The Challenges of Translating Metaphors in Slovene Retranslation of Edgar Allan Poe's Short Stories

One of the main aims of this work is to compare and analyse the translation of metaphors in subtitles as performed by human translators and by machine translation, and conduct MT evaluation. The work considers two YouTube videos of a Cyberpunk 2077 (2020) videogame walkthrough. The first video is in the original language (English) with English subtitles and the second one is an officially translated video in Russian, with Russian subtitles. Both videos have the same content, but in different languages. Metaphors were extracted manually from selected audiovisual material in English by the usage of MIPVU (Metaphor Identification Procedure Vrije Universiteit). In order to achieve our aims, first the translation of these metaphors in the official Russian subtitles were analysed; secondly, their automatic translation into Russian as it appears on YouTube by Google Translate were analysed as well; after that the results were compared to find the similarities and the differences between the automatically translated version of the metaphors on YouTube and the translated metaphors in the official subtitling. Another aim is to perform Machine Translation (MT) evaluation using the BLEU (Bilingual Evaluation Understudy) algorithm and to determine the errors made by MT while translating metaphors in the analysed subtitles. Three examples, which were taken from the videos, are presented in the format of cases. The cases show different metaphors and the situations they were used in and analyse why these metaphors were used in that particular situation, how metaphors were identified there, how they were translated and why they were translated exactly in this way. Furthermore, the machine translation of the same metaphors is analysed and a comparison between them is made. The topic of the speech recognition process and the metaphor identification procedure is also touched upon. The results demonstrate that although machine translation is able to translate frequently used, popular metaphors, or metaphors, the literal translation of which retains the meaning, it is still difficult for the machine to recognise original author’s metaphors or to translate using the context of the situation. The results could encourage training the machine to recognize metaphors and to create a larger database of metaphors to identify them.

This paper defines metaphor translation in literary texts translated into Korean. Specifically, it presents concepts related to metaphor translation such as ‘text types’ and ‘semantic/ communicative translation’ necessary for discovering how the issues of culture and metaphor are defined. Then it introduces a method of data analysis and seeks out an appropriate metaphor translation technique. The results of the analysis of five Korean translations of a short story by Poe show that the main feature of the metaphor translation into Korean in the data is the priority on the transfer of meaning rather than that of form. As for desirable translation of metaphor in high literature, a suitable method is to reproduce the image in the TT as closely as possible. Therefore, it is important for a metaphor to be retained in the translation. However a metaphor translation cannot be always identical to its ST. When the semantic translation cannot help TT readers understand the metaphor, the translator should try to find equivalence rather than identity. In other words, if metaphors cannot be translated by using metaphors, it can be done by focusing on communicative rendering and/or cross-cultural translation.

The paper deals with illustrations for Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories, created by Soviet artists of different generations and published in different decades, from the New Economic Policy period to perestroika. Our main focus are the illustrations of Dmitri Mitrokhin, Alexandr Silin, Nikolai Kuzmin, Vladimir Noskov and Sergey Sokolov. Our aim was not only to describe unique personal style of each artist or to analyze the complex relationship between the illustrations and Poe’s text, but also to put the illustrations in historical and cultural context, find their correlation with the publishers’ preferences, market or censorship requirements, and, in general, the idea of Poe’s place in a Soviet library. Poe’s “tales of ratiocination”, in particular “The Gold Bug”, used to be the main object of Soviet illustrators’ interest for a long period of time. Interestingly enough, they avoid plain entertaining position and take various approaches, e.g. exoticism in Mitrokhin’s landscapes, Kuzmin’s representation of transience of life, or references to film aesthetics in Sokolov’s illustrations. Poe’s Gothic tales were rarely illustrated in USSR. Alexandr Silin’s illustrations of the 1920s were strongly influenced by British book design of the previous decades. Vladimir Noskov created his metaphorical illustrations for a Soviet book series “Library of World Literature” (“Biblioteka vsemirnoi literatury”, 1976). Soviet illustrated editions of Poe’s prose in 1960–1970s reflect his status of a canonizes “classic” author for both adult and young adult readers. Especially important are the illustrations in various book series, from prestigious “Library of World Literature” to popular “World of Adventures” (“Mir priklucheniy”).

