Modern Humanities Research Association Research Articles

Women's Friendship in Medieval Literature ed. by Karma Lochrie and Usha Vishnuvajjala

Reviewed by: Women's Friendship in Medieval Literature ed. by Karma Lochrie and Usha Vishnuvajjala Diane Watt Women's Friendship in Medieval Literature. Ed. by Karma Lochrie and Usha Vishnuvajjala. Columbus: Ohio State Press. 2022. viii+299 pp. $99.95. ISBN 978-0–8142–1515–9. The Bechdel Test (or, more correctly, according to Bechdel herself, the Bechdel-Wallace Test) first appeared in 1985 in Alison Bechdel's comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. It describes three criteria by which the level of women's representation in cinema can be judged: a film should have (1) at least two women in it, who (2) talk to each other, about (3) something besides a man. The test has gained widespread currency up to the present day, in and beyond the LGBTQ+ community, as a gauge for progress (or its lack), and has been adapted to apply to a range of under-represented groups in film and other media. In her contribution to Women's Friendship in Medieval Literature, Karma Lochrie riffs off the Bechdel Test to explore the work of Geoffrey Chaucer, teasing out what she calls 'the fleeting and even quirky moments of female friendship [. . .] carved out of the predominantly male fellowship in The Canterbury Tales' (p. 195). In fact, 'fleeting' and 'quirky' are appropriate adjectives to apply to the representation of women's comradeship in medieval literature more generally, as the other essays in this valuable collection illustrate. Starting on the more solid ground of spiritual relationships between women in the essays by Jennifer N. Brown, Stella Wang, Andrea Boffa, and Alexandra Verini, the focus then moves to consider the representation of women's friendship in Middle English romances and in the works of writers such as Chaucer, John Gower, and Thomas Malory in essays by Lydia Yaitsky Kertz, Usha Vishnuvajjala, and Melissa Ridley Elmes. The final section of the volume, which includes contributions by Christine Chism, Laurie A. Finke, and Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing, forges innovative approaches in the consideration of virtual friendships and the work of Christine de Pizan, the modern Wicca movement, and contemporary literary reimaginings of relations between early medieval women. Also in the final section, alongside Lochrie's piece, is Carissa M. Harris's study of women's 'cummarship' in medieval alehouse poems, which, like Lochrie's essay, is informed by twentieth-century lesbian culture. Harris finds in the lesbian bar culture which emerged in the United States from the 1930s onwards a queer connection with the representation of women in the alehouse poems, identifying 'the political possibilities of twentieth-century lesbian bar cummarship [that] underscores how it, like premodern cummarship, can foster peer pedagogy that empowers and edifies its participants and provides them valuable knowledge to challenge their marginalized position' (pp. 174–75). In their editorial introduction, Lochrie and Vishnuvajjala suggest that the critical neglect of medieval women's friendship hitherto may have happened because 'the topic was subsumed in the movement of queer studies in the 1990s and early 2000s. [. . .] Queer medieval studies co-opted female friendship studies before [End Page 237] there was such a thing' (p. 7). This seems a rather odd accusation to level at queer studies, and an odder still exoneration of mainstream feminist studies, given that this collection illustrates just how much can be achieved by an intersectional approach. As Audre Lorde said in her 1979 lecture entitled 'The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House', 'without community, there is no liberation' (in Lorde, Sister Outsider: Lectures and Speeches (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 2019), pp. 110–14 (p. 110)). Women's Friendship in Medieval Literature offers the reader a range of innovative ways for identifying and analysing textual evidence and representations of comradeship and camaraderie between women in the Middle Ages. These readings often involve being open to finding links between the past and the present and to reading the absences and gaps in the narratives. Diane Watt University of Surrey Copyright © 2023 Modern Humanities Research Association

The Metamorphoses of Myth in Fiction since 1960 by Kathryn Hume

Reviewed by: The Metamorphoses of Myth in Fiction since 1960 by Kathryn Hume Fiona Cox The Metamorphoses of Myth in Fiction since 1960. By Kathryn Hume. New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic. 2020. xii+192 pp. £85 (pbk £28.99). ISBN 978–1–5013–5987–3 (pbk 978–1–5013–7824–9). Kathryn Hume opens the volume by asking: 'Why should contemporary Anglophone writers use myths from ancient Greece and Rome, from Pharaonic Egypt, from the Viking north, from Africa's west coast, and from Hebrew and Christian traditions?' (p. i). This is, of course, a big question eliciting a range of responses, and the wide, inclusive sweep of mythologies indicates the vast scope of this volume, a breadth that is all the more striking since the book is relatively short. Hume's extraordinarily wide-ranging expertise and reading are evidenced throughout the volume as we move from Mailer to Acker to Vonnegut, Pullman, and Calvino (the one non-Anglophone writer), and many more. The dizzying array of primary sources is indicated in the chapter titles—for example, the final chapter, Chapter 6, is entitled 'The Contemporary Functions of Myth as Artistic Tool: Pynchon, Arthurian stories, Faber, Pullman, Morrow, Ducornet, Marcus, Atwood, Vonnegut, Naylor, Morrison, Silko, Östergren, Winterson, Grossman, Rucker'. This is an astonishing range of writers and subjects to cover in just 28 pages. Previous chapters take as their focus 'Multiple Selves and Egyptian Mythology', 'Mythological Worlds and Death', 'Orpheus and Eurydice: Variations on a Theme', 'Invented Myth: The Problem of Power', and 'Situational Myth: Posthuman Metamorphoses'. All promise a wide selection of sources enriching the discussion. Hume writes well and engagingly and I read the book with pleasure and profit. I learnt a great deal and was introduced to a range of authors whose works I have not yet considered. I particularly enjoyed the nuanced discussion of Janette Turner Hospital's Orpheus Lost. The presentation of Neil Gaiman's work and thought was also especially suggestive and persuasive. There is a particular emphasis in the volume on dystopian fiction, which has been understudied to date, at least in the area of classical reception. The virtues of the volume are, however, directly tied to [End Page 241] what might be perceived as its shortcomings. There were many times when I would greatly have welcomed far more detailed discussion of an author or a work, but found myself tantalized with a brief analysis before the discussion moved on to the next book or the next author. Since so many authors and texts are covered there is a lot of introductory discussion, which sometimes comes at the cost of more probing analysis. I also think that much of the exposition could have been enriched by closer engagement with other scholarly works within the field. Certainly there has been much work on contemporary literature and classical reception which is absent from the Bibliography and which could have added texture to the discussion of authors such as Winterson, Byatt, and Morrison. I am thinking particularly of studies such as Tessa Roynon, The Classical Tradition in Modern American Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021), and Judith Fletcher, Myths of the Underworld in Contemporary Culture: The Backward Gaze (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). I am aware, however, that a more focused and substantial engagement of selected authors would have reduced the extraordinary scope of this volume, and that would have been to its detriment. I closed the book wishing that there was much more, but grateful for the pleasure of being introduced to so much fresh material. This is a book that will open the eyes of any reader to unfamiliar worlds and undiscovered texts and which makes a genuine contribution to the expanding field of engagements with, and rewritings of, classical Greek and Roman myths in fiction of the last sixty years. Fiona Cox University of Exeter Copyright © 2023 Modern Humanities Research Association

