Secondary Scholarship Research Articles

Notes on the Cambridge translation of Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason

This article mainly discusses translation issues in the two Cambridge editions of Kant’s Religion, while engaging in a briefer discussion of Pluhar’s translation of the same work. The aim is to correct single errors as well as patterns of questionable translation, and to do so guided by criteria of consistency in relation to Kant’s use of key terms. I argue that the English translations have contributed to misinterpretations of Kant’s philosophy of religion, although I make only passing references to the secondary scholarship.

Deborah Willis. The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship.

Readers interested in the Black freedom struggle of the nineteenth century will find Deborah Willis’s The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship a must read. While abolitionist portraiture and antislavery ephemera of the 1830s and 1840s have yielded some of the most iconic illustrations of the nineteenth century, this text reveals an equally robust image practice organized around Black soldiers, produced between 1860 and 1866, that continues to influence twenty-first century visualizations of Blacks in the military. Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery by Willis and Barbara Krauthammer (2013) might be the closest comparison to Black Civil War Soldier in terms of revelations about African American engagements with the camera around the question of freedom. However, Black Civil War Soldier contributes to a larger historiographic project that insists the abolition of slavery was the central motive for fighting the Civil War. Critical works such as Thavolia Glymph’s Women’s Fight: The Civil War’s Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation (2019) rebuff a larger swath of secondary scholarship organized around ideas about who fought and for what reasons. Yet Black Civil War Soldier is distinct in using photographs to assert the primacy of African Americans in the Civil War and freedom as their particular motivation for taking up arms. Willis organizes archival sources in ways that reveal the Black freedom struggle in visual media produced in a wartime context. By presenting readers with a vast collection of photographs, letters, diary writings, pension records, newspapers and contemporary art, Willis shows us that vision and visibility were of central importance to Black Civil War soldiers who fought to free loved ones and end the system of enslavement.

British Hymn Books for Children, 1800–1900: Re-tuning the History of Childhood by Alisa Clapp-Itnyre

Reviewed by: British Hymn Books for Children, 1800–1900: Re-tuning the History of Childhood by Alisa Clapp-Itnyre Hugh Morrison British Hymn Books for Children, 1800–1900: Re-tuning the History of Childhood. By Alisa Clapp-Itnyre. London and New York: Routledge, 2016. xviii + 306 pp. Alisa Clapp-Itnyre's British Hymn Books for Children is a standout product of the long-running Routledge (formerly Ashgate) "Studies in Childhood, 1700 to the Present" series. It is a self-confessed "labor of love" (xv). Clapp-Itnyre clearly brings to her scholarship musical expertise along with a deep affinity for the subject matter. As a result, readers interested in the history of music will certainly be drawn to this book and gain much from it. Just as importantly, however, it is also a significant scholarly contribution that offers new interdisciplinary insights and avenues of enquiry. It sits squarely within childhood studies, but with the added conviction that "our traditional marginalization of children's hymnody outside the fields of literature, musicology, art history, even history, makes those fields of study incomplete" (11). Culturally and geographically situated in nineteenth-century British (mainly English) Protestant hymn production, the book makes three major claims: that children's hymns constituted a "genre" that was "integral to the fabric of Victorian childhood experience"; that their "hymn singing was a context for immense empowerment of Victorian children"; and that "children's hymn-book production intersected with major aesthetic movements of the period . . . [thus deepening] our understanding of the aesthetic network for children and adults" (6). From all of this, she argues, "an empowered [albeit complex and historicized] singer emerges" (6). To advance this broad argument, the book is divided into clearly focused chapters that are each effectively organized around selected emphases or transitions. Chapters move from thinking about classed or gendered juvenile communities shaped by the act of singing; to the relationship between hymns and literature for children; to the ambiguities between designations of "adult" [End Page 311] or "child" thrown up by hymn collections; to visual representations of children in hymn books; to children as both subjects and agents of reform through various singing traditions; and finally to the ambiguities apparent in hymns that invoked images of childhood death, dying and children of life. Each chapter provides a mixture of critical and careful analysis (across and between a broad spectrum of published hymn books) and close reading (of selected hymns or groupings of hymns as case studies), augmented by such other primary sources as diaries, contemporary fiction and children's epigraphic traces. At each point, Clapp-Itnyre necessarily brings those sources into conversation with wide-ranging secondary scholarship, discerning larger historical or historiographical questions and issues thrown up by the source material. Where appropriate, readers are given helpful nineteenth-century context—for example, English educational developments and reforms (chapter 1), key missionary and philanthropic/social reforming movements (chapter 5), and adult attitudes towards children and death (chapter 6)—because in each case trends in children's hymn writing or singing either point to or are explained by larger historical processes. In her analysis she is also keen to elucidate nuances or to explicate how hymns as literature might disrupt previously accepted notions of childhood or periodization. Three examples will suffice. Hymn singing could be both divisive, socially or gender-wise (chapter 1), but at the same time it at least brought different groups together mentally: "they all sang many of the same hymns" (51) and children's hymns moved "fluidly between class contexts" (52). Similarly, hymn content points to "cracks in the continuum" (58) of nineteenth-century juvenile representations, from the supposed negation to later reification of the child in fictional literature (chapter 2). And the presence of cross-over hymns in adult or child collections (chapter 3) potentially complicates how we understand Victorian concepts of age as a category. At the same time, they suggest that "Victorians truly treasured their children, bestowing upon them the richness of their own 'adult' hymn tradition. . . . To treasure their children was, in more cases than not, to lift the child up to the adult in theology, music, and poetics" (136–37). While well-constructed, this book is not always easy...