Translation is a frequently misunderstood process. Monolingual readers tend to believe that the literary translation they are reading offers a transparent reproduction of the meaning, style and effects of the original. However, those of us who are translators know that this is not so. This thesis highlights the agency of the translator, showing how different translation strategies colour the readers’ reception of the work, creating remarkably different impressions. I take up the case of Japanese-English literary translation and focus on the translation of metaphor, since metaphor is a key literary device and its translation poses particular challenges – including the need to switch between different cultural, conceptual and linguistic frames of reference. Research into metaphor translation strategies has only a short history and focuses mainly on European languages. The much larger linguistic and cultural divide between Japanese and English may require a different mix of strategies to effectively convey the author’s style and imagery. Through a comparative evaluation of the strategies adopted by translators in multiple translations of two well-known short stories: Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s 刺青 (“Shisei”) and Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s 羅生門 (“Rashōmon”), I explore the effectiveness of a range of strategies for translating metaphorical expressions. I show that in many cases, domesticating strategies are adopted by translators, such as replacing the source language metaphor with a target language metaphor of a similar sense; paraphrasing by removing the metaphor and translating only its sense; replacing a metaphor with a simile; or deleting the expression altogether. However, although the resulting translation may be smooth and readable, such strategies frequently soften the emotive force of the metaphorical expressions. I argue that the most successful approaches are those that recreate the effect of the original metaphor, often by using more foreignizing strategies that retain the Japanese imagery. My case studies also highlight the need for translators to decipher the intratextual and intertextual network of metaphors and attempt to maintain these sub-texts in their translation. This demonstrates the importance of interpretation in literary translation. I then use the insights gained from these case studies, including the importance of analysing the effect of metaphor and its communicative function in the context of the text as a whole, to develop an optimal translation approach. I apply this approach to the translation of two chapters from a contemporary Japanese novel (容疑者の夜行列車; Yōgisha no Yakōressha by Tawada Yōko to illustrate its potential. My overall conclusions are that the interpretive process requires an in-depth reading and analysis of the source text. This is necessary in order to determine the functions and effects of metaphorical expressions and prioritise those which should be retained. Translation strategies for each source text metaphor should be sensitive to the category of metaphor, its novelty, conceptual basis and cultural connotations. The translation strategy best able to recreate the most important effects should be adopted. This requires the translator to be flexible and willing to make use of compensatory strategies where necessary. Above all, the translator needs to exercise creativity to explore the target language possibilities, formulate innovative solutions and resist the easy option of domestication. To use a metaphor, the translator should be a traveller – crossing from one textual landscape to another and exploring the linguistic opportunities that would enable the effects of the original to be experienced in a new environment.