Marcel Proust: portrait d'un jeune écrivain en philosophe by Claudio Rozzoni

Reviewed by: Marcel Proust: portrait d'un jeune écrivain en philosophe by Claudio Rozzoni Jennifer Rushworth Marcel Proust: portrait d'un jeune écrivain en philosophe. By Claudio Rozzoni. Paris: Classiques Garnier. 2016. 251 pp. €31. ISBN 978–2–8124–4720–4. This book is an interesting account of the early philosophical formation of Marcel Proust. Claudio Rozzoni's study is organized chronologically, from Proust's childhood up until early adulthood. It deliberately stops short of Proust's work on John Ruskin, but makes frequent reference to A la recherche du temps perdu since its interest lies in the development and prefiguration of Proust's philosophical ideas. The first part consists of a short section on Proust's parents and a much longer section on his school education. Rozzoni comments especially on Proust's father's career as having inspired Proust's use of medical metaphors and terminology and on his mother as having provided exposure to literature and languages as well as to habits of humour and letter-writing. Rozzoni emphasizes the importance for Proust of his philosophy teacher Alphonse Darlu, unearthing new materials while also drawing explicitly on the earlier studies of André Ferré, Les Années de collège de Marcel Proust (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), and Henri Bonnet, Alphonse Darlu (1894–1921): le maître de philosophie de Marcel Proust (Paris: Nizet, 1961). Rozzoni's analysis dwells especially on Darlu's contribution to journals such as the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale founded in 1893 by lycée friends of Proust, while acknowledging both the paucity of written evidence of Darlu's thinking and Proust's eventual 'renversement' (a term that recurs, but see e.g. p. 205) of Darlu's views on truth and morality. The second part takes us into Proust's post-school years, initially with a focus on his 'année sabbatique' (p. 148) in military training, his entry into society and first writings about society, and his interactions with his cousin by marriage Henri Bergson. Continuing with the focus on Proust's education, Rozzoni also considers his university studies, first in law and then in literature and philosophy, the latter including formative lessons in aesthetics from Gabriel Séailles. It is a shame that we do not have access to material from Proust's university years comparable to his school essays and notes, on which Rozzoni earlier draws so fruitfully. Proust's obtaining of the 'licence en lettres et philosophie' on 27 March 1895 is the book's purported endpoint. That said, as noted, Rozzoni makes frequent connections with Proust's eventual novel, especially with an eye to aspects which can be said (in a typical phrase) to 'anticipe[r] le chef-d'œuvre proustien à venir' (p. 59). The book and its reading of Proust are thus strongly teleological, and the 'jeune écrivain' of the title can at times feel overshadowed by discussion of the later novel. Nonetheless, contemporary theories of memory and of the self, or multiple selves, are interestingly reviewed in this light, especially in the middle section of the second part, on 'Le milieu psychologique' (pp. 163–203). Rozzoni concurs with Luc Fraisse about the eclecticism of Proust's philosophical sources (see especially Fraisse, L'Éclectisme philosophique de Marcel Proust (Paris: PUPS, 2013)), while emphasizing what is idiosyncratic about Proust's theory of memory in particular. Alongside its historical, biographical approach, the book is also characterized by a sustained dialogue with Gilles Deleuze, and while fascinating and meticulously explored, this dialogue can likewise at times feel like a distraction from the book's [End Page 246] avowed focus. At the end of the Prologue Rozzoni explains that 'Une première version de ce texte a paru en italien'—that is, I segni del giovane Proust: per un ritratto filosofico del futuro autore della 'Recherche' (Milan: AlboVersorio, 2009)—and he thanks 'Adeline Thulard et Pietro Allia pour leur traduction du texte en français' (p. 20). It seems important to acknowledge the work of Rozzoni's translators here, too, in bringing this useful and wide-ranging work to new readers. Jennifer Rushworth University College London Copyright © 2023 Modern Humanities Research Association

La Peinture selon Proust: les détournements du visuel by Sophie Bertho

Reviewed by: La Peinture selon Proust: les détournements du visuel by Sophie Bertho Thomas Baldwin La Peinture selon Proust: les détournements du visuel. By Sophie Bertho. Paris: Classiques Garnier. 2021. viii+170 pp. €26. ISBN 978–2–406–10757–6. This book brings together work published by Sophie Bertho over the last twenty years on the subject of Proust's aesthetics and on the 'fonctionnement interne de la peinture' (p. 15) in A la recherche du temps perdu. The first part focuses on the ways in which the pictorialist poetics of A la recherche represent both an assimilation and a transformation of 'les idées ou la "manière" de ses maîtres' (p. 29). The works of Montesquiou, the Goncourts, and Ruskin, Bertho argues, are 'retenus et retravaillés' (p. 29) by Proust, suggesting a form of influence and rewriting, a 'critique en action' (an expression that Proust himself uses to describe pastiche) that cannot be reduced either to repudiation or to a more transactional, unambiguous intertextual process involving debt and uncreative borrowing (p. 29). The second and third parts of the book focus on the ways in which the treatment of painting in A la recherche represents a shift away from a more 'traditional' mode of ekphrasis (involving set-piece, relatively autonomous descriptions of visual art that invite us to 'quitter un instant le roman pour nous tourner vers un tableau, l'admirer' (p. 104)) towards a 'détournement du pictural', a 'dissolution' (p. 17) of well-known paintings in writing. It is here that the argument of the book is at its most interesting and also its most problematic. Bertho demonstrates quite convincingly—and with ample reference to manuscript material—that Proust stands at a distance from a straightforwardly mimetic, referential ekphrastic mode or 'transposition d'art' in A la recherche (one that he had dabbled with on several occasions before 1899), and that he experiments in that work, through processes of metaphorization (for example), with a reappropriation and reworking of the visual by the textual—an internalization of painting in or by narrative (Bertho calls this approach radically 'modern', but readers of Diderot's Salons, for example, would probably disagree). However, her suggestion that the less conventional form of ekphrasis developed by Proust in A la recherche involves the 'effacement' (p. 17) of painting is underpinned by a superannuated take on the ekphrastic relation as a paragonal battle for dominance between word and image, the limitations of which have been clear for some time. There is a critical cack-handedness here that is compounded by the absence of any meaningful reference in Bertho's work to recent critical writing on Proust and/or ekphrasis in English. The idea of an 'effacement' of the visual in or by the textual does not, furthermore, do justice to the title of Bertho's book. A 'détournement' might be a diversion, a misappropriation, a hijack, or a rerouting (it is also, famously, the name of a technique developed in the 1950s by the Internationale lettriste and later adapted by the Internationale situationiste), but to say it is an erasure leaves the impression of an overexcited drama that does not reflect the subtle intricacies of the rest of Bertho's argument, in which terms such as 'traces', 'contamination', 'profanation', and 'allusion' feature prominently. [End Page 245] Thomas Baldwin University of Sheffield Copyright © 2023 Modern Humanities Research Association

Shakespeare, Violence and Early Modern Europe by Andrew Hiscock

Reviewed by: Shakespeare, Violence and Early Modern Europe by Andrew Hiscock Rory Loughnane Shakespeare, Violence and Early Modern Europe. By Andrew Hiscock. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2022. x+289 pp. £75 ($99.99). ISBN 978–1–108–83018–8. Shakespeare, Violence and Early Modern Europe is another major study by Andrew Hiscock, one of our leading commentators on early modern cultural and intellectual history. This ambitious book, divided into six chapters and with an expansive Introduction and Conclusion, offers a series of case studies about the 'cultural debate concerning the status and functions of violence' (p. 2). While grounded in Shakespeare's late Elizabethan English histories in its core chapters, it is an emphatically European book, a political statement of its own right in these testing times. It looks beyond the Atlantic archipelago to mainland Europe, and in particular to the wars of religion that raged in sixteenth-century France, demonstrating that for the Elizabethan elite 'it became impossible to conceive of England's political survival without having a watchful eye beyond the borders of the kingdom' (p. 4). In his lucid and learned Introduction, Hiscock moves seamlessly from Augustine and Seneca to early modern political commentators to post-World War critics and philosophers such as Hannah Arendt, Jean Baudrillard, and Slavoj Žižek, all of whom have considered the origins and outcomes of violent acts. Hiscock draws together his sources carefully, revealing how the phenomenon of violence, and its deployment as a tool for social (dis)order and nation-building, has long been and remains [End Page 242] foregrounded in cultural debate. The book helps to reveal how Shakespeare's early histories, and the early modern dramatic scene more generally, contributed to such debate about the militarization of society and helped inform cultural opinion about the status and functions of rebellion and nation-led violence. The chapters, in brief, are bookended by case studies about individuals: Chapter 1 uses the career of Sir Walter Ralegh, and his unfinished History of the World book project, to analyse broader English attitudes towards the use and justification of violence; Chapter 5 turns to Robert Devereux, his disastrous Irish campaign, and the failed rebellion of 1601 that led to his execution; Chapter 6 usefully considers European responses to the careers of Ralegh and Essex in the two centuries that followed. The core chapters, 2, 3, and 4, analyse, respectively, the three Henry VI plays, the two Henry IV plays, and Henry V. Hiscock identifies a continuity of sorts between the plays, wherein Shakespeare 'repeatedly returns attention to the disturbingly creative ways in which cultures of violence disclose the sobering realities of corruption and human failure' (p. 150). The study of Henry V in Chapter 4 leads naturally, of course, into the study of Essex's failures in Chapter 5, as the Chorus opening the play's fifth act in the Folio text alludes to Essex's efforts to quell rebellion in Ireland. Hiscock concludes the book by extending his analysis to the nineteenth century, where he demonstrates an enduring fascination in dramatic and operatic writing with narratives of violence and the late Elizabethan court. Shakespeare, Violence and Early Modern Europe marks a significant contribution to our collective understanding of how violence figured in early modern cultural debate, and how Shakespeare's creative engagement with English history in the late Elizabethan period helped to introduce and sustain such debate, albeit without any hope for resolution, in the popular forum of the theatre. Shakespeare's early history plays persistently reveal the fault-lines of violence, variously condemning and valorizing its use; indeed, as Hiscock observes, part of the entertainment of such plays was the fiction of real violence it represented. It is this tension surrounding the cultural 'appetite for violence', a phrase Hiscock repeats usefully, that helps bridge the early modern and modern worlds this study traverses. Rory Loughnane University of Kent Copyright © 2023 Modern Humanities Research Association

