MLR, 105.2, 2010 509 Women Writing Greece: Essays onHellenism, Orientalism and Travel. Ed. byVassi liki Kolocotroni and Efterpi Mitsi. (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft, 118) Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. 2008. 257 pp. 52. ISBN 978-90-420-2481-6. The basic successful claim of the eleven contributions gathered in this volume is thatGreece in themodern period has and has had the potential to complicate our notions of colonial and postcolonial writing patterns and their academic study. The long-drawn-out establishment of the new Greek nation state in the 1820s and 1830s, a process especially rich in complexity when itcomes tonegotiating Greece's position on amovable spectrum between several imperial spheres of influence, East andWest, allowed Greece as a distinct site of travel to offernew commentary on questions of travel, writing, and empire: 'Women travellers in Greece find this ambiguity [of the nation] particularly compelling, and, as this collection of essays illustrates, they observe and respond to the actuality of "new Hellas" in distinct ways' (p. 5). The assumption is that travelwriting, especially when arising from an imperial context, is linked to amasculine gender position of the traveller's superiority that inpractice may well be complicated and engage with 'feminization', of the traveller asmuch as of the other who is encountered, innew and subtle ways?a theoretical nexus that is explored especially in the contributions of EfterpiMitsi and Vassiliki Markidou dealing with Elizabeth Craven and Hester Stanhope respectively, as well as Christina Dokou's piece on theAustralian writer Gillian Bouras. Aside from the traveller's superiority, it is the link between Hellenism and nor mative gendered assumptions about civilization, Europeanness, and itsorigins that makes Greece such a privileged site for the scholars gathered here.While this is an important point (Maria Koundoura's contribution isparticularly fineas it links that theme to specific notions of literary realism), there is also a risk in some contributions of isolating and praising some of thewoman travellers' ambivalent statements about Greece and their 'eccentric writing' as a form of feminist em powerment and critique avant la lettre:the discourse ofHellenism itself in relation tomodern Greece is a complex one, and descriptions ofGreece that seem to defy an assured traveller's stance or focus on the alienation provoked by an encounter with Greece often have just asmuch precedent inmale travelwriters. One of thebenefits of thevolume is certainly itschronological rangewell into the twentieth century, including pieces on travellingwomen scholars of themodernist era (Martha Klironomos), theAmerican reformer Eva Palmer (Artemis Leontis), the contemporary writer Gillian Bouras (Dokou and Helga Ramsey-Kurz), as well as comparison between theAmerican writer and poet Patricia Storace (who is, in a nicely Freudian slip of proof-reading, renamed Penelope Storace in the introduction) and the East German writer Christa Wolf (Asimina Karavanta). At the same time, one of the greatest paradoxes of the book is the gap that remains between, on the one hand, a sophisticated, theoretical appeal to the 'no madic' strategies which many of thewomen presented here explored in order to 510 Reviews face, to sustain, and to articulate otherness, including their own, and, on the other hand, a strict adherence to a by now very well-established set of critical termino logy and arguments on gender, imperialism, and travelwriting, thatmakes many of the contributions seem like a conclusion, rather than an invitation to new work on women writing Greece. Princeton University Constanze Guthenke La Reception de Shakespeare en Allemagne de 1813 d 1850: propagation et assimi lation de la reference etrangere. By Christine Roger. (Theatrica, 24) Bern: Peter Lang. 2008. xxx+488 pp. 80.30. ISBN 978-3-03910-422-2. Christine Roger startsby asking the rhetorical question why anyone should want to concentrate on the critical reception of Shakespeare inGerman-speaking Europe during a period which on the surface looks like a time of dearth after thehighlights of the eighteenth century. The answer lies in thedensity and vitality of the reception during a time of complex transition. The focus of the book is at times extended to take in the years before 1815 (especially in respect of translation) and the second half of the nineteenth century (especially in relation to publication history), but its originality...