English Criticism Research Articles

ЖАНРОВАЯ ПОЭТИКА КНИГИ А. С. БАЙЕТТ «ПАВЛИН И ВИНОГРАДНАЯ ЛОЗА»

The article deals with the last book of the well-known English writer A. S. Byatt Peacock & Vine (2016) in the context of her oeuvre (novels, stories, essays). It is proved that the controversial reviews by British critics are caused by the character of the genre and the author’s mythology. The book combines biographies of two artists and an essay on design of the turn of the 19th–20th centuries. It is concluded that A. S. Byatt uses her particular method of analogy at different levels of poetics. She juxtaposes biographies and oeuvres of William Morris and Mariano Fortuny with the help of such universals as the North and the South, which acquire a complicated character due to their being represented through national (or more specifically, cultural) images and symbols. The emphasis is not so much on the life as on the oeuvre of the designers – first and foremost, their houses and fabrics as seen by Byatt herself and through her biography and oeuvre. Her main principle lies in conceiving something of her own through something of the other’s, and vice versa. While the figure of Morris in Byatt’s novel The Children’s Book (2009) was fitted in the social, political, and psychoanalytical contexts of the epoch, the book Peacock & Vine ‘illuminates’ the artist’s life both with his own works and Fortuny’s experiments with colors and light. The main evaluation criteria are color (light) and proportion (contexture), distinctive for both the artists’ design and Byatt’s style. However, in verbal interpretation of floral and animalistic ornaments (vines and pomegranates, peacocks and phoenixes, lions and dragons), one can see a comprehensive dialogue between paganism and Christianity, past days and modernity, a man and a woman, two famous designers, ars nouveau and ars deco. Illustrations (photographs, drawings, reproductions) together with the verbal text of the biographical essay make an organic whole of the book, which emphasizes a special role of paratext in Byatt’s works. Searching for words to represent visual images is a special task for an author of a biographical essay that she was conscious about in her works. In the book Peacock & Vine, Byatt acquires the accuracy and clarity of the language she was dreaming of when working over the novel Still Life (1985). At the same time, simplicity and complexity of her style have become an integral part of her own mythology. The Englishman Morris, being passionate about the Middle Ages and the North, travelled to Iceland and conceived of the Scandinavian saga as a real history. In the Byatt’s book he is compared with the Spaniard Fortuny, who had a penchant for Classical Antiquity and the Mediterranean world, lived in Paris and Venice, and conceived of the Scandinavian saga only through the prism of the Wagner Theatre. As to the Byatt’s love to Scandinavian mythology, it goes back to her war-time childhood, which is reflected in her book Ragnarok: The End of the Gods (2011).

Opera, War, and the Politics of Effeminacy under Queen Anne

Opera, War, and the Politics of Effeminacy under Queen Anne Amy Dunagin (bio) When Italian opera first came to the English public stage in 1705, its reputation as a frivolous, luxurious, and potentially effeminizing entertainment preceded it.1 Five years before its debut, the dramatist John Dennis preemptively sowed the ground with salt.2 In the prologue to his play Iphigenia in 1700, he has the genius of England "rise to a warlike symphony" and relate the muse of Tragedy's exclamation: "Oh is my Brittain faln to that degree, / As for effeminate Arts t' abandon me? / I left the enslav'd Italian with disdain, / And servile Gallia, and dejected Spain: / Grew proud to be confin'd to Brittain's shore / Where godlike Liberty had fix'd before."3 Fearing a growing public taste for "those arts … that soften'd foreign braves, / And sunk the Southern nations into slaves," Dennis attempted to shame audiences by asking how England's past kings might have reacted "to see a bearded more than female throng / Dissolved and dying by an eunuchs song."4 In issuing this warning about the dangers of opera, Dennis capitalized on a longstanding set of beliefs about the genre's birthplace. The association of Italy with various sorts of what was considered sexual degeneracy, including lust, effeminacy, and sodomy, was by this time well established in English sources.5 To take just one example, in the same year, 1700, Daniel Defoe, in his well-known poem The True-Born Englishman, identified Italy as a "torrid zone," "where blood ferments in rapes and sodomy" and "nature ever [End Page 127] burns with hot desires, / Fanned with luxuriant air from subterranean fires."6 It is no surprise, then, that the trope of Italian licentiousness informed the public's reception of Italy's premier musico-dramatic export. From its first introduction in London theaters at the start of the eighteenth century, Italian opera provoked scathing responses from some English critics, who perceived a threat to their nation's masculinity.7 Critics of the opera argued that the spectacle and sensuality of Italian opera and the ambiguously sexed, or de-sexed, bodies of some of its star performers, the castrati, could have an effeminizing effect on individual British men and, even more troublingly, on British culture.8 Musicologists have noted that this gendering of Italian opera as feminine was completed in England in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—around the same time Italian opera was being introduced—and that it had to do not merely with the characteristics of opera itself, which had not been gendered in the same way in Italy, but also with opera's association with a place that the British were invested in viewing as feminine.9 These critiques of Italian opera as dangerously sensual and potentially effeminizing would be deployed against the genre for decades—in fact, centuries—to come. While some contemporaneous Continental opera criticism linked opera with effeminacy, early eighteenth-century English critics emphasized opera's supposed effeminizing, enervating effects with a unique intensity and alarm. Why should these characterizations of Italian opera have been particularly pronounced in England?10 This article argues that an important facet of the explanation for the gendering of Italian opera in England was early opera criticism's relationship to the fierce partisan debate over England's (after 1707, Britain's) involvement in the War of the Spanish Succession.11 Italian opera arrived in England at a particularly fraught time. In the first decade of the eighteenth century, Britons contended with an era of hyper-partisanship during which Whigs and Tories vied for power, and partisan invective flowed from the pens of the era's most celebrated literary figures. In this hot political climate, the War of the Spanish Succession was the litmus test issue that most galvanized the two parties. In 1700, Whigs and Tories alike lamented the deathbed decision of the childless Spanish King Charles II to bequeath his throne to his grandnephew Philip, Duke of Anjou, a grandson of Louis XIV. Both parties feared, not unreasonably, that this succession could tip the balance of power irrevocably in the French king's favor, and England consequently joined...