Voltaire après la nuit: Paris, Moscou, Genève by François Jacob

Reviewed by: Voltaire après la nuit: Paris, Moscou, Genève by François Jacob Simon Davies Voltaire après la nuit: Paris, Moscou, Genève. By François Jacob. Ferney-Voltaire: Centre International d'Étude du xviiie Siècle. 2021. ii+186 pp. €40. ISBN 978–2–84559–150–9. François Jacob published his biography Voltaire in 2015 (Paris: Gallimard). His new book investigates Voltaire from a different angle, his reputation in post-Second World War countries until a Congress in 1963. The cities in his subtitle represent France, the Soviet Union, and one man, the 'savant anglais' Theodore Besterman. Besterman created the Institut et Musée Voltaire in Geneva, of which, years later, Jacob was to become the Director. The monograph's sources are wide-spread, published and archival. It explores primarily the image of Voltaire rather [End Page 243] than the reception of his works. This image is often situated in a political context. In France he could be portrayed as an anti-Semite during the German occupation to buttress the persecution of Jews. Simultaneously he was depicted as an 'anti-vychiste' and a 'résistant'. The two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his birth was commemorated in 1944, yet the French Catholic Church continued to worry about his malign influence. French people were also anxious about his potential linkage to communism. The Soviets, while uncomfortable with his life as a landed gentleman, published a catalogue of his library and volumes of his marginalia. Nevertheless, it was the English-speaking world that did most to explore his life and works. Here, arguably unwisely, Jacob cites Kathleen O'Flaherty's Voltaire, Myth and Reality (Cork: Cork University Press, 1945). She views Voltaire as a bogeyman from the perspective of a conservative Irish Catholic. The extraordinary mood changer was Besterman. Winning support across the Atlantic, he championed Voltaire for spreading Enlightenment values, and Voltaire became more an international than a French figure. Besterman's edition of the patriarch's correspondence was ground-breaking in a positive and, for the French, a negative sense. He published the most comprehensive edition of the letters not in France, but in Switzerland (Voltaire's Correspondence, 107 vols (Geneva: Institut et Musée Voltaire, 1953–65)). If that was one affront to patriotic pride, a second was even more damaging: the missives were annotated in English. Besterman had a troubled relationship with the CNRS, with the result that the 'hexagone' was not involved in celebrating its Voltairean heritage. Moreover, the Englishman began publishing Studies on Voltaire in 1955—France was losing its 'patrimoine'. He organized the first international Congress on the Enlightenment in Switzerland in 1963, with a limited participation from French scholars. Having contacted Besterman, Nancy Mitford produced her account of Voltaire's love life in English (Voltaire in Love (London: Hamilton, 1957)). Voltaire's works could still inspire adaptations, particularly those of Candide. Leonard Bernstein's musical work is well known but the tale also encouraged film versions in France. However, it could be contended that these offspring did little to enhance the understanding of the qualities of Voltaire and his works. Although it is not pertinent to the time-frame of this study, Besterman was also instrumental in launching the edition of Voltaire's Œuvres complètes which was completed at the Voltaire Foundation in Oxford in 2022—an achievement marked at a reception in the British Embassy in Paris in June that year. Overall, Jacob's study underscores the importance of editorial decisions and their context. He highlights the difficulty of embarking on major projects on Voltaire which are free from 'toute empreinte idéologique' (p. 49). Voltaire has become a standard point of reference in the advocacy of tolerance—witness the 'Je suis Charlie' slogan created as the response to the terrorist attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo in 2015. This publication succeeds in illustrating the fact that scholarly editing is not a value-free undertaking and that history and chance can play a significant role. [End Page 244] Simon Davies Belfast Copyright © 2023 Modern Humanities Research Association

Vladimir Nabokov et la traduction ed. by Julie Loison-Charles and Stanislav Shvabrin

Reviewed by: Vladimir Nabokov et la traduction ed. by Julie Loison-Charles and Stanislav Shvabrin Suzanne Eade Roberts Vladimir Nabokov et la traduction. Ed. by Julie Loison-Charles and Stanislav Shvabrin. Arras: Artois Presses Université. 2021. 306 pp. €19. ISBN 978–2–84832–517–0. This stimulating collection of articles, edited by Julie Loison-Charles and Stanislav Shvabrin, encourages a re-evaluation of Nabokov as a translator, translation scholar, and object of translation. Moving beyond what tends to be known about his self-translations and the high proportion of footnotes to text in his version of Pushkin's Evgenii Onegin, it includes a new appraisal of Nabokov's literalist approach to translation, analysis of his collaborative translations, and discussion of the challenges of translating Nabokov. The volume, which contains slightly more articles in French than in English, is the latest to appear in the 'Traductologie' series of Artois Presses Université, which regularly publishes Francophone scholarship in Translation Studies, as well as translations into French. Thus, a major benefit of this book is how it presents both Anglophone and Francophone scholarly writing. The Nabokov researchers represented here are based primarily in the USA, the UK, France, and Canada. Moreover, the contributors encompass the disciplines of Translation Studies, Linguistics, English and Slavic Literature, as well as Comparative Literature. The Introduction fascinatingly reveals the hazards of this eclectic approach: in Nabokov's œuvre, it is not always easy to distinguish between a translation, an original, a self-translation, or a collaborative translation, or to harmonize the dates of first publication. Stanislav Shvabrin's enjoyable article begins by reminding us that 'the backlash against [Nabokov's] translation theory and praxis rivals the endurance of Lolita's [End Page 274] grip on its readers' (p. 87). He offers a more nuanced picture of Nabokov's literalism, drawing on Bakhtin to reassess Nabokov's translations, even youthful ones, as 'dialogic encounters' in which he can try out different approaches to literary translation. These experiments vary 'from wilful adaptation to most exacting literalism and everything else in between' (p. 96). Christine Raquet's essay draws attention to the numerous ways both of reading a text and of translating it, even though 'le tempérament littéraire autocratique de Nabokov avait souvent du mal à accepter [les choix d'un autre traducteur]' (p. 23). His collaborations became power struggles in which any other translator was expected to capitulate. In contrast, Susan Elizabeth Sweeney identifies recurrent ideas of ineffability and untranslatability in Nabokov's work, relating them to his synaesthesia. Julie Loison-Charles's contribution examines the treatment of the many foreign words used by Nabokov in Ada and the varying ways in which this multilingualism is conveyed by the novel's French and Russian translations. Similarly, Marta Arnal Gas focuses on how Nabokov's jeux linguistiques are translated into Spanish and Catalan. Russianists, meanwhile, will be interested in Lyudmila Razumova's comparison of the reception of samizdat (Soviet-era), perestroika-era, and post-perestroika translations into Russian of Pale Fire and her conclusions about the changing market for translation in Russophone nations. In terms of comparing Francophone and Anglophone Translation Studies, it may be a coincidence that two French scholars, Isabelle Paulin and Stanislas Gauthier, draw productively on the work of French translation theorist Antoine Berman in their respective analyses of the nature of Nabokov's translations or the reception of translations of Nabokov. The final section of this volume focuses on intersemiotic translation. It includes Yannicke Chupin's enlightening interview with Émilie Moreau, exploring the latter's choice to incorporate shadow play and masks into her theatre adaptation of Lolita. The appendix includes a convenient index of Nabokov's original work and his translations. This volume constitutes both a significant contribution to the different facets of Nabokov's work and an accessible examination of the challenges of translating Nabokov into several European languages. There is much to interest both Translation Studies scholars and Nabokov specialists. Suzanne Eade Roberts University of Bristol Copyright © 2023 Modern Humanities Research Association

Boccaccio's 'Decameron': Rewriting the Christian Middle Ages and the Lyric Tradition by Dino S. Cervigni

