, the omissions from these collections provide the space to present three less familiar short stories in the second part, 'Uncollected Fiction'. This is the first time 'A Latter-Day Highwayman (An Adventure in Miniature)' has been published since the original newspaper version in 1896. In this short story, the narrator recalls the night he spent sheltering from a snowstorm in a disused cattleshed with an inept highwayman who 'resembled a decadent Father Christmas' (p. ","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":"134934011","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":"Fantine in the Belle Époque: Representation of the Fille-Mère in L'Assiette au beurre (1902) and Marcelle Tinayre's La Rebelle (1905)","authors":"Kathryn Bryan","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907832","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907832","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This article reads depictions of the fille-mère as a vehicle for the expression of anxieties surrounding representation of marginal female figures and freedom of the press in the Belle Époque. It looks to two texts, exploring how these fictional unmarried mothers differ from Hugo's Fantine, the archetype of the fille-mère , earlier in the nineteenth century. After an overview of welfare support for unmarried mothers in the long nineteenth century, the author provides close and intermedial readings of a 1902 issue of L'Assiette au Beurre and Marcelle Tinayre's La Rebelle (1905), focusing on the limits of representation of these non-conforming women.","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":"134935161","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":"Delw y Byd: A Medieval Welsh Encyclopedia ed. by Natalia I. Petrovskaia, and: Hystoria Gweryddon yr Almaen: The Middle Welsh Life of St Ursula and the 11,000 Virgins ed. by Jane Cartwright (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907852","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907852","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Delw y Byd: A Medieval Welsh Encyclopedia ed. by Natalia I. Petrovskaia, and: Hystoria Gweryddon yr Almaen: The Middle Welsh Life of St Ursula and the 11,000 Virgins ed. by Jane Cartwright Helen Fulton Delw y Byd: A Medieval Welsh Encyclopedia. Ed. by Natalia I. Petrovskaia. (MHRA Library of Medieval Welsh Literature) Cambridge: Modern Humanities Research Association. 2020. x+ 183 pp. £37.85. ISBN 978–1–78188–949–7. Hystoria Gweryddon yr Almaen: The Middle Welsh Life of St Ursula and the 11,000 Virgins. Ed. by Jane Cartwright. (MHRA Library of Medieval Welsh Literature) Cambridge: Modern Humanities Research Association. 2020. x+ 133 pp. £39.99. ISBN 978–1–907322–59–4. With the publication of these two edited volumes, the MHRA Library of Medieval Welsh Literature now comprises six editions representing some key works of Middle Welsh prose and poetry, including court poetry, nature poetry, and historical writing. The series aims to make Middle Welsh texts accessible to students and scholars who may have little or no knowledge of the language and, as someone contracted to produce an edition for the series in the future, I welcome this initiative for the support of medieval Welsh literature and its importance within comparative medieval studies. These two new volumes perfectly represent the aims and achievements of the series. Each of them makes available a significant Middle Welsh text illustrative [End Page 604] of a specific genre of interest to medievalists. The first, Delw y Byd, presents a selection of chapters from a thirteenth-century Welsh prose translation of Book 1 of the twelfth-century Latin encyclopedia by Honorius Augustodunensis, Imago mundi (whose title, 'image of the world', is exactly repeated in the Welsh title). The second, Hystoria Gweryddon yr Almaen (literally, 'the story of the virgins of Germany'), is the first edited text of the Welsh Life of Saint Ursula, adapted from Latin versions by the poet and hagiologist Syr Huw Pennant, active in the first half of the sixteenth century. Though differing in dates, both texts exemplify the interest among medieval Welsh writers and patrons in Latinate non-fiction prose from the worlds of secular and religious learning. In her edition of Delw y Byd, Natalia I. Petrovskaia presents 67 of the 136 chapters of the Welsh text, justifying her selection on the grounds of'structure, use, and representativeness' (p. 27). In other words, she has selected chapters which are necessary to preserve the basic structure of the text in its geographical description of the world, chapters which were evidently the subject of discussion, and chapters representative of particular sequences, such as lists of countries, planets, or constellations. She provides a full list of chapter numbers in the complete text, making it clear which chapters have been selected for this edition. The edited text itself is not very long, representing just under 30 pages sandwiched between the slightly longer introdu","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":"134935206","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":"Old English Tradition: Essays in Honor of J. R. Hall ed. by Lindy Brady (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2023.a907851","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a907851","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Old English Tradition: Essays in Honor of J. R. Hall ed. by Lindy Brady Andrew Breeze Old English Tradition: Essays in Honor of J. R. Hall. Ed. by Lindy Brady. (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 578) Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies. 2021. xxiv+ 339 pp. $90. ISBN 978–0–86698–636–6. Twenty-one items make up this tribute to Jim Hall of Mississippi, a scholar known for scrupulous work on Beowulf and the like. The results are serious and worthy, with professionalism everywhere. We start with an editorial note on how the contents 'were written and submitted in 2014'; then an Introduction by Fred C. Robinson (d. 2016) and bibliography of the honorand's publications; thereafter eighteen studies in five sections. First is 'Old English Poetics' with four pieces: Roberta Frank on the semantics of Old English wine 'friend' (and its cognates in Old Norse and Old Saxon); Jane Roberts on personification of Death in Guthlac and beyond; Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe on The Wife's Lament-, Thomas Cable on new aspects of Old English metrics. Longer is 'Old English Christianity', a matter dear to the heart of Jim Hall. A. N. Doane expounds the iconography of Enoch in the Junius Manuscript of Genesis and Exodus; Frederick M. Biggs attends to Apparebit repentina' as source for Christ III; Paul E. Szarmach relates Alcuin of York to Latin homilies in Cambridge, Pembroke College, MS 25; Thomas D. Hill explains the eucharistic dance of angels mentioned in laws of King Cnut; R. D. Fulk edits (from Bodleian manuscripts) two Old English homilies, on the deadly sins and on Lent. Section 3, on Beowulf, has three contributions. A characteristic study by Eric Stanley (d. 2018) has as subject a possible confusion in the text of words for 'thrive' or 'determine' or 'intercede' or 'oppress'. Lindy Brady writes on the poem's 'swords [End Page 603] of doomed inheritance'; Howell Chickering offers clarification of its lines 3074–75. After that, codicology, with David F. Johnson on the Worcester 'tremulous hand' in a manuscript of the Old English Bede at the University Library, Cambridge; and Gregory Heyworth on ruinous attempts to elucidate the Vercelli Book with chemicals vis-à-vis better ones with modern technology. Last are observations on pioneer scholars of Old English: Daniel Donoghue on Junius and The Metres of Boethius; Carl T. Berkhout on Laurence Nowell and the Old English Bede; Dabney A. Bankert on how Benjamin Thorpe influenced Joseph Bosworth as lexicographer and as editor of the Old English Orosius (by an unknown Cornish cleric) and Gospels. John D. Niles provides a satisfying close on an unsigned essay of 1851 (about the Anglo-Saxon race) as 'very likely' by the poet Longfellow. Much progress is made here on Early English, reflecting that elsewhere (the Chronicle, Riddles, Battle of Brunanburh). Others may now take further what is to be found in this book. Here is one instance. While recommending it as useful for getting a se","PeriodicalId":45399,"journal":{"name":"MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW","volume":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":"134933771","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

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

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

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

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