Anglomanía: la imagen de Inglaterra en la prensa española del siglo XVIII by Leticia Villamediana González

 Reviews of the twentieth novella, Estragos que causa el vicio. Lisis, the protagonist of the overarching narrative and host of an entertaining soiree, finally reveals that she has no intention of marrying don Diego despite the attendees’ expectation that the evening would culminate in their nuptial celebrations. As with the majority of Zayas’s phrasing, ‘no por mí, que no me toca, pues me conocéis por lo escrito, más no por la vista’ lends itself to multiple readings. ese words form Lisis’s rationale for rejecting don Diego’s courtship and her decision to enter a convent. One interpretation is that the issue with men’s perpetual mistreatment of women is not a concern that affects Lisis any longer, as this dialogue precedes her decision to reside in a convent, a female-only space in which men’s actions indeed cannot touch her. Alternatively, the quotation could highlight Lisis’s existence as a fictional character. Irrespective of whether we accept Navarro Durán’s central premiss or not, there are clear advantages to drawing connections between the output of Castillo Sol órzano and Zayas given that the complex dialogues between Golden Age authors oen resulted in shared preoccupations and variations on themes such as disillusionment . In the fih chapter ‘Puentes entre las novelas’, Navarro Durán highlights how cross-dressing and the narrative conceit of the invisible mistress are tropes for Zayas and Castillo Solórzano alike (p. ). Again, however, a non sequitur is at play. e prodigious playwright Lope de Vega had introduced the invisible mistress as an expression of Baroque disillusion and source of satire. Hence, the use of plots involving this figure is undoubtedly a ‘puente’ that links Castillo Solórzano’s and Zayas’s writing, but this proves little beyond the interconnections between the works of Golden Age authors. U  L H O’K Anglomanía: la imagen de Inglaterra en la prensa española del siglo XVIII. By L V G. Woodbridge: Támesis. .  pp.£. ISBN ––––. English matters were hardly a staple of the early eighteenth-century Spanish press. By  the trend had drastically changed. How and why did this happen? Leticia Villamediana González responds to this question in a thoroughly researched and captivatingly argued book. e wealth of literary and press materials consulted allows her to unearth reasons why readers and writers developed an ‘Anglomanía’, consisting of Anglophobia and Anglophilia alike. English essays, novels, plays, and periodicals were translated into Castilian and avidly read in Spain. Celebrated authors and scientists (e.g. Leandro Fernández de Moratín and José Mendoza y Ríos) visited and lived in London. ey later published memoirs and detailed accounts informing Spanish readers about novelties witnessed in the English capital. Busy presses, outspoken criticism of the government, and the role of Parliament in shaping public life in England ranked high in their list of interests. ese publications reflected (on) the ambivalent feelings they experienced at a time when MLR, .,   the Spanish press was less diverse or developed than its counterparts in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and England itself. e ongoing process of civilization, to appropriate Norbert Elias’s descriptive term for the late early modern period, was thus moulded and defined in conversation and competition among European powers. Or, as Villamediana chooses to label these interactions, ‘civilized’ practices, ideas, and artefacts were interchanged via the ‘cultural transfers’ between Spain and England. Political, dynastic, and geographic factors accounted for the domineering French influence on Spanish Enlightenment circles for most of the s. However, as shown in Chapter , the impact of the emerging British political economy increasingly demanded the attention of Spanish readers. As an editor and writer, the Dutch-born Juan Enrique de Graef was at the vanguard of this new turn with his publication of the Discursos Mercuriales económico-políticos in the early s. Graef, as well as Francisco Mariano Nifo some years later in La estafeta de Londres, echoed the English criticism of the tight Spanish monopoly of trade with the American territories. Having read the works of John Locke and David Hume, Graef denounced the excessive influence lawyers and clergymen held over Spain’s...