Introduction. The aim of research is to reveal national-cultural and cognitive peculiarities of translation of conceptual metaphors from Uzbek into French and develop modern principles of translation of conceptual metaphors. The object of research is the conceptual metaphors selected from the novel by Erkin Azam “Noise”, short stories “A tender soul of a shorty”, “Jumble mound”, “Where is the paradise”, “Master’s dog” and their French translations. The subject of research is the national-cultural and cognitive specificity of representation of Uzbek conceptual metaphors in translation. Research methods. The thesis uses comparative, contextual, conceptual and cognitive analysis methods. Results and discussions. The scientific novelty of the research is as follows: the scientific and theoretical sources of research of conceptual metaphors in modern linguistics are studied and a philosophical paradigm of the metaphor is substantiated; a working definition of the concept "conceptual metaphor" in the Uzbek language is given; modern principles of translation of conceptual metaphors were developed; a cognitive-semantic classification of metaphors has been developed; ontological, orientational, and structural conceptual metaphors in the translation of the works by E. Azam were grouped and on their basis a short Uzbek-French dictionary of metaphors was developed; a comparative analysis of the presentation of gastronomic metaphors in translation was carried out and an Uzbek-French visual mobile application for tourists was created. Based on the research carried out: the "Uzbek-French gastronomic mobile app for tourists" based on the gastronomic metaphor presented in the works of Erkin A'zam was created and placed on Play Market. Conclusion. In the study of metaphors presented in the translations of E. A'zam's works more than 500 examples of the use of ontological, orientation, structural types of conceptual metaphors were identified. The identified examples were sorted by national-cultural features, originality, methods of translation and 250 of them were analyzed. The parsed examples are grouped into more than 10 themes as conceptual metaphors. As a result of preserving axiological, gnoseological, praxiological, creative and cognitive properties of conceptual metaphor in the French translations of Erkin A'zam's works, the existing approaches in translating this trope were characterized and their scientific-theoretical basis was developed. Based on the developed principle, the "Uzbek-French Dictionary of Metaphors" was created on the example of Erkin A'zam's works.

As an essential part of news, English news headlines are especially important. This paper makes an analysis of metaphor translation from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. Combining cognitive metaphor theory, the author deals with cognitive features that characterized by the people’s life experience and cognitive perception. Then, the translatability of metaphor is discussed in English news headlines in order to demonstrate that metaphorical translation is complicated for the cultural differences. Sometimes a faithful translation may be at the cost of losing metaphorical meaning. Then, effective metaphor translation methods are offered. They are literal translation, free translation and the change of vehicles, all of which involves the interpretation of similarity and/or difference of two languages. By using these methods appropriately, translators will be saved out of awkward translation adversity. With all the work above done, it will be easier for English news translators to translate more appropriately and for people to have a better understanding of the English used in this field. Accurate translation will definitely promote the spread of news and strengthen its timeliness.

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu is one of the most prominent representatives of the ghost story genre. His works were widely popular not only during the years of their publication, but also many years after. The subject of research in this article is the problem of creating a genre typology. Based on the material of Gothic novels (collections "Purcell Papers", "In a glass darkly", etc.) by the British writer of the XIX century Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, the question of the optimal typological criterion is considered, which would allow creating an objective typology, the application of which would be possible when studying the works of other authors of Gothic minor prose of the second half of the XIX – early XX century. The methodological principles underlying this study take into account the achievements of cultural-historical, comparative, and structural-descriptive approaches. The novelty is associated with the absence of such a typology of Le Fanu's short stories, as well as with the fact that researchers prefer the novel form in the writer's work. However, this typology makes it possible to clarify some aspects of the development of Gothic minor prose both in the works of Le Fanu and in the works of other writers of this period. In addition, the typologization of Le Fanu's Gothic novels allows us to trace in more detail the change in the figurative system of Gothic short prose. Conclusions made as a result of the study: the objective typological criterion can be considered the specifics of the narrator's attitude to the category of the supernatural. Based on this criterion, the classic Gothic novel, the "scientific" Gothic novel, the humorous Gothic novel, the socio-psychological Gothic novel, the folklore-mythological Gothic novel are distinguished in Le Fanu's work.

This research was conducted to find out the translation methods applied by the translator in translating figurative language in O. Henry's short stories. This descriptive analysis research took the data from nine short stories as the research documents. There were 19 pieces of data taken from those nine short stories and analyzed using content analysis. The findings revealed that literal, semantic, communicative, idiomatic, and free translation methods were used in translating simile metaphors and hyperbole. It was found that the literal translation methodwas significantly used compared to other translation methods. The frequent use of literal indicated the poor translation competence of the translators that tended to copy both the structure and meaning of the source text into the target text.