Reviewed by: Boccaccio's 'Decameron': Rewriting the Christian Middle Ages and the Lyric Tradition by Dino S. Cervigni Charlotte Alton Boccaccio's 'Decameron': Rewriting the Christian Middle Ages and the Lyric Tradition. By Dino S. Cervigni. (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 548) Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies Press. 2021. viii+558 pp. £88. ISBN 978–0–86698–606–9. Dino Cervigni's latest monograph provides an extensive study of Boccaccio's masterpiece which is exceptionally well timed in its publication in the light of the [End Page 256] increased readership of the Decameron in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Cervigni's approach is particularly pertinent given its focus upon the text's critique and reconstruction of societal norms in the aftermath of the plague which forms the backdrop to Boccaccio's text. Cervigni reads the Decameron's first ninety tales as a parodic rewriting of the societal, historical, and lyric traditions of the Christian Middle Ages and suggests that the Tenth Day sets out a new ethical code for society and literature in the wake of the plague, based upon human and liberal principles such as generosity and sacrifice. Cervigni's work asserts the importance of the text's overarching narrative and dismisses the labelling of this architectural feature as a 'frame' or 'cornice', as it is so often referred to by critics. Instead, he reads this 'novella portante', voiced by Boccaccio's narrator, as the principal location of meaning within the text. Cervigni's advancing of this 'novella portante' addresses the limitations of fragmentary readings of Boccaccio's text which occur through the discussion of isolated novelle. Through his concern with this overarching narrative, Cervigni's emphasis also highlights areas of the text that have eluded significant critical attention thus far. The book comprises an Introduction and fourteen chapters, ten of which are dedicated to each of the text's ballads that feature in the 'novella portante' at the close of each day of narration. The focus upon the ballads is particularly significant to this work's contribution. Building on his own previous work on the ballads, with this monograph Cervigni provides ten rich, close readings of each of the text's ballads and exposes them as significant textual loci. The book offers an original and necessary approach to the Decameron by demonstrating the ballads' significance in the construction of meaning across the text, thus providing a hugely important intervention in the literature surrounding the Decameron. The ballads are frequently passed over by the critical literature and certainly have not thus far been widely considered as essential to textual meaning. Cervigni takes these poetic sites as key moments of introspection on the part of the narrators that provide a key through which we may read their ten narrated tales. This approach thus contributes a further important intervention in the ongoing debate within Boccaccio Studies surrounding the individuality of the ten members of the brigata. Cervigni's focus upon the ballads as keys for understanding the members of the brigata as unique subjects offers a notable contribution to that debate by arguing that 'the evening ballad accomplishes something no other daily activity can achieve: it offers all members of the group the opportunity of revealing aspects of their inner selves which would not have become manifest otherwise' (p. 101). Cervigni's far-reaching work makes a substantial contribution to Boccaccio Studies by addressing a significant gap in the scholarly literature relating to the Decameron, by arguing for the 'essential function of the ten evening ballads' (p. vii), and by highlighting the importance of the 'novella portante' to the text's meaning. This monograph also offers a reading that is opportune in its concern with the [End Page 257] disruption and reconstruction of tradition in response to plague, which our own contemporary readership will no doubt find to be particularly thought-provoking. Charlotte Alton Selwyn College, Cambridge Copyright © 2023 Modern Humanities Research Association

Memory and Utopia: The Poetry of José Ángel Valente by Manus O'Dwyer

Reviewed by: Memory and Utopia: The Poetry of José Ángel Valente by Manus O'Dwyer Ricardo Fernández Romero Memory and Utopia: The Poetry of José Ángel Valente. By Manus O'Dwyer. Cambridge: Legenda. 2020. x+ 142 pp. £75. ISBN 978-1-781883-65-5. Discussions of José Ángel Valente (1929–2000), one of the most important and original Spanish writers in the Spanish and Galician languages of the second half of the twentieth century, typically bring to mind a specific image: a modern mystic, a difficult and hermetic 'poet of silence'. This excellent monograph sails against the tide to, as Manus O'Dwyer himself writes, 'desvalentizar' the subject, 'making clear the political and social significance of his poetry' (p. 110). The challenge is considerable, especially given the fact that O'Dwyer identifies an ethical underpinning to the 'poetics of silence' (the questioning of lyrical language, absence, solitude, etc.), which requires a political approach to Valente's signature poetics. Even the title of the monograph points in this direction in its reference to the memory and testimony of the disappeared and those lacking a voice. Valente's desire to recuperate silenced figures indicates an openness to alterity, a poetic quest for a language that gestures towards a utopian future of radical social and political reform. This new vision of the poet is constructed through concise and precise analysis that does not shy away from issues of great philosophical and aesthetic complexity. Highlights include the examination of a fundamental philosophical tradition present in Valente that O'Dwyer connects with a specific religious culture: 'a discourse and understanding of Jewishness that develops in the works of post-war French thinkers—Sartre, Levinas, Derrida, Blanchot' (p. 75). In them, Valente finds '[a notion of community] that resists the atomistic conception of the individual of liberal tradition' and 'a utopian hopefulness': 'radically new forms of social relation and organisation that could be described as secularised versions of Jewish messianism' (p. 75). It is from this same perspective that O'Dwyer situates the importance of Ernst Bloch's utopian thought for understanding the poet. Such observations are complemented towards the end of book through reference to Valente's dialogue with the poets Edmond Jabès and Paul Celan. Of all these thinkers and writers, the relevance of Levinas, Bloch, and Celan comes to the fore in the political approach to Valente's poetry. The result is convincing as long as we understand the political dimension in general terms as opposed to being restricted to specific ideological labels and labelling. On repeated occasions, O'Dwyer reduces the historical backdrop for Valente's poetry to broad brushstrokes: 'the suffocating atmosphere of fascism', 'the intellectual and political mediocrity of the Communist Party', '[Valente's] historical experiences as an exile from a country that had borne the brunt of decades of fascist violence and repression' (p. 112). While O'Dwyer announces at the outset that '[Valente's] poetry and poetics imply a specific political stance' (p. 9), the reader, or at least this reader, is left at the end with the sensation that it is not so much specific as implicit. This, is however, a minor quibble to level at a ground-breaking and informative book that will change the way readers and scholars appreciate this towering figure of Spanish and Galician verse. [End Page 147] Ricardo Fernández Romero University of St Andrews Copyright © 2023 Modern Humanities Research Association

Nikolai Gogol: Performing Hybrid Identity by Yuliya Ilchuk

Reviewed by: Nikolai Gogol: Performing Hybrid Identity by Yuliya Ilchuk Timothy Langen Nikolai Gogol: Performing Hybrid Identity. By Yuliya Ilchuk. Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press. 2021. xvi+ 267 pp. $52.50. ISBN 978-1-4875-0825-8. From the beginning of his career to our day, Gogolʹ's works have generated highly charged interpretative fields, and in recent years, 'Russian' and 'Ukrainian' have [End Page 148] been two of the most powerful hermeneutic magnets. With this monograph, Yuliya Ilchuk subjects both terms to dynamic, historicizing analysis. By her reading, Gogolʹ's national identity is not fixed but rather constituted (at least partially) in performance, before heterogeneous audiences, with multiple cultural and linguistic codes, giving rise to gestures and texts capable of generating divergent interpretation. Her focus is not on classifying Gogolʹ as essentially 'Russian' or 'Ukrainian', or as first one and then the other, but rather on the constant (and constantly shifting) interpenetration of these categories in the contexts in which Gogolʹ enacted his own literary and personal identity. This book is methodologically and theoretically ambitious. The chapters treat, in order, the history of Ukrainian elites in the Russian empire; Gogolʹ's varying self-presentation in the 1830s; the distribution of Ukrainian and Russian (and hybridized) lexical, syntactic, and idiomatic elements among the narrators of his Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka (1831); the interaction of various languages and linguistic markers (especially Russian, Ukrainian, German, and Yiddish) in Gogolʹ's writing and in Russian cultural and political debates during his career; the changes he made to Taras Bulba and Dead Souls (both 1842); and the posthumous treatment of his texts in Russian, Soviet, and Ukrainian contexts. Ilchuk brings considerable theoretical sophistication to bear on these topics; she is as ready to see in Gogolʹ's self-conscious linguistic hybridity a challenge to Bourdieu (p. 71) as she is to find in Greenblatt's and Bhabha's paradigms a useful framework for reading Gogolʹ. Equally well managed is her use of large data sets for stylistic analysis, with technical appendices giving extra information about her methodology. The results support her overall argument that Ukrainian and Russian elements do not simply coexist in Gogolʹ's texts, but rather operate in varying manners and proportions according to audience and occasion. In addition to this lexical corpus analysis, Ilchuk draws attention to a kind of dual coding whereby (typically) a Russian reader will receive one sort of message from Gogolʹ and/or his narrator(s), while a Ukrainian reader or listener will hear something different. Both the early Dikanka tales and the later revisions of Taras Bulba and Dead Souls have this property, as she argues. One sign of the value of a book like this is the way it can reframe arguments which its subject does not address directly. Ilchuk repeatedly emphasizes performativity—Gogolʹ's social manners, his sartorial and coiffuristic gestures, and his deviations from literary Russian grammar and usage. Readers of Boris Eikhenbaum's 1919 article 'How Gogolʹs Overcoat Is Made' (repr. in Gogol from the Twentieth Century: Eleven Essays, ed. and trans. by Robert A. Maguire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), pp. 267-91) will recognize a similar claim here but with new light cast on it. Eikhenbaum's Gogolʹ is irrepressibly performative and creative, rather than concerning himself with what one might call 'content'. For Ilchuk, performance is how Gogolʹ engages content. It is hard to think what more this book could do. Devoted to the topic of identity in its dizzying complexity, it is theoretically sophisticated, clearly and engagingly written, methodologically bold, and rich in detail. Ultimately Ilchuk's aim, in the best spirit of the theorists whose ideas she mobilizes, is not only to provide an objective [End Page 149] analysis of an acuvre, idiom, and life, but also to show its positive generative potential. She succeeds. Timothy Langen University of Missouri Copyright © 2023 Modern Humanities Research Association