Provincial Shakespeare

With reference to aspects of the career of the twentieth-century actor-manager Donald Wolfit and the use of the concept of provincialism in English criticism, this article argues that idealist and universalist values are repeatedly valorised in order to devalue materialist and what might be called ‘provincial’ interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays. I pay attention to conditions of production of early modern drama in the sixteenth century, and to Wolfit’s Second World War performances of Shakespeare, the reception of which is offered as evidence for the persistence of a critical prejudice against what is understood as provincial marginality. The article concludes with a reading of The Merry Wives of Windsor that argues that the play supports the provincial values that have so often been dismissed by critics.

The Melodramatic Moment: Music and Theatrical Culture, 1790–1820

The Melodramatic Moment: Music and Theatrical Culture, 1790–1820

The Practices of Hope: Literary Criticism in Disenchanted Times, by Castiglia, Christopher

<i>The Practices of Hope: Literary Criticism in Disenchanted Times</i>, by Castiglia, Christopher

White Bread and Whitewashing: Whiteness and Food in Marlene van Niekerk’s Triomf

Summary Marlene van Niekerk’s Triomf, published in Afrikaans in the year of South Africa’s transition to democracy, and in English five years later, remains one of the most powerfully cogent deconstructions of whiteness and Afrikaner nationalism to have appeared in local literature in the last twenty-five years. While a relatively large body of scholarship has analysed Van Niekerk’s interrogation of whiteness in the novel, this article focuses specifically on the everyday quotidian practices through which white- ness is maintained and perpetuated as an epistemic formation. Most Afrikaans and English criticism briefly emphasises food imagery in Triomf to signify not only the Benades’ economic impoverishment but also their moral and cultural degeneracy: the Benades – the family on which the novel centres – subsist on an unwholesome diet of margarine-smeared white bread, polony and Klipdrift brandy. However, critics’ cursory mentions of food imagery do not do justice to the nuanced and dexterous manner in which Van Niekerk employs food discourse to destabilise whiteness and show it up as a heterogenous construction. In this article, I analyse instances in the novel where the family interacts with food in various spaces in order to offer new and different ways in which whiteness can be read productively in the South African context.

To the problems of difference in interpretations of the plot of D. D. Shostakovich’s ballet “The Limpid Stream”

The object of this research is the plot of D. D. Shostakovich&amp;rsquo;s ballet &amp;ldquo;The Limpid Stream&amp;rdquo;. The subject is the interpretation of this plot in the versions of F. G Lopukhov (1935) and A. O. Ratmansky (2003), as well as peer review on these spectacles. The goal of this work consists in determination of the crucial for the concepts of ballet masters differences of libretto (as a literary foundation of the plot) in the three versions of the ballet, and comparison of perception of the plot in the year of its first staging and at the present. The considered problematic required application of historical approach &amp;ndash; attraction of the materials and articles for the period of 1935-1936. The historiographical analysis allowed translating and examining one of the most recent peer reviews on the spectacle &amp;ndash; the English-language reviews on the &amp;ldquo;Limpid Stream&amp;rdquo; of Ratmansky, presented on the London tour of Bolshoi Theatre in August 2019. The article also utilizes practical experience of author&amp;rsquo;s work with Ratmansky and participation in the aforementioned tours (performing the role of Zina).The main tool for solution of the set problem became the comparative analysis of the varieties of libretto (authors &amp;ndash; Lopukhov and Piotrovsky) of the three versions of ballet &amp;ldquo;The Limpid Stream&amp;rdquo;. It is concluded that the first versions of ballet were popular among the public, but aroused negative or ambiguous feedback, which led to the removal of spectacle from the repertoire. The last version is regularly performed in the repertoire of Bolshoi Theatre, including on the tour, being well regarded by the public and sophisticated British critics.

