Stadt, dem Hoftheater (Burgtheater),der Hofoper usw'. (p. I16), implying by the 'usw.' that in the early nineteenth century there were theatres in the city centre other than the two court theatres;the incongruity and irrelevance of a statement about Nestroy, 'Seine Aper9us sind witziger als Schillerslangatmige Reflexionen' (p. 137);the assumptionthat Horvath can be seen as the heir of nineteenth-century Viennese popular comedy, without any indication that the point has been a matter of critical debate (pp.I39, 142); or the suggestion that the audience may identify with a Nestroy character(p. I65). Significantly,the workson comic theorylisteddo not even include Elder Olson's classic The Theoryof Comedy (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1968). In sum, an enjoyably readable polemic, but one to be readwith caution. UNIVERSITY OFEXETER W. E. YATES Neo-Formalist Papers:Contributions to theSilver JubileeConference toMark25 rearsof the Jfeo-FormalistCircle. Ed. by JOE ANDREWand ROBERTREID. Amsterdam and Atlanta GA:Rodopi. I998. xi + 337 pp. This collection comprisestwentyof the twenty-fourpapersreadat the SilverJubilee Conference of the Neo-Formalist Circle held at Oxford in 1995. The original conference panels numbered eight and reflected the full and diverse nature of the concernsengagedby the Neo-Formalistsover thepasttwenty-fiveyears.The editors have re-grouped the essaysaround three headings:'Language and the Boundaries of Genre', 'Text and Intertext', and 'AuthorialStatus and Modernity'. True to the eclectic spirit of the Circle, the range of approaches represented includes Deconstruction , Gender Studies, Semiotics, Linguistictheories of Metaphor, and Translation Theory, as well as the Russian Formalist tradition proper running from Tynianov to Lotman. Similarlytypical of the Neo-Formalists'work is the fact that the objects of analysisare drawnnotjust from Russian literature,but also from the English, French and Serbian traditions, and from generic forms as diverse as classical landscape painting, the everyday idiom, the popular historical epic, the personaldiary,modernistprose and the nineteenth-centurynovel. The volume thus epitomizes one of the Circle's abiding achievements: the dialogues that it has fostered between the West European and Russian traditions in literary-cultural theory, and between elite and popular culture. The clearest example comes, appropriately,in the last essay in which, boldly turningtheory against itself, Artur Blaim employs SiegfriedSchmidt'sconcept of literaryproduction as a social system in orderto explainIurii Lotman'srelativeobscurityin the west. (Itwould, however, have required a more detailed discussion of the philosophical underpinnings of Lotman'sworkto account fullyfor thiscollective blindness.) As is unavoidable with such volumes, some individual contributionssit uneasily within the categories to which they have been assigned: Andre Van Holk's application of semiotic theory to the formalpropertiesof the landscape painting is only indirectly connected with issues of generic boundary and might have been placed alongside Leon Burnett'suseful comparison of Colour and Composition in Ibsen and Chekhov, itself included in the 'Text and Intertext' section; and it is, perhaps,stretchingdefinitionsto classifyRuth Sobell'straditionalexercisein source identification as an intertextual reading if 'intertextuality' is to have any real meaning within the Neo-Formalist paradigm. This, however, is not to deny the generalusefulnessof the editors'schema. The standardof the contributionsis almost uniformlyhigh. It is not necessarily the fault of their proponents that some theories wear better than others;although Stadt, dem Hoftheater (Burgtheater),der Hofoper usw'. (p. I16), implying by the 'usw.' that in the early nineteenth century there were theatres in the city centre other than the two court theatres;the incongruity and irrelevance of a statement about Nestroy, 'Seine Aper9us sind witziger als Schillerslangatmige Reflexionen' (p. 137);the assumptionthat Horvath can be seen as the heir of nineteenth-century Viennese popular comedy, without any indication that the point has been a matter of critical debate (pp.I39, 142); or the suggestion that the audience may identify with a Nestroy character(p. I65). Significantly,the workson comic theorylisteddo not even include Elder Olson's classic The Theoryof Comedy (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1968). In sum, an enjoyably readable polemic, but one to be readwith caution. UNIVERSITY OFEXETER W. E. YATES Neo-Formalist Papers:Contributions to theSilver JubileeConference toMark25 rearsof the Jfeo-FormalistCircle. Ed. by JOE ANDREWand ROBERTREID. Amsterdam and Atlanta GA:Rodopi. I998. xi + 337 pp. This collection comprisestwentyof the twenty-fourpapersreadat the SilverJubilee Conference of the Neo-Formalist Circle held...