From Post-Yugoslavia to the Female Continent: A Feminist Reading of Post-Yugoslav Literature by Tijana Matijević

Reviewed by: From Post-Yugoslavia to the Female Continent: A Feminist Reading of Post-Yugoslav Literature by Tijana Matijević Alexandra Andrejevic From Post-Yugoslavia to the Female Continent: A Feminist Reading of Post-Yugoslav Literature. By Tijana Matijević. Bielefeld: Transcript. 2020. 274 pp. €70. ISBN 978-3-8376-5209-3. Tijana Matijević lectures on post-Yugoslav literature, culture, and languages at two European universities, and this monograph reflects her expertise while consolidating her previous research. The book attempts to examine contemporary literature from the regions of former Yugoslavia through the lens of feminist analysis and also in the light of its theorized connections with the Yugoslav neo-avant-garde. It expands and redefines existing concepts (such as the idea of post-Yugoslavia as a liminal socio-political space defined, in Bhabha's phrasing, as 'the time never completely beyond' (p. 8)) while introducing new notions (such as framing and understanding the literary landscapes of today's Yugoslavia as a 'female continent'). As such, this book represents a nuanced integration of literary and feminist analysis applied to several key texts, including the Serbian author Slobodan Tišman's Bernardijeva Saba (Bernardi's Room, 2011) and the Croatian writer Olja Savićević Ivančević's Adio, Kauboju (Adios Cowboy, 2010). It is carefully researched and meticulously argued, if a little densely worded at times. Matijević engages ambitiously with various theoretical fields, which underpin her close textual and interdisciplinary analysis of the primary sources examined in Chapters 2-6. While Western [End Page 155] scholars may not be familiar with all of the authors discussed here, as they are not widely known outside the Balkan region (with a few notable exceptions such as Dasa Drndić), Matijević's comparative approach makes her study relevant for non-specialists as well as regional experts. Matijević's main focus is on writing produced in the first half of the second decade of this century in three of the former Yugoslav republics (Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina), all of which now exist as separate legal, political, and geographical entities. However, she argues for the existence of a non-physical entity which she terms 'post-Yugoslavia', where certain continuities can be identified with the literary conditions and preoccupations of the former state, particularly from a feminist standpoint and in terms of the marginalization offemale authors. It is these continuities that the author attempts to dissect and explore, with particular interest in how gender, sexuality, and body combine with themes of war and particularly with the narrativization of war by female characters. The author views the publication and mainstream status of war novels by female authors in this period as crucial to illustrate her point that, in post-Yugoslavia, 'non-phallic and non-masculine bodies and identities' (p. 10) begin to invade literary domains hitherto dominated by male authors. Another principal strand of her argument concerns the connection between the post-Yugoslav literary field and the Yugoslav neo-avant-garde, both of which endured, and continue to suffer, a certain elusiveness or even failure of integration into the literary mainstream, despite often relating to similar themes and discourses. Matijević makes a strong case for this link, illustrating it with specific examples through analysis of works by such seminal neo-avant-garde authors as Judita Šalgo and the aforementioned Slobodan Tišma. While any text referring to Yugoslavia has to acknowledge the lasting impact and damage of the wars fought during the 1990s, nevertheless Matijević ends on a hopeful note: that post-Yugoslav writing demands that we reconsider Yugoslavia's past in new ways-for example, by inventing improved alternative pasts and futures, even by allowing for the possibility of 'projecting' socialist utopia (p. 217). She calls this process "'choosing the optimal variant" in prevailing over reality' (p. 251). In summary, Matijević's book represents a salient contribution to an under-researched area, which will be of great interest and benefit to both students and established scholars in the field of European and literary studies. [End Page 156] Alexandra Andrejevic University of Gloucestershire Copyright © 2023 Modern Humanities Research Association

Singing the English: Britain in the French Musical Lowbrow, 1870–1904 by Hannah L. Scott

Reviewed by: Singing the English: Britain in the French Musical Lowbrow, 1870–1904 by Hannah L. Scott Claire Moran Singing the English: Britain in the French Musical Lowbrow, 1870–1904. By Hannah L. Scott. London and New York: Routledge. 2022. ix+ 254 pp. £96. ISBN 978-0-367-81543-1. Scholarship in nineteenth-century French Studies has, in recent years, increasingly highlighted the need to address the complexity of everyday lived experience and unravel the myths which have shaped our perceptions of the period. Hannah L. Scott's remarkable study of British popular music in late nineteenth-century France offers a fascinating glimpse into French cultural life in an extraordinary period of the country's history. The focus on British music in a study concerned with France may, as Scott points out wryly in her Introduction, 'strike the reader with some surprise' (p. 2) since, as the influential French musical theorist François-Joseph Fétis put it, 'the English [are] on the lowest rung of the ladder of musical talent' (p. 2). However, through her engaging, well-documented, and well-illustrated study, Scott makes a compelling case for the influence of British lowbrow music in shaping modern France. Singing the English revalorizes the centrality of popular British music for 'exploring, negotiating and mediating national identity and the importance of Britain in Third Republican society, politics and culture' (p. 12). The book comprises an Introduction, four chapters, and an Epilogue, and also includes a comprehensive appendix of café-concert songs about the English. The Introduction offers a much-needed contextual overview, all the while citing the pervasiveness of representations of les Anglais in French culture, most notably in literature, and Scott calls attention to the many minor and central figures such as the chronically melancholic Lord Ewald of Villiers d'Isle-Adam's L'Ève future, the courageous yet angelic Miss Clifton in Hector Malot's Souvenirs d'un blessé, and the sadistic English femme fatale Clara in Mirbeau's Le Jardin des supplices. The first chapter focuses on comic songs from French popular theatres in which French performers pretended to be English and where 'Englishing up' was the trend. The second explores the phenomenon of the Salvation Army band and its noisy presence on the streets of Paris, while the third discusses the French reception of Celtic folk music and includes analyses of translations and arrangements of songs by Robert Burns, Walter Scott, and Thomas Moore. The last chapter discusses the place of music in French travel writing and emphasizes how 'music and sound become fundamental axes in the French mental conception of British character and culture' (p. 185). Singing the English captures the essence of Britishness through nineteenth-century French eyes. It is both entertaining and illuminating, offering glimpses into a French mindset via a host of intriguing texts and archival documents. Paul Bourget's 1889 description of the aural impression of a Salvation Army band is a case in point: 'suddenly, a blast of trumpets bursts out, accompanied by strange singing. […] [A] man begins a sort of yelled prayer; his head is thrown back, his mouth is twisted, his eyes are turned backwards in his head. He calls out "the Lord, the Lord…". An expression of despair or ecstasy can be seen upon every face' (p. 85). Scott navigates texts and documents such as these with ease and [End Page 141] skill, highlighting the linguistic specificities and visual imaginaire that they draw upon. Overall, her analysis of the popular songs, performances, and traditions that represented Britishness in nineteenth-century France offers important insights into the relationship between France and Britain. It is, as she argues in her Epilogue, a relationship which continues to be influenced by popular music, and she cites the dozens of songs by artists from Mick Jagger to Bertrand Cantat which attempted to 'influence, mock, critique and occasionally praise the outcome of the June 2016 referendum' (p. 227). Singing the English is an excellent book which, in its careful and rigorous interdisciplinary scholarship, shows the importance of the nineteenth century in shaping modern life. Claire Moran Queen's University Belfast Copyright © 2023 Modern Humanities Research Association