“A Black Rather Well-Known South African Recently Arrived in London”: Critical Responses to Todd Matshikiza’s Chocolates for My Wife

ABSTRACT This article studies the intersections between Todd Matshikiza’s celebrity in South Africa and in Britain and the critical reception of his autobiography, Chocolates for My Wife (1961). Matshikiza’s renown as the composer of the South African jazz musical King Kong, staged in Britain in the early 1960s, contributed to the development of his only full-length literary work, while the ambivalent and frequently racist media discourse around King Kong reverberated into readings of his autobiography. By exploring how Matshikiza’s writing was perceived and presented by his publishers, alongside an analysis of the responses by British and South African literary critics, this article shows how Matshikiza and his writing served as a site for debates about the role of literature in relation to apartheid. Matshikiza’s exile and banning necessitated a new, British audience for his work, and also resulted in a deferred re-issuing and re-reading of his writing in the early 1980s, when Chocolates for My Wife was unbanned. This study contributes to the growing body of knowledge about the complex roles of exiled South African cultural figures and intellectuals in relation to international resistance to apartheid from the early 1960s onwards.

The Spanish version of E. M. Forster's Maurice: a curious censorship case

ABSTRACTAs one of the great British writers of the twentieth century, E. M. Forster has been widely acclaimed for his novels Howards End (1910) and A Passage to India (1924), as well as for a large body of criticism. The posthumous publication of Maurice in 1971 has also attracted the attention of many British critics and has earned Forster a place in the canon of gay fiction. In Spain, a translation of Maurice was published as early as 1973, during the last years of Franco's regime, when a strict censorship system was still being enforced. How did this controversial book come to be authorised in Spain at that time? How did its homosexual content slip past the traditional homophobic views of Franco's censors? Was the Spanish translation softened or self-censored by the publisher or the translator? How does the Spanish reception of Maurice stand in relation to other books by Forster? This article describes information found in the censorship office files in an attempt to provide an explanation for this early Spanish translation of Maurice and the attitudes towards Forster's writings in the Franco era. These files contain valuable data that shed light on the reception of Forster in Spain.

“Primitive Sounds”: An Examination of the Conflicting Discourse in the Early British Reception of Igor Stravinsky’s Russian Ballets

ABSTRACTIgor Stravinsky’s ballet The Firebird was an immediate success upon its arrival in London in 1912. Nevertheless, as Stravinsky’s music evolved with each subsequent ballet, his British reception equally evolved. While Stravinsky’s supporters championed him as a new musical modernist, British conservative critics saw Stravinsky’s music as a primitive threat to the traditional, nationalistic style that dominated nineteenth-century music. The analysis of both sides of the discourse that pervaded the early reception of Stravinsky’s first three ballets in Britain – The Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring – shows how these narratives helped shape Stravinsky’s critical reception in twentieth-century Britain.

Self-Evident Truths: Contesting Equal Rights from the Revolution to the Civil War by Richard D. Brown