This research paper examined the ways how translators translated metaphors in the dubbing of animation songs and measured the degree of loss occurred in rendering metaphors from English into Arabic; these two languages are culturally and linguistically distinct languages. This study employed descriptive qualitative methods. The data used in this research were metaphors of songs from three animated musical movies: Beauty and the Beast, Tangled, and Pocahontas. This paper analyzed the translation of metaphors depending on the cognitive theory proposed by Mandelblit (1995). The results proved that even though translating metaphors in animation songs was a laborious process, they did not always cause a problem of untranslatability; on the contrary, translators can render metaphors from English onto Arabic without a significant loss in terms of meaning and sound patterns. Compensation in kind and compensation in place helped to achieve the translatability of metaphors in cartoon films’ songs. The analysis of source and target metaphors revealed that there were three translation procedures used to translate metaphors in animation songs, namely: replacing the source metaphor with a target metaphor (substitution), translating the metaphor into sense (paraphrasing), and using literal translation.

Speculations on Eudora Welty's Reading of Seven Gothic Tales and Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen Pearl Amelia McHaney Eudora Welty reviewed Isak Dinesen's 1957 Last Tales and two scholarly studies of the Danish writer's oeuvre for the New York Times Book Review. She read, and passed on to William Maxwell, Dinesen's essay "On Mottoes of My Life," and she also contributed to a memorial tribute for Dinesen (the pen name of Karen Blixen) in 1965. These commentaries are part of Welty's oeuvre and have been reprinted and made available to readers and scholars. Until 2019, the first known book review that Welty had published was of Marguerite Steedman's But You'll Be Back for the Saturday Review of Literature in 1942. Recently, however, I learned that in 1938 Welty had reviewed Dinesen's memoir Out of Africa in her hometown paper, the Jackson Clarion Ledger.1 In her review, Welty also acknowledges having read Seven Gothic Tales, Dinesen's first book. By 1938, when she first reviewed Dinesen's work, Welty had traveled throughout Mississippi for her five months as a junior publicity agent for the Works Progress Administration and had had one photography exhibit in the Jackson Municipal Art Gallery and two photography exhibits in New York City. She had published eleven short stories in truly "little" magazines and had written and burned the first version of "Petrified Man." Edward O'Brien had reprinted "Lily Daw and the Three Ladies" in his edition of The Best Short Stories of 1938. Welty was eighteen months away from receiving Diarmuid Russell's invitation to be her primary reader and agent. She was years away from writing a novel, and nearly a half-century would pass before she would write her own memoir. To write a book review is to read closely and then to think, almost from afar, of which details and which impressions to gather and share. To review Out of Africa, the second book by Dinesen, Welty begins by commenting that "'Seven Gothic Tales' appeared several years ago under the name Isak Dinesen. It was a widely read book of ornate, metaphysical stories designed carefully and with a sharp obviously feminine humor, to delight and tantalize the reader who likes curious and unreal things" (1). This brief summary of Dinesen's first book illustrates, most importantly, that Welty had read Seven Gothic Tales prior to writing her Out of Africa review, and, in addressing the "reader who likes curious and unreal things," she begins [End Page 125] the habit of reviewing from a reader's perspective—a point of view she maintains in nearly all of her book reviews. The library of books in Welty's home includes the 1934 Random House Modern Library edition of Seven Gothic Tales that reprints the Smith and Haas publication with Dorothy Canfield's introduction. This first collection of Dinesen's tales was an April Book-of-the-Month Club selection and was on the New York Times Best Seller list for April, May, June, and July of 1934. The book is a complex exploration of the Gothic: sudden dark, stormy, windy weather causing drastic consequences; ancient worlds bearing down on the present through elaborate allusions; corporeal ghosts and shadowy people; unexpected, fantastic events; death; strange visages and bodies; and riddles posed to the characters and readers. Dinesen asks, "'What is it,' she said very slowly, in the manner of a sibylla, 'which is bought dearly, offered for nothing, and then most often refused?'" (Seven 115).2 Peter Monro Jack reviewed Seven Gothic Tales in the New York Times Book Review under the headline "A Strange Book for Our Time." Jack found the tales "curious" with an "almost Proustian sensibility that illuminates, by refining, the romantic mood." Citing that Dinesen's "pattern is as flexible as Scheherazade's," Jack asserts that Dinesen's "inventiveness is apparently inexhaustible," and he concludes, "This is a work of the imagination, very subtle and graceful; a rare and curious book, it will be white magic to many and mere mummery to others … though both are in the book, there is more magic than mummery" (6). This evaluation, I believe, would...