Nach der Literatur: Studien zu einer Theorie der Literatur by Giulia Agostini

Reviewed by: Nach der Literatur: Studien zu einer Theorie der Literatur by Giulia Agostini Ian Ellison Nach der Literatur: Studien zu einer Theorie der Literatur. By Giulia Agostini. (Neues Forum für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, 57) Heidelberg: Winter. 2021. 275 pp. €38. ISBN 978–3–8253–4681–2. At least in the context of modern German culture, literature and philosophy were long considered inseparable. This is perhaps best encapsulated in the phrase ‘Volk der Dichter und Denker’ (‘people of poets and thinkers’) regularly in use since the mid-eighteenth century to describe the German philological tradition. Over the centuries, this was often reconceptualized in an ongoing attempt to grasp how literary writers confront questions of human understanding and knowledge through philosophical discourse. Until the early 1900s, the phrase was increasingly used to commemorate the intellectual greats of the Enlightenment, Classicism, and Romanticism. As the horrors of twentieth-century conflict and persecutions unfolded, it became distorted and parodied—perhaps most notably by Karl Kraus in Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (1915–22) as a ‘Volk der Richter und Henker’ (‘people of judges and executioners’)—before becoming threatened with obsolescence. The certainty of literature’s potential to offer a means of understanding oneself and the world was no longer a given. In a high-wire act of intellectual comparison, Giulia Agostini’s Nach der Literatur considers afresh these philosophical stakes, less in a historicized mode than in a form of metaphysical counterplay. Over the course of six densely written chapters, she seeks to test out ‘Die Grenzgänge zwischen Literatur und Philosophie’ (‘the border crossings between literature and philosophy’, p. 15), pursuing the thorny question of what literary works mean for us today, at a time when, she claims, literature seems to be disappearing as much as it proliferates. Hence her study’s curious focus on literary theory after literature (‘nach der Literatur’), which is to say, its attempt to unlock new—if oblique—prospects on what literature itself does not know but strives to understand (‘einen Ausblick auf das zu eröffnen, was die Literatur selbst nicht weiß, was sie jedoch zu verstehen strebt’, p. 16). This is not so much after literature as beyond its gaze. Moving from Stéphane Mallarmé’s poetics of the absolute to the quasi-mystical dimensions of Maurice Blanchot’s and George Bataille’s readings of Marcel Proust, Agostini elaborates a literary metaphysics that traces the impersonality of language and literature (‘Unpersönlichkeit von Sprache und Literatur’, p. 101). A reading of recurring images of growing plants in Proust’s work as metaphors of literature’s inner workings leads Agostini to the abstract flow structures of Najia Mehadji’s visual artworks. Later chapters consider indifference in the philosophical and poetic work of María Zambrano alongside the artwork of Auguste Rodin, Eva Hesse, and Francisco de Zurbarán, as well as the sensual ultra-philosophy of Giacomo Leopardi’s lyrical poetry in relation to the stark black-and-white photography of Mario Giacomelli, and, last but not least, the distinctions between Samuel Beck-ett’s experimental theatre that plumbs the depths of literature and Julio Cortázar’s eschewing temporal realities through the figuration of the Möbius Strip. Agostini demonstrates a remarkable command of numerous languages and philosophical [End Page 692] discourses, though the threat that the ungraspable in literature may tip at any moment into theoretical inscrutability is never entirely absent from her prose. A tendency to overemphasize through italicization may also confuse as much as enlighten. Nonetheless, for those willing to venture down the rabbit hole, there is much to admire in this erudite attempt to construe the forms and implications of various literary and artistic portrayals of a gaze that desires understanding. Beautifully presented by the Winter publishing house, this is a richly researched study that brings together a chorus of twentieth-century European cultural figures accompanied by plentiful illustrations. After all, as the quotation in Agostini’s dedication from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland reads, ‘what is the use of a book [. . .] without pictures or conversations?’ Ian Ellison University of Kent Copyright © 2022 The Modern Humanities Research Association

Victorian Women Poets

Victorian Women Poets Heather Bozant Witcher (bio) A. Mary F. Robinson was best known, to her English audience, for her poetry and, to her French audience, as a woman of letters. So begins the introduction to Robinson's "Anglo-French" life in Patricia Rigg's A. Mary F. Robinson (Montreal: McGill-Queen's Univ. Press, 2021). Rigg seeks to reconcile these dual identities in this comprehensive and engaging biographical study. Rigg's book offers a nuanced look at an international poet: the unorthodoxy of Robinson's life, the integration of various literary styles (poetics, historical, biographical), and her Anglo-French identity. Highlighting Anglo-French literary communities and the social components of Robinson's life, Rigg's biography sets the tone for this year's scholarship on Victorian women poets. Its rich, layered approach—bringing together extensive archival material with personal and familial relationships (Rigg details her time in the Robinson family home and her relationship with Robinson's great-granddaughter by marriage)—offers a methodology that foregrounds materiality, affect, and form. Similarly, James Diedrick's edited edition for the MHRA Jewelled Tortoise Series, Mathilde Blind: Selected Fin-de-Siècle Poetry and Prose (Cambridge, U.K.: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2021) foregrounds Blind's contributions as a transnational and displaced (or expatriate) writer. His scholarly edition of Blind's late poetry brings three volumes (published between 1889 and 1895) together, alongside selections of her reviews and literary essays, to foreground Blind's experimental verse forms and affiliations with leading Decadent communities. The scholarship, then, of 2021 predominantly interrogates an intersectional approach to Victorian women poets: from exploring the ecological impact of Decadent poets to the intersections of poetry with a wide range of nineteenth-century sciences, transnational and cosmopolitan outlooks, and various modes of being. In this way, Victorian poetry becomes a site of curiosity, exchange, and engagement—in all senses of the word—with the world. In "Haptic Ekphrasis" (Victorian Studies 64, no. 1 [2021]: 88–114), Jill R. Ehnenn reconsiders the ekphrastic text, usually defined as a technology of vision: the relationship between word and image. In the Victorian period—and more broadly—ekphrasis involves not only vision but a technology of feeling, "both touch and emotion" (p. 89). In what Ehnenn calls "haptic ekphrasis," she identifies the centrality of affect and the sensing body as a method of [End Page 418] phenomenological interpretation and poetic encounter, or poetry's ability to do something, to move our bodies and brains into reconsiderations of the self/ object within the world (in both the nineteenth century and our world today). She makes three central claims. Focusing on haptics alongside vision enables reconsiderations of poetic form that foreground the "visceral register of experience" (p. 92). New ways of analyzing poetry emerge when we consider the tactility of the ekphrastic text or the arousal of emotion when we are attuned to meter and metrical variance. Rather than viewing ekphrasis as a description of an art object, haptic ekphrasis documents the poet's encounter with the art object. When reading poems like Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "Hiram Powers' Greek Slave" (1850) or Julia Margaret Cameron's "On a Portrait" (1876), with priority given to haptics, formal readings encourage sympathy for the object and what it represents. The language of sympathy here foregrounds another of Ehnenn's claims: that haptic ekphrasis resonates with the nineteenth-century discursive shift from sympathy to empathy (Einfühlung). Most intriguingly, perhaps, Ehnenn identifies haptic ekphrasis as a strategic technique for "minoritarian" (women and queer) writers (p. 100). Through insightful close readings of poetry by John Gray, Olive Custance, Julia Margaret Cameron, Graham R. Tomson, and the Bengali poet Sarojini Naidu, Ehnenn showcases how haptic readings communicate the complexities of lived experiences as a woman or queer poet. Not only, then, does haptic ekphrasis permit realistic detail and transportation of feeling, but "ekphrasis built on the haptic . . . permits the author to safely articulate the ineffable, the non-canonical, and the private" (p. 105). In providing a new framework from which to understand ekphrasis, Ehnenn points toward the phenomenological and epistemological potentials of poetic experience and poetic encounter—for both the Victorians and the twenty-first-century reader. Sight and...

Francisca Wood and Nineteenth-Century Periodical Culture: Pressing for Change by Cláudia Pazos Alonso