Reviewed by: Self-Evident Truths: Contesting Equal Rights from the Revolution to the Civil War by Richard D. Brown Melinda Lawson (bio) Self-Evident Truths: Contesting Equal Rights from the Revolution to the Civil War By Richard D. Brown. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017. 400 pages, 22 halftones, 6⅛” x 9¼.” $40.00 cloth. The founders’ call for equal rights has long drawn scrutiny for the many ways it stood at odds with the realities of their world. Even at the time there were critics—particularly British critics— who noted what appeared clearly to them to be flagrant hypocrisy. Samuel Johnson, whose 1775 pamphlet featured a scathing observation about the slaveholders’ “yelps for liberty,” is merely the most well-known of these. Richard Brown’s Self-Evident Truths sets out to “investigate the proposition that the self-evident truths proclaimed in the Declaration were not simply rhetorical window-dressing but inspired serious aspirations from the moment they were proclaimed” (viii). Since many of these aspirations met vigorous opposition, the decades following the Revolution were marked by a series of contests over the meaning of equal rights. Brown’s book explores the struggle over that meaning as it took place concerning race, gender, religion, nationality, age, and class. Focusing on constitutions, bills of rights, and courtroom practices, Brown examines the ways in which various states either realized or disavowed equal rights in theory, policy, and practice. When the Revolutionaries declared all men equal and endowed with inalienable rights, “they spoke abstractly, without closely considering the ultimate consequences of their expansive rhetoric” (292). It is not, Brown explains, that the founders were hypocritical. They did not intend to include Indians or slaves because neither were considered to be members of society, and they failed to anticipate the rise of a free black population. They never considered that women or children might have equal rights, and though they repealed primogeniture and entail, they never believed that equal rights meant equal distribution of property. The privileges the founders were most concerned with removing were those that separated them from other elite white men in England: the kind that monarchs and aristocrats distributed—privileges that as American colonists they could never enjoy. But the language the founders employed laid the rhetorical groundwork for much broader claims, and over the years numerous groups took up the call for equal rights. Even when they did not succeed, these early actions laid the groundwork for subsequent movements and ultimately for a much more expansive understanding of equal rights. Given the founders’ limited conception of membership in society, it is not surprising that the earliest successes among these quests lay in the realms of religion and nationality or ethnicity, [End Page 295] where the people in search of equality were also white males. An emphatic belief in the right to property meant that campaigns for equal rights for people of color, for women and children, and for class equality met more resistance. Though the level of resistance varied, the outcomes for equal rights in all these arenas were marked by complexity. Progress varied between and even within states; moreover, as Brown’s focus on practice reveals, a state’s constitution and its policies might mandate one thing, while its practices revealed something very different. Regarding religious equality, for example, in North Carolina state laws forbade establishment, mandatory church attendance, and directed or nondirected taxation for churches. The state also prohibited active clergymen from serving in a legislative state body. Still, these laws did not add up to religious equality: the state also required all state officeholders to swear to a belief in the “‘the divine authority of the Old and New Testaments’” and “‘avow the ‘truth of the Protestant religion’”(43), thus barring free thinkers, Catholics, and Jews. Yet Brown points to practicing Catholics as well as one Jew serving in state office while these laws were in effect. If those practices diverged from policy in a manner that defied prescribed limits on equal rights, the opposite was true for people of color. In nineteenth-century New England, though no policy suggested that African Americans were to be punished differently, blacks were nine times more likely...

Introduction: Combinations

IntroductionCombinations Claudia Nelson That the process of looking at separate things together—comparing, contrasting, considering from different angles—teaches us is a fundamental premise even of books for the very young. “One fish / two fish / red fish / blue fish,” begins a classic work by Dr. Seuss, continuing, “Black fish / blue fish / old fish / new fish. / This one has / a little star. / This one has a little car. / Say! what a lot / of fish there are” (n. pag.). And while the two blue fish in the quoted passage may well be a single fish pictured twice (Seussian style is such that it’s hard to make this call), context matters: the blue fish doesn’t look quite the same when it’s with the black fish as it did with the red fish, and in the next double-page spread it appears still more changed by the company of the “glad” fish versus that of the “very, very bad” fish. Enumerating the range of types that makes up that “lot / of fish” invites the young child not only to learn to recognize the word “fish” on the page but also to take pleasure in difference by thinking about what makes each creature special. Significantly, this cognitive exercise requires that the fish be presented as a group. In their different ways, the articles in this issue draw our attention to the value of considering combinations. We begin with LuElla D’Amico’s “The Journey to American Womanhood: Travel and Feminist Christian Rebellion in Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World and Martha Finley’s Elsie’s Girlhood,” which offers the combination not only of two nineteenth-century sentimental novels that share key plot elements (indeed, as D’Amico notes, Finley’s novel implicitly acknowledges its debt to Warner’s earlier best seller by identifying the latter as a text that entrances Elsie) but also of the concepts of travel and rebellion. Warner’s and Finley’s girl protagonists both journey and rebel within socially acceptable limits; they move from one family member to another and assert their right to self-determination in ways that clearly indicate their obedience to God’s authority. By examining these two texts in combination, D’Amico establishes that the way in which they invite readers to feel, and to value, “a sense of mobility within the prevailing confining paradigms” of nineteenth-century femininity is neither unique nor accidental, but part of a larger conversation within sentimental American fiction over a generation. [End Page 1] Stephanie L. Derrick’s “The Transatlantic Reception of The Chronicles of Narnia and of C. S. Lewis as a Children’s Book Author in the 1950s and 1960s, Compared” combines two reception studies of the same writer in order to argue that the very different British and American responses to Lewis’s heptalogy in the mid-twentieth century arose from cultural differences that have considerable significance for the history of children’s publishing. Whereas esteemed Victorian writers from Charles Dickens to W. M. Thackeray to Robert Browning produced works for young readers, the failure of many members of the twentieth-century British “literary elite” to follow this lead helped to prompt Lewis to assist in filling the gap. Yet in part because British critics were slower than their US counterparts to consider children’s literature worthy of serious notice, the Narnia books met with a less positive response in their homeland than they did across the Atlantic. Derrick’s investigation provides a case study in the value of considering the larger social contexts that participate both in the creation of youth literature and in how it is read by adult literary gatekeepers. In this issue’s third article, “Death in Signifiers: Words and Pictures in Three International Picture Books,” Newton Freire Murce Filho takes as his source texts a Canadian, a Brazilian, and a Portuguese picture book dealing with the aftermath of a grandparent’s death. Building upon Perry Nodelman and Mavis Reimer’s point that “a picture book contains at least three stories. There is the one told by the words, the one implied by the pictures, and the one that results from the combination of the other two” (qtd...