The article considers the language means of verbalization of conceptual metaphors “Family” and “Love” in the contemporary short stories of the British and American writers. The investigation also involves determining the principles and the algorithm of rendering these conceptual metaphors in translation. Concepts are defined as mental structures used by a person in the process of thinking. Concepts in fiction are called artistic concepts. They are verbalized with the help of lexical and stylistic devices and are represented by conceptual metaphors. Conceptual analysis helps to characterize the key concept in the text of fiction, and, at the same time, such analysis can be a good criterion for assessing the quality of literary translation. In this paper, we suggest four stages of conceptual analysis in translation. The first stage includes defining the main concept in the text; the second involves formulating the conceptual metaphor (CM) in the text; determining the lexical and stylistic means of verbalization of the CM. The third stage consists in the text translation and editing, and the fourth-in the comparison of the source and target texts. At the first stage, it is also necessary to consider how the key text concept is represented in the folklore, proverbs, and aphorisms. Our investigation focuses on the concepts of “Family” and “Love”, therefore we chose several famous proverbs as the illustration of these concepts: As the twig is bent, so the tree is inclined; Men build houses, women build homes; A mother’s heart is always with her children. The major concept in the short story “Oliver’s Evolution” by John Updike is: “Family”, and the two microconcepts are “Father” and “Son”. The main character Oliver was growing as a weak boy, vulnerable to different injuries and misfortunes. But when he became an adult and had a family, he started feeling responsibility for his children and his wife, he became the support of his children. The main CM is verbalized by means of the extended metaphor and gradation and can be formulated as FATHER IS THE TREE FOR HIS CHIDREN. Another story “My Mother’s Many Scarves”, published in August 2022, is an example of flash fiction stories, two-three pages long, usually with a very important ending. The concept “Family” includes two microconcepts – “Mother” and “Daughter”. The author Andree Guedron describes the relations of love and understanding between the mother and the daughter. The narrator’s mother liked scarves, and her daughter inherited different things from her: brooches, jewelry. But most valuable was a bag of scarves which the mother bought in different countries. The concept is verbalized, first of all, by numerous repetitions of the noun scarf. The scarves become a metonymic detail, a symbol in the story. That is why the main conceptual metaphor of the text can be formulated as MOTHER’S SCARVES ARE SPIRITUAL INHERITANCE. The daughter realizes that she inherited from the mother not only material things, but also spiritual traits, behavior, emotions. At the same time, the concept “Love” is also realized in this story, as love of the daughter to her mother. Another short story where this concept is actualized is “Bigfoot Love” by E. Gary. It is a fantastic and allegoric story of love of a man and an ape, and the major CM can be formulated as LOVE IS A BIG FORCE. This conceptual metaphor is verbalized with the help of such stylistic devices as hyperbole and extended metaphor. In translation, two major strategies were used to retain the aesthetic and stylistic effect: retaining the conceptual model with the same language expression; retaining the conceptual models with somewhat different linguistic expression, with the use of such translation techniques as synonymic substitution and modulation.