Reviewed by: Francisca Wood and Nineteenth-Century Periodical Culture: Pressing for Change by Cláudia Pazos Alonso Leticia Villamediana González Francisca Wood and Nineteenth-Century Periodical Culture: Pressing for Change. By Cláudia Pazos Alonso. Cambridge: Legenda. 2020. xi+250 pp. £75. ISBN 978–1–781887–99–8. Cláudia Pazos Alonso's monograph explores the fascinating life and career of a neglected but ground-breaking Portuguese writer, journalist, and translator. As a cultural agent, an unorthodox and freethinking intellectual, an activist, and a mentor, Wood's multifaceted profile, work, and influence have at last found belated recognition and celebration in this full-length account that also provides an overview of the intellectual landscape of the period. Wood (1802–1900), the reader is convincingly shown, was an early and important precursor of first-wave feminism. Carefully documented, the monograph is composed of an Introduction, six chapters, a Conclusion, and a Bibliography, followed by three extremely valuable appendices that list over ninety works published by Tipografia Luso-Britânica, Wood's own press ('Tipografia Luso-Britânica'; 'List of Editorials by Francisca Wood'; 'List of Editorials'). Chapter 1 beautifully reconstructs the life and family background of both Francisca and her British husband, William Thorold Wood. Although information on Francisca is scant, Pazos Alonso succeeds in piecing together key moments from her biographical timeline, through the detailed exploration of articles and references in periodicals, as well as of different Portuguese archives and sites, such as the British cemetery in Lisbon, where the couple were buried. There is a significant focus on Wood's years in Britain given that, as Pazos Alonso argues, the Victorian era and the British political landscape between 1820 and 1850 impacted her later work and journalistic career. This is particularly evident on her return to Portugal in the 1860s, where the couple showed an educational and political commitment, contributing to female learning. It is precisely this presence of women in print culture that Chapter 2 scrutinizes, paying attention to the contributions of three other female intellectuals who have remained in the margins of Portuguese literary history. In so doing, Pazos Alonso not only demonstrates women's active contribution to periodical culture, but also shows how Wood's modern ideas and [End Page 508] journalistic work, especially her weekly A Voz Feminina (1868–69; known as O Progresso in latter years) stood up among her peers and became 'an unquestionable milestone in the Portuguese context' (p. 77). As such, the following chapters are dedicated to the detailed analysis of the periodical. Chapter 3 focuses on the progressive editorial team, mainly comprised of female contributors led by Francisca herself, who signed half of the editorials as well as other types of wittily crafted and transgressive articles, such as open letters addressed to distinguished men in power. All these political pieces, as Chapters 4 and 5 reveal, opened up debate on social issues such as the protection of animals and tackled gender discrimination and inequality, offering a searing critique of both Church and male hegemony, in an attempt to emancipate both men and women as a means to regenerate society and the country. Finally, Chapter 6 examines the cosmopolitan dimension of A Voz Feminina: that is, how the weekly contributed to the dissemination of foreign news on women's rights, becoming a cultural mediator and a key agent in a transnational network of periodicals that echoed the Woman Question across Europe and the Atlantic. By bringing Wood's ideas back to an English-reading audience, Pazos Alonso's compelling and engaging study not only rescues a prime Portuguese journalist and intellectual from cultural oblivion, but also grants her a well-deserved transnational place in feminist and gender scholarship. Leticia Villamediana González University of Warwick Copyright © 2022 Modern Humanities Research Association

Translating Great Russian Literature: The Penguin Russian Classics by Cathy McAteer

Reviewed by: Translating Great Russian Literature: The Penguin Russian Classics by Cathy McAteer Emily Lygo Translating Great Russian Literature: The Penguin Russian Classics. By Cathy McAteer. (BASEES/Routledge Series in Russian and East European Studies) London: Routledge. 2021. xxix+196 pp. £120. ISBN 978–0–36750–348–2. Cathy McAteer's fascinating study explores the important role of the Penguin Russian Classics series in bringing Russian literature to the UK readership. McAteer examines the historical background to this series, exploring the circumstances of its creation while introducing the key figures involved (Chapter 1); presents a microhistory of one of Penguin's most prolific translators from Russian, David Magarshack, whose tenure spanned the 1950s and early 1960s (Chapter 2); discusses Magarshack's translation theory and practice in the light of both Soviet and more recent, predominantly Western, translation theory (Chapter 3); and finally, she gives an analytical account of changes involving new translators and Penguin's move to translating contemporary, Soviet-era literature from the 1960s onwards (Chapter 4). McAteer's account uses extensive material from the Penguin archive to reveal behind-the-scenes arrangements for (and discussions around) the translation of major works of Russian literature. In itself this material is fascinating, especially for those readers whose acquaintance with Russian literature began with translations from this series. McAteer's discovery of an unpublished manuscript on translation theory by David Magarshack complements her analysis of his commissioned work for Penguin Books, which is based upon archival sources. By contextualizing his ideas with reference to Soviet translation theory, she examines the significance of individual translators' identities and aspirations: as a Russian émigré, Magarshack was influenced by developments in conceptualizing translation that were happening in the USSR as well as the guiding principles of E. V. Rieu's Penguin Classics. He was also anxious to be recognized as an authority on literature both in the UK and in Russia. By comparing Magarshack's versions of Dostoevskii with those of more recent Penguin translators of the same novels, McAteer provides an in-depth diachronic analysis of translation approaches and strategies. McAteer clearly positions her study and arguments in terms of translation theory, signalling her subject's significance beyond Russian Studies. At times her terminology and theoretical references imported from Translation Studies seem somewhat heavy-handed and unnecessary; that knowledge of the background, training, situation, and so on of translators is essential to understand their motivation and practice is a sufficiently common-sense assumption not to require theoretical underpinning. Her arguments for greater nuance in translation theory are engaging and convincing, however. McAteer's point that Bourdieu makes 'over-generalised' [End Page 524] statements about the opposition between intellectuals and owners of industry and business (p. 150) is a welcome challenge to the former's rather dogmatic binary categories, which risk discarding the varied experiences and models of publisher–translator relations. Her history of Penguin's creation of the Classics series is a persuasive example of how complex such relations can be, and, indeed, how they change over time and between individuals. This book moves convincingly from theory to practice, describing the precarious position of translators in a world where the increasing pressure of commercial viability, as well as the shift from translating nineteenth-century classics to contemporary, Soviet literature, significantly altered Penguin's practice. McAteer demonstrates how analysis of archived correspondence, together with awareness of the evolving role of paratexts, can facilitate understanding of the social and professional contexts of translators for this Penguin series. This monograph will be of great interest to scholars of Translation Studies, since McAteer's nuanced and rounded approach to translation history provides an excellent case study of a major publisher's series of translated texts. Her observations on translation publishing culture point to very interesting changes not only in the formal status of translators, but also in their training, backgrounds, and professionalism. Penguin's Russian Classics form a fascinating aspect of the history of Russian literature in Britain, and McAteer's book will also interest scholars in the field of Anglo-Russian cultural relations and interactions. Emily Lygo University of Exeter Copyright © 2022 Modern Humanities Research Association

Legal Entanglements: Law, Rights, and the Battle for Legitimacy in Divided Germany, 1945–1989 by Sebastian Gehrig

Reviewed by: Legal Entanglements: Law, Rights, and the Battle for Legitimacy in Divided Germany, 1945–1989 by Sebastian Gehrig Sarah Colvin Legal Entanglements: Law, Rights, and the Battle for Legitimacy in Divided Germany, 1945–1989. By Sebastian Gehrig. New York and Oxford: Berghahn. 2021. xiii+327 pp. $145; £107. ISBN 978–1–80073–083–0. Sebastian Gehrig has written a detailed, scholarly, and very useful account of the legislative debates and tensions in East and West Germany during the Cold War: that is, at a time when the political legitimacy of the competing German states depended not least on their perceived adherence to international legal standards. This new study opens out a novel and important perspective on the 'two Germanies' not as merely divided, but as importantly and complexly entangled in the context of their shared national history. Among other things, Gehrig meticulously unpicks the entangled intricacies of East and West German citizenship law, offering crucial historical background for those seeking to understand the debates around Federal German citizenship laws and (right-wing) identity politics now. Law and rights, Gehrig demonstrates, were a key element in the Cold War battle for legitimacy between East and West Germany, even while the competing ideologies of the two states meant that terms such as citizenship and human rights had different meanings, which shifted over time. Consideration is also given to how post-war decolonization and the global development of nation states impacted on conceptions of law, rights, and the state, and how East Germany's branding of West Germany [End Page 515] as neo-fascist and neo-colonial accompanied the GDR's diplomatic efforts to be recognized in Africa as a nation state. In the context of the overarching narrative of legislative developments and entanglements, Gehrig offers fascinating micro-stories on issues such as the legal and political manoeuvring that drove the outlawing of the West German Communist Party (KPD) in 1956, or the domestic struggles over Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik in the early 1970s. In 1973 both Germanies were accepted into the United Nations, and Gehrig's study charts the establishment of international human rights norms in both Germanies, at least in theory. In the GDR, the author comments, 'legal realities remained a different matter' (p. 225); though the same could conceivably be said of the FRG, whose treatment of its prisoners from the domestic terrorist groups in the mid-1970s drew letters of protest to the Federal German government from Amnesty International (Gehrig does address problematic aspects of West German counter-terrorism measures in the 1970s, but not the highly controversial treatment of accused and convicted members of the terrorist groups in West German prisons). Gehrig notes that in East Germany citizens' rights were not absolute or basic, but contingent on individuals' participation in the socialist project. Crime in the GDR failed to abate in the way it was supposed to as socialism developed, Gehrig notes; but again, the problems of penal law and practice are not part of his study. Nelson Mandela rather famously wrote that 'no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails', and it would have been extremely interesting to see the penal codes and practices of the two Germanies contextualized in this otherwise comprehensive study. It remains, however, an admirable piece of work that not only does a very significant amount of meticulous groundwork, but provides new and fascinating perspectives on and insights into East and West Germany after 1945, and tracks the after-effects of that time to the present day in ways that should inflect thinking on citizenship and identity now. Sarah Colvin University of Cambridge Copyright © 2022 Modern Humanities Research Association