“Can this hell perhaps be Jules Dassin’s London, which is certainly not the London that belongs to you and me?” Critical responses to depictions of London in The Blue Lamp and Night and The City

1950 was a pivotal year in the production and release of British London-set films. Ealing studios released The Blue Lamp (Basil Dearden, 1950) in January 1950, while Ealing’s The Lavender Hill Mob (Charles Crichton, 1951) and Pool of London (Basil Dearden, 1951) went into production in the same year. Then, in June 1950, Twentieth-Century Fox released Anglo-American production Night and the City (Jules Dassin, 1950). For critics, The Blue Lamp sealed Ealing’s reputation to capture a recognisable London, rooted in specific districts with ‘ordinary’ inhabitants with a community ethos. The Blue Lamp set the barometer for London-set films to follow. Indeed, British critics derided Night and the City as an inauthentic depiction of London, one created by ‘outsider’ Jules Dassin, in comparison to Ealing’s ‘familiar’ London. This paper firstly examines of archival documents of the production of location shooting in The Blue Lamp, to demonstrate how the film sealed Ealing’s reputation to capture a recognisable London, rooted in specific districts with ‘ordinary’ inhabitants with a community ethos. It then examines and compares the critical reception of The Blue Lamp and Night and the City, to explore discourses around ‘home-grown’ versus ‘outsider’ perceptions of London in the immediate postwar period.

The Invention of English Criticism 1650–1760

The Invention of English Criticism 1650–1760

A contrastive study on mitigation of criticism in English and Chinese book reviews

Abstract The present article is a corpus-based contrastive study on mitigation of criticism in linguistic book reviews in English and in Chinese. It is based on the face theory of Brown and Levinson (1987) and follows the framework of Johnson and Roen (1992). The present article shows the following results: (1) at the local level, there are thirteen mitigation devices in the corpus, of which only six have been introduced by previous studies; devices of ‘generalization’ and ‘metaphorical statement’ are specific to the English sub-corpus, whereas ‘omission’ is only found in Chinese; (2) at the global level, English writers maintain an overall supportive tone with praise largely distributed in both openings and closings, whereas their Chinese counterparts sound much impartial. Differences in findings are then explained from perspectives of cultural values and functions of book reviews.

The Monopack Revolution, Global Cinema and Jigokumon/Gate of Hell (Kinugasa Teinosuke, 1953)

This article discusses the impact of cheaper colour film stocks introduced in the 1950s on the global film market. After a contextual overview the cases of India and China are briefly considered before a more detailed examination of conditions in Japan, and how the world’s attention was drawn to the achievements of Jigokumon/Gate of Hell (Kinugasa Teinosuke, 1953) as an exemplary colour film that was influenced by both Japanese culture and Hollywood melodrama, particularly The Mississippi Gambler (Rudolph Mate, 1953), an American film that was notable for its display of different colours, fabrics and silken textures illuminated by lighting. The history of colour filmmaking in the sound period is detailed, as well as how Japanese technicians visited Hollywood in the early 1950s to study colour. Following a textual analysis of Jigokumon, the article considers its reception by Japanese and British critics. Shifting attention away from the more prevalent analyses of colour in American, British and European cinema, the article highlights the need for transnational approaches to more fully understand a critical period in the history of global cinema. The contemporary context of film restoration is also referenced as of prime importance in recovering the chromatic qualities of films shot in Eastmancolor that were subject to deterioration. Conceptualising global colour as an expansive, fluid phenomenon that has been largely formed by transnational exchange constitutes an important step towards bringing colour more centrally into the frame of transnational studies as well as informing our understanding of colour’s relevance to the development of national cinemas.