Born in 1906 in Nanjing, Zhang began writing in his teens for Mandarin Duck and Butterfly magazines in Shanghai. After 1929, he wrote short stories, middle-length stories, novels and two plays, all in a realistic style. The eighty-odd short stories Zhang wrote between 1929 and 1938 provided the basis for his reputation as a writer of fiction in the pre-liberation period. After 1938, Zhang concentrated on writing literary criticism and theory and after contracting tuberculosis in 1942 he all but stopped writing. Upon the establishment of the Communist republic in 1949 Zhang was assigned to several posts in the literary leadership and wrote a few didactic works for children as well as theoretical and critical articles. He wrote nothing of note after 1960 and his health deteriorated after suffering a stroke in 1975. Zhang died on 28 April, 1985, This thesis considers Zhang's development as a writer of fiction, concentrating attention on the period 1929 to 1938 when Zhang produced his most noteworthy works, but also analysing the place in his career of the recently rediscovered stories written between 1922 and 1928. Zhang's critical and theoretical writings are considered for what they reveal of his literary ideals and are considered as an index to Zhang's success as a writer of fiction. Zhang's development as a writer of fiction is considered chronologically and contemporary political, historical, social and literary influences are alluded to whenever pertinent. Zhang's short stories are also measured against the yardstick of Western practice in the writing of short stories and conventional and unconventional uses of the genre by Zhang are pointed out. Appendices contain a biographical entry about Zhang written in the light of recently published material about Zhang's life and interviews with his family and friends; together with translations of several previously untranslated stories by Zhang.

This study analyzes the strategies used in the Spanish translation of the metaphors present in Chapter 10 of Susan Hill's (1983) The Woman in Black, titled "Whistle and I'll Come to You". In the context of Gothic literature, metaphors play a crucial role in creating atmospheres of tension, mystery, and fear. The main objective of this research is to identify and classify the metaphors present in Chapter 10 of the work in order to determine the translation strategy in each case. Through a qualitative, descriptive, and analytical-comparative methodology, 10 significant metaphors were selected to identify the type of metaphor and classify the metaphor translation strategies proposed by Peter Newmark (1988). A literary analysis of the stylistic role of each metaphor was also conducted. The findings reveal that the predominant strategy is the reproduction of the original image; therefore, the aim was to preserve the emotional effect of the original text, prioritizing semantic fidelity without sacrificing the fluency or naturalness of the Spanish language. This demonstrates a deep understanding of the Gothic genre and the function of metaphor as a narrative device. Furthermore, it is concluded that the effective translation of literary metaphors requires not only linguistic competence but also aesthetic sensitivity and knowledge of the cultural context. This analysis provides tools for translation practice and at the same time emphasizes the importance of metaphors as fundamental elements in literary translation, especially in genres that rely on figurative language to convey their atmosphere and deeper meaning.

In this article, translations of metaphors in Mukhtar Auezov’s story “Kokserek” were analyzed in Russian and English versions furthermore the authors also made scientific conclusions by analyzing and discussing the research results. The scientific goal, main directions and ideas of the research include the formulation of the specifics of translating metaphors from Kazakh into Russian and English, one of the artistic and visual means that requires special participation from the translator and high skill in literary translation. The scientific and practical significance of the study lies in the fact that the comparative analysis of metaphors in M. Auezov’s story “Kokserek” in Russian and English based on the concepts and theories of Russian and Kazakh scientists contributes to the development of practice and theory, quality, criticism of Kazakh translatology. The research methodology was based on the works of Kazakh scientists Zh. Dadebaev and A. Aldasheva, who studied the value of the comparative method in literary translation. The algorithm of selection, interpretation, content analysis, lexico-semantic analysis and formulation of language units falling into the general study was used. Based on the results of the research work, the authors of the article prove that a direct translation of M. Auezov’s story “Kokserek” from Kazakh into English helps to preserve and foreignize the ethno-semantic layers of the original national metaphors and facilitate the learning process of future translators. The value of the research was studied by Kazakh literary scholars and linguists in such scientific articles and dissertations as the problem of social analysis, content and structural specificity, history of writing and poetics, layers of meaning, through the eyes of Kokserek in Mukhtar Auezov’s story “Kokserek”, but a comparative analysis of the features of translating metaphors based on the original and translation versions have not considered as a scientific article in the field of Kazakh translatology.