Novel Sensations: Modernist Fiction and the Problem of Qualia by Jon Day

Reviewed by: Novel Sensations: Modernist Fiction and the Problem of Qualia by Jon Day Josh Powell Novel Sensations: Modernist Fiction and the Problem of Qualia. By Jon Day. (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernist Culture) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 2020. ix+197 pp. £75. ISBN 978–1–4744–5839–9. In 2013, taking a break from my Masters dissertation on sensory modernism, I proof-read another student's philosophy dissertation on the problems posed to physicalist views of the world by 'qualia' (individual instances of subjective conscious experience). In 2021, I married the author of that qualia dissertation and it is pleasing to review a work which weds (sorry) the topic of my dissertation with hers. Noting that 'as a philosophical entity the quale is broadly contemporaneous with the artefacts of high modernism' (p. 5), Jon Day's study does striking historicist work in reading philosophical discussions of qualia in relation to the literary movement most known for foregrounding individual instances of conscious experience. It is surprising that this kind of work has not been done before. I am certainly surprised, and a little disappointed, that it did not occur to me back in 2013. The problem to which Day's title refers is not the one that qualia potentially pose to physicalism. Instead, while trying to evade philosophical disputes about the existence of qualia, Day is primarily concerned with the problem that the notion of the quale poses to modernist fiction and its study. In particular, Day stresses the degree to which the discourse around qualia problematizes the 'cognitive realist' understanding of modernism—the understanding that, through literary innovation, modernist writers were able to describe 'not just the functions of consciousness but also its phenomenological properties' (p. 12). The crux here is that qualia, as conceptualized in philosophy, cannot be captured in language, whether [End Page 493] that language is scientific, mathematical, or literary. Thus, as Day memorably puts it: 'if qualia do exist, then Flaubert's "mouldy colour of a wood-louse's existence" simply cannot be conveyed within language, however refined or experimental or accomplished that language may be' (p. 6). Perhaps, then, defenders of cognitive realism would want to deny qualia. This creates its own problems: by denying qualia one risks 'denying some of the very properties of consciousness that the novel, as a form, has often been celebrated for accommodating' (p. 6). To accept qualia, then, is to accept that literary writing cannot capture the phenomenological properties of consciousness; to deny qualia is to bring into question the existence of the very thing that modernist writing is supposed to be singularly deft at getting across: individual instances of conscious experience. In advancing his thesis, Day offers a range of incisive readings of prominent modernist writers. The standout chapter is undoubtedly the one on Joyce (Chapter 3). From this, Ulysses emerges not as an attempt to portray 'what it is like to be another mind', but a 'radical interrogation' of cognitive realist thought (p. 76). Elsewhere the chapter on Wyndham Lewis (Chapter 6) does excellent work in detailing Lewis's concern with a qualia-denying, behaviourist view of human subjectivity. Not everything works. There is something of a double introduction, which means the book is slow to get to its primary literary texts. Chapter 4, which covers 'Neuromodernism and the Explanatory Gap', contains a lot of historical detail that probably would have been better put into notes. Chapter 5, frustratingly for this Beckettian reader, takes a long time to get to its titular author, and suffers from lack of engagement with recent work on Beckett and perceptual experience by writers such as Steven Connor, Laura Salisbury, and Ulrika Maude. These, though, are minor points. The study should ultimately prove a fascinating read for anyone interested in finding new ways of thinking about literary modernism's engagement with the senses. Josh Powell Cardiff University Copyright © 2022 Modern Humanities Research Association

Anthropocene and the Gothic: An Interview with Justin Edwards


 Justin Edwards is a professor in the Division of Literature and Languages at the University of Stirling. Previously Chair of English at the University of Surrey and professor and head of English at Bangor University, he was elected by-fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge in 2005. Between 1995 and 2005, he taught at the University of Montreal and the University of Copenhagen, where he was appointed as an associate professor in 2002. He holds an Affiliate Professorship in U.S. Literature at the University of Copenhagen and in 2016-2017 he was a Fulbright scholar at Elon University, North Carolina. He is also a member of the Peer Review College for the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and a Trustee of the Modern Humanities Research Association (MHRA). Justin’s contribution to the study of Gothic literature started with Gothic Passages: Racial Ambiguity and the American Gothic, which examines the development of U.S. Gothic literature alongside 19th-century discourses of passing and racial ambiguity. In Gothic Canada: Reading the Spectre of a National Literature, he continued in the area by examining how collective stories about national identity and belonging tend to be haunted by artifice.

Pelevin and Unfreedom: Poetics, Politics, Metaphysics by Sofya Khagi

Reviewed by: Pelevin and Unfreedom: Poetics, Politics, Metaphysics by Sofya Khagi Sarah Gear Pelevin and Unfreedom: Poetics, Politics, Metaphysics. By Sofya Khagi. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 2021. xi+284 pp. $39.95; £36.50. ISBN 978-0-81014-302-9. In her detailed consideration of Victor Pelevin's literary output, from his short story 'Hermit and Six Toes' (1990) to his novel iPhuck 10 (2017), Sofya Khagi examines the techniques and theoretical preoccupations of a writer who 'likes to think' (p. 216). Khagi argues convincingly that Pelevin deserves scholarly attention. Whether one reads him in post-Soviet Russia, or in the contemporary West, Pelevin's damning observations about capitalism, consumerism, technology, and our resulting unfreedom are relevant to us all. Khagi's excellent Introduction shows how Pelevin's philosophical concerns and opinions about contemporary society are grounded in the theories of Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard, Herbert Marcuse, and Michel Foucault, which she discusses throughout this study. Her first two chapters analyse Pelevin's indictment, in his seminal Generation P (1999), of the consumerism unleashed in 1990s Russia. Chapter 1 situates the same novel alongside other dystopian fiction, drawing comparisons with Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, George Orwell's 1984, and Evgenii Zamiatin's We, while Chapter 2 scrutinizes what Khagi terms Pelevin's 'language politics' (p. 49): deliberate disruption of Russian literary language in order to intensify his critique of modern society. Using the central protagonist Tatarskii's advertising slogans as key examples of such subversive linguistic techniques, Khagi makes the case that this experimental use of language embodies Pelevin's beliefs about the degradation of contemporary society. The remaining six chapters build on concerns raised in Generation P to cover related themes in a wide-ranging selection of Pelevin's later works. Empire V (2006), according to Khagi, is concerned with biopolitics and with humanity as a biomass commodity exploited by vampires; Helmet of Horror (2005) and Pineapple Water for the Beautiful Lady (2010) deal with Pelevin's concerns about dehumanization, while illustrating his eschatological views with biblical and apocalyptic imagery. In the last two novels, the most likely outcome is an 'apocalypse of entropy' (p. 121). Chapter 6 follows Pelevin's exploration and exhaustion of the trope of alternative history; tracing intertextual references to predecessors, such as Boris and Arkadii Strugatskii and Dostoevskii, occupies Chapter 7. Finally, Khagi considers Pelevin's multifaceted use of irony throughout his texts, applied as much to his authorial persona as to the world he depicts. It is through irony, she contends, that Pelevin successfully introduces a sliver of hope into his predominantly hope-less texts. More broadly, Khagi traces the arc of Pelevin's thematic development: from preoccupation with Soviet ideology to the new focus on 'global techno-consumerism' (p. 4) which replaces the former after the 1990s. She also notes that Pelevin's solipsism, as expressed in his earlier work, has more recently evolved into a wider ethical regard for others. She counters those critics who accuse him of producing repetitious novels by pointing out that Pelevin's work addresses contemporary society and politics. Therefore any thematic stagnation reflects the stagnation of reality, rather than, as some critics suggest, Pelevin's contempt for his readers. [End Page 314] Perhaps Khagi's most notable claim is for Pelevin as a modern-day Dostoevskii. By considering both writers' concerns about contemporary society, their anti-Western sentiment, their hedgehog-like preoccupation with one central idea, and their characters' quests for self-improvement, Khagi demonstrates strong and convincing parallels between Pelevin and Dostoevskii. This thorough and thought-provoking exposition of Pelevin's œuvre provides a rich resource for academic readings of his work. In keeping with Pelevin's Zeitgeist-y texts, Khagi poses vital and timely questions about the true nature of freedom in an increasingly unfree world. Sarah Gear University of Exeter Copyright © 2022 Modern Humanities Research Association