Germanische Heldendichtung im Mittelalter: Eine Einführung by Victor Millet

Abstract

268 Reviews and as a form of cultural agency. Such underlying questions were clearly present to the author, but she opted to tackle them indirectly, through the in-depth analysis of a specificmoment in Italian cultural history as seen through the lens of translation practices. The strength of the book is in theway inwhich the broader picture is painted inoftenminute strokes,which are theproduct of detailed archival research and data collection. As a result,we get not only the portraits of some of the large players in the cultural market (Bompiani, Einaudi, and, of course, Mondadori) but also of the lasting influence exercised by smaller enterprises, such as the publishing ventures connected to La Voce, toRenato Serra, or to Piero Gobetti. This approach highlights, in particular, how in the first four decades of the century the Italian debate on foreign literature tended to concentrate on recurring arguments and the defence of translation was characterized by leitmotifs such as the need to open up (sprovincializzare) Italian culture, the desire for a dialogue with European and, in some cases, American literarymodels (Gobetti's europeismo is followed byVit torini's and Pavese's americanismo), or thewish to create a wider public, both for economic reasons (to sustain a modern cultural market) and for cultural ones (to encourage demand forhigh-quality popular, or at leastmiddle-brow, literature). The novel is the uncontested protagonist of these debates (though short stories and poetry make the occasional appearance) and Billiani is very careful to go beyond simple lists: besides data concerning the number of translated texts per year, genre and author breakdowns, titles selected by each publisher and their distribution across themain collane, she also offers frequent in-depth readings of specific translation projects. These miniature case studies include exchanges between publishers, editors, and translators (plus reviewers and censors), as well as critical assessments of the role played by a particular author or book in the literarypanorama of each decade. Through them,we follow the changing fortune of writers such as Dickens or Melville; we note how the readerships reached by Goethe, Stevenson, or Swift changed over the years; and we are presented with the different strategies adopted by subsequent translators and editors of a single text, or ofmultiple texts by the same author (from Defoe to London, via the already mentioned Melville and Stevenson). All of these micro elements are tesserae in a greater picture and illustrate the complex relationship which linked large and small publishing houses through edi torial projects which, for all their differences, shared a belief in the ultimate value of translated literature for the formation of a modern cultural market and of a suitably diverse modern culture in Italy. University of Warwick Loredana Polezzi Germanische Heldendichtung im Mittelalter: Eine Einfuhrung. By Victor Millet. (De Gruyter Studienbuch) Berlin: de Gruyter. 2008. xii+502 pp. 24.95. ISBN 978-3-11-020102-4. Although the genre of theGermanic heroic epic includes two of themost famous and widely discussed examples of medieval German writing, the Hildebrands MLR, 105.1, 2010 269 lied and theNibelungenlied, the genre overall has not enjoyed anything like the widespread popularity of Arthurian romance and is generally not as well under stood. This study seeks to provide a comprehensive introduction accessible to non-specialists as well as to students and academics. Inmany ways, the author is extremely successful inmeeting his own objective of accessibility: hewrites knowledgeably and engagingly without recourse to jargon or presumption of prior knowledge; he provides clear plot summaries and discussion ofwider cultural issues, and focuses primarily on the interpretative complexities presented by theworks discussed. He covers a lot of ground, both geographically (including Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse material) and chronologically (pursuing the development of the genre into the seventeenth century); and he makes very good use of iconography. However, the objective of accessibility is not without drawbacks. In the preface the author states that this is neither a 'wissenschaftliche Monographic' nor the usual kind of handbook aimed at university students (pp. vi-vii). Instead, his conception of the book is as something analogous to a lecture or series of lectures. While this lecturing mode works well in some respects, it is also likely to cause some...