Slavonic and East European Review, 99, 1, 2021 Professor Neil Cornwell (1942–2020) Many former colleagues in the field of Slavonic studies were greatly saddened to learn of the death of Neil Cornwell on 23 March 2020, at the age of 77. Neil graduated in 1972 from the School of Slavonic and East European Studies of the University of London, where he is still remembered by colleagues from that time as an outstanding undergraduate. He then lectured in the Department of Slavonic Studies at Queen’s University Belfast, from 1973 to 1987, where he also gained his PhD (1983). In 1987 he transferred to the Department of Russian Studies at Bristol, where he was promoted to a chair in 1993 and became Emeritus Professor in 2007. Neil was a highly productive scholar whose corpus of authored books, edited books, articles, chapters and reviews spanned a wide field, from nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian literature to comparative literature. His first book, The Life, Times and Milieu of V. F. Odoyevsky (Athlone Press, 1986), is a comprehensive and still valuable study of an eccentric dilettante, polymath and writer of prose fiction who made a colourful contribution to Russian literary and intellectual life in the age of Nicholas I. Neil often returned to this fruitful subject. In 1988, he published a Russian edition of Prince Odoevskii’s tales, with notes and bibliography. He also tried his hand at literary translation, producing an English edition of eight of Odoevskii’s stories under the title, The Salamander and Other Gothic Tales (Bristol Classical Press, 1992). He authored two further books on Odoevskii: Vladimir Odoevsky and Romantic Poetics (Berghahn, 1998) and Odoevsky’s Four Pathways into Modern Fiction: A Comparative Study (Manchester University Press, 2010). The publication of the latter, and final, monograph of Neil’s career coincided with the appearance of his translation of two more of Odoevskii’s tales, under the title Two Princesses, with a foreword by Bridget Kendall (Hesperus Classics, 2010). Besides his extensive, pioneering work on this previously little-known writer, Neil produced monographs on three major Russian authors of the classical period and the twentieth century. There was a thoughtful study of Aleksandr Pushkin’s tale, ‘The Queen of Spades’ (Bristol Classical NEIL CORNWELL 156 Press, 2001), which had been preceded by Pasternak’s Novel: Perspectives on ‘Doctor Zhivago’ (Keele University, 1986), and Vladimir Nabokov (Northcote House, 1999). However, Neil was a comparativist as much as a Russianist. His broader interest in European literature and literary movements was reflected in his books, James Joyce and the Russians (Macmillan, 1992; translated into Russian and published in St Petersburg in 1998), The Literary Fantastic: From Gothic to Postmodernism (Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990) and The Absurd in Literature (Manchester University Press, 2006). In numerous articles and contributions to books edited by others, his attention also ranged over other non-Russian authors writing within diverse traditions and at various times, from Umberto Eco, Thomas Hardy, Ernst Hoffman, Henry James and Fitz-James O’Brien, to Orhan Pamuk, Jan Potocki and Salman Rushdie. In his excursions into the work of such authors, Neil would generally keep in mind their relation to or affinities with writers in the Russian canon. Neil was also a skilled and energetic editor of valuable collections of essays and materials, such as a collaborative book on the early Soviet prose writer and poet Kharms (another enduring interest), Daniil Kharms and the Poetics of the Absurd: Essays and Materials (Macmillan, 1991). Some of his edited volumes arose from colloquia he himself had organized, notably The Society Tale in Russian Literature: from Odoevskii to Tolstoi (Rodopi, 1998), which contained eleven chapters, one by Neil himself in addition to his introduction, and The Gothic-Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature (Rodopi, 1999), containing twelve chapters and Neil’s substantial introductory essay. Neil’s masterpiece, though, is surely his Reference Guide to Russian Literature (Fitzroy Dearborn, 1998), which perhaps most perfectly reflected his interests, methods, breadth of learning and attention to detail. Running to almost a thousand pages, this volume is of enduring significance for students of Russian literature. It comprises over 500 entries, written by an international team of 180 contributors, on individual authors and...