A Spy in the House of Art: The Marxist Criticism of Anthony Blunt

Anthony Blunt's writings on the visual arts have not received as much scholarly attention as they deserve, not least because Blunt's reputation was seriously tarnished by the revelation that he had worked as a Soviet spy. This article examines the writings on art which Blunt produced under the influence of Marxism in the 1930s. Among its central concerns is Blunt's attitude towards the Soviet ideas about culture which did so much to shape British communist criticism between the wars. It is argued that Blunt's response to Soviet aesthetic orthodoxy was a curiously ambivalent one. On the one hand, Blunt went far beyond any other British writer in welcoming the Soviet belief that artists should take their instructions from the socialist state. On the other hand, while posing as an apologist for the Soviet doctrine of Socialist Realism, he was clearly unimpressed by existing examples of socialist art and seemed suspicious of the way in which Socialist Realism had been theorised by Soviet critics. His lukewarm response to Socialist Realism was expressed directly in his writings on contemporary painters and more obliquely in his historical work on the visual culture of the Renaissance. By the same token, in spite of trotting out formulaic condemnations of surrealism, abstraction and other modernist forms, Blunt was unhappy with the Soviet prohibition on modernism and found it difficult to conceal his belief that painters had much to learn from modern art. In the final analysis, Blunt's ambivalence towards Soviet theory gives his work a highly representative quality. Like many other British Marxist critics of his time, Blunt took Soviet ideas as his starting point but often developed them in unexpected and sometimes unorthodox ways. His work serves as a valuable reminder that British communist criticism between the wars was never merely a pale reflection of Soviet orthodoxy.

Summer Reads

also original Hong Kong films to become successful, their quality suddenly self-evident. Where the marker of convention sits on the scale of the dominant Normal determines what is considered realist, magical realist (you’ll find many writers labeled as such reject the idea), romance (based on what is accepted as a happy ending), gangster (where vengeance is normal), etc. If your normal is not present within the lexicon of dominant Normal, whatever world you create is subject to question, your normal can be refused, and you are left on the periphery. This is how the American novel was considered inferior to the British novel in the nineteenth century, because Great Britain at the time was the center, the arbiter of taste; G. K. Chesterton jibes in one of his Father Brown narratives, “One of his hobbies was to wait for the American Shakespeare—a hobby more patient than angling,” and Sydney Smith asks in a January 1820 issue of the Edinburgh Review, “In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?” Novels from America were largely dismissed by British critics as sentimental and lacking in literary quality; Russian works of fiction were seen as curiosities. As the center has expanded, America and Russia have become part of the larger Normal and have thus qualified to be spoken of in the realm of quality. I was actually told in one class how to read a Russian novel, and, of course, Vladimir Nabokov famously published Lectures on Russian Literature in 1980. Until your normal enters the grand hall of the dominant Normals, however, you are subject to some editor saying your well-researched, meticulously crafted work, which anyone who knows anything about your normal thinks is extraordinary, is just not relatable, compelling, structured , of high enough quality. . . . You are an Aborigine, you are a rural Nicaraguan, you are any number of minorities. You are outside the gates and neither Vogler nor Booker nor Yorke can save you. That is the power of Normal. Accra If your normal is not present within the lexicon of dominant Normal, whatever world you create is subject to question, your normal can be refused, and you are left on the periphery. Based in landlocked Oklahoma, Editor in Chief Daniel Simon looks to coastal waters and beyond the continental US for his summer reads. Luljeta Lleshanaku Negative Space Trans. Ani Gjika | New Directions In the translator’s statement discussing her 2016 NEA Literature Translation Fellowship , Ani Gjika contends that the concept of “negative space” in the work of poet Luljeta Lleshanaku enables the author to “look back at the reality of her Albanian past, giving voice to those who have historically failed to speak up for themselves.” In a postcommunist era marked by a “new code of sanctification,” the poet speaks for herself as well, moving beyond the bunker mentalities of the twentieth century. Tracy K. Smith Wade in the Water Graywolf I first heard Tracy K. Smith recite “Wade in the Water” on the PBS NewsHour, then read it in the New Yorker, and now look forward to reading it again as the title poem in her newest verse collection. Dedicated to the Geechee Gullah Ring Shouters, the poem calls the speaker to a baptismal moment that simultaneously evokes the “troubled waters” of the Middle Passage: “I love you in the water / Where they pretended to wade, / Singing that old blood-deep song / That dragged us to those banks / And cast us in.” Mark Polizzotti Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto MIT Press With more than fifty translated books to his credit, Polizzotti brings that prolific praxis to bear in this translator’s apologia. According to the publisher, the author “shows us how to read not only translations but also the act of translation itself, treating it not as a problem to be solved but as an achievement to be celebrated.” If, as David Damrosch has argued, world literature is literature that “gains in translation ,” readers of WLT will find much here to deepen their appreciation for the art and craft of literary translation. editor’s pick: summer reads WORLDLIT.ORG 37 ...

The Invention of English Criticism 1650–1760 by Michael Gavin

Reviewed by: The Invention of English Criticism 1650–1760 by Michael Gavin David Alff Michael Gavin. The Invention of English Criticism 1650–1760. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2015. Pp. vii + 220. $30 (paper). Michael Gavin offers an incisive study of a boundless concept: criticism. Where scholars usually take criticism to mean writing that evaluates literature, this account conceives of its topic broadly as the “socially realized exercise of judgment.” In seventeenth-and eighteenth-century England, criticism sprouted within and outside writing: in prefaces, prologues, and periodical essays, as well as coffee-house chatter, stage heckling, and coterie manuscript exchange. In addition, those who commandeered these outlets often addressed topics beyond belles lettres and became controversial arbiters for determining what qualified as literary expression in the first place. Drawing on the insights of book history, The Invention of English Criticism aims neither to redraw the boundaries of early modern critical discourse nor to contain criticism within catchy definitions, undertakings to which the field has proven historically resistant. Rather, the goal is to understand what critics actually did. Behind Dryden’s idealization of criticism as a “standard of judging well,” Mr. Gavin reveals a world rife with personal quarrels, public skepticism, and self-doubt. English critics struggled to construct their authority to judge, and to answer questions that still haunt their modern counterparts: is criticism a true field of knowledge? What does it contribute to society? Why has critical enterprise seemed always so fraught, at once “vitally important” and “horribly wrong”? Mr. Gavin asks how criticism became “recognized as a mode of writing,” not how it graduated into a stable genre that helped solidify bourgeois English culture into a public sphere. As such, he revels in the messiness of criticism’s origins without presupposing its eventual legitimatization as an authoritative discourse. Indeed, his account questions whether criticism ever achieved such a victory, arguing that the field’s “undisciplined past illuminates its ambivalent, contested, and never fully disciplined present.” Invention rejects singular narratives of generic evolution to foreground a seventeenth-century “media shift,” through which a hodgepodge of speech acts and scribal forms converged on print as their primary vehicle. Mr. Gavin labels this shift the “textualization of judgment,” and argues that it held important ramifications for the public’s perception of critics. Initially regarded as outspoken scolds, critics were later seen as polemic pamphleteers, and [End Page 62] finally as literary peers, as animadversion came to seem like a “friendly exchange of opinions among poets.” Mr. Gavin traces writing’s absorption of criticism across six chapters. The first locates the beginnings of “the textualization of judgment” in the world of Restoration drama, and the conduits that connected playhouses, presses, patronage networks, and a literary marketplace after the theaters reopened. It was in the “densely social world of theatrical reception, conversation, and writing,” Invention shows, that criticism first became a “program for writing and publishing books.” Mr. Gavin devotes significant attention to the roles of stationers like the Interregnum publisher, Humphrey Moseley, and the royalist bookseller, Henry Herringman, whose inclusion of prefatory essays within his editions of playbooks helped transform “the manuscript culture of the prior decades into a tradition of textual debate.” As this debate became a fixture in the book trade, critics fashioned terminology to describe the discursive space that criticism claimed. Many found battle imagery apt, and the most vigorously contested turf became Parnassus, “a virtual realm of writing, reading, and publishing” that could be superimposed on real places in England. Mr. Gavin shows how a limestone mountain in central Greece mythologized as the home of the muses became in eighteenth-century England a venue for the “competing efforts of authors, publishers, and other participants in literary prestige-making.” He warns, at the same time, that such spatial metaphors gloss over the particularities of critical debate, the purpose of which was to “differentiate among its participants.” Invention recovers Parnassus as a trope of critical self-conception at the same time it identifies the limits of another simulated space: the place of public communication demarcated by Habermas and shaped spherical by his English translators. A chief fault of this model, Mr. Gavin claims, is that it excludes the critical contributions of...