Haunted Dreams: Fantasies of Adolescence in Post‐Soviet Culture By JennyKaminer. NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2022, xvi + 188 pp. $44.95. ISBN 978‐1‐5017‐6219‐2

Haunted Dreams: Fantasies of Adolescence in Post‐Soviet Culture By JennyKaminer. NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2022, xvi + 188 pp. $44.95. ISBN 978‐1‐5017‐6219‐2

Wang Anshi and Song Poetic Culture

Wang Anshi and Song Poetic Culture

Virtue, Piety and the Law: A Study of Birgivī Meḥmed Efendī’s al-Ṭarīqa al-Muḥammadiyya By Katharina Anna Ivanyi

Birgivi Mehmed Efendi (d. 981/1573) ranks among the most prolific and controversial scholars of early modern Ottoman history. However, despite his significance, especially for the Muslim revivalist tradition, we have seen very little scholarly interest in his life and work in Western academia, and certainly no dedicated studies in the English language. That is until now. Katharina Ivanyi’s examination of Birgivi’s monumental al-Tariqa al-Muhammadiyya (TM) marks what I hope will be a reversal of the status quo. This meticulous study (volume 72 of Brill’s ‘The Ottoman Empire and its Heritage’ series) departs from the typical historical/historiographical approach in Ottoman studies and adopts instead careful textual excavation and exploration along thematic lines. Along the way, Ivanyi engages with an impressive range of primary and secondary scholarship in several languages, including Ottoman, modern Turkish, Arabic, French, German and Bosnian. The end product is an engaging monograph replete with original insights. Neatly spread over five chapters, with extensive footnotes throughout, the book begins with a survey of Birgivi’s life, scholarly oeuvre and historical epoch, then examines the intellectual framework of TM, before presenting its close textual study of the TM in the final three chapters. The first of these (ch. 3) provides an overview of the structure and contents of TM, the second (ch. 4) addresses a key strand in the text, namely sincerity, and the last (ch. 5) explores issues related to the Ottoman moral economy, including Birgivi’s position on cash waqfs. Through her close analysis of TM, Ivanyi sheds light on Birgivi’s thought as it relates to practical ethics, exhortation and advice. Her most significant finding is that Birgivi’s project of individual and societal reform was premised on an uncompromising rigidity of approach that led to inevitable clashes with powerful members of the Ottoman state, not least Ebu’s-Sucud Efendi, Shaykh al-Islam of the realm from 952–82/1545–74.

Sea Change: Ottoman Textiles between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean

Sea Change: Ottoman Textiles between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean

Rethinking Women’s Dress Prescriptions in the Qur’an: An Extratextual Reading of Zina

Women's dress in Islam remains a contentious issue. Despite various perspectives on dress prescriptions, rarely are they based solely on the Qur'ān. This is also the case with exegetical works as highlighted in the works of contemporary Muslim feminists. However, these authors also fail to underscore the Qur'ān's own prescriptions on dress, preferring instead a general focus on modesty that is not explicitly linked to the Qur'ān. Responding to this trend in secondary scholarship, this paper undertakes a synchronic intratextual reading of what is arguably the key term in the Qur'ān's prescription of dress, zīna (adornment). This article argues that the Qur'ānic text lends itself to a paradigm of women's dress prescriptions that values certain general principles, such as not being sexually alluring or tempting, invoking desire and drawing visual focus.

The Cambridge Heidegger Lexicon ed. by Mark A. Wrathall

Reviewed by: The Cambridge Heidegger Lexicon ed. by Mark A. Wrathall S. Montgomery Ewegen WRATHALL, Mark A., editor. The Cambridge Heidegger Lexicon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. xxxviii + 867 pp. Cloth, $125.00 This colossal volume contains an impressive 220 encyclopedic entries on words and concepts perceived as being integral to Martin Heidegger's corpus. The entries are written by a veritable "Who's Who" of accomplished Heidegger scholars from diverse interpretive approaches and geographical backgrounds (though there are a few glaring omissions). The Lexicon also includes an extremely detailed biography, an exhaustive list of Heidegger's works, as well as a hearty bibliography of secondary scholarship. Although this substantial volume contains much of value for scholars of all levels, there are a few general shortcomings that the reader should keep in mind. To begin with, the inside flap boasts of a "comprehensive" collection of Heidegger's vocabulary. In claiming such comprehensiveness, the Lexicon gives the impression that only the words/concepts that were given individual entries mattered to Heidegger, and that other words/concepts that are not given entries are not as important to his thought. Such a structure, inevitable for a project such as this, runs the risk of deciding for readers which words/concepts are crucial to Heidegger's work, and which [End Page 611] are of secondary or tertiary importance. One might respond to this criticism by pointing out that no volume, no matter how "comprehensive," could consider every word/concept that was important to a thinker. But such a response proves the point of the underlying criticism: namely, that the very notion of a "lexicon" that would somehow comprehensively present the work of a thinker is bound to fall short in this respect. Second, although each entry is informed by extensive and often impressive familiarity with the secondary literature that pertains to the issue at hand, an engagement with that scholarship is largely missing from the entries themselves. Rather, most (though not all) of the entries are presented with dictionary like authority, as if the information being presented therein is somehow "definitive." (This is owed in large part to Wrathall's desire, as he explains in his preface, that each entry begins with "something akin to a definition" before delving more deeply into the issue at hand.) As such, the entries tend to lack the sort of dialogical exchanges typical of scholarly engagements (though there are many entries for which this is not the case). This issue is obviated a bit by the use of a "Further Reading" tab placed at the bottom of many (but not all) of the entries; yet, even with this, the impression remains that the entries are somehow settling the matter under consideration, rather than merely offering one scholar's informed understanding of it. This is perhaps less of an issue for the seasoned Heidegger scholar, who will likely already approach these entries with circumspection; however, it remains a risk for the tyro, who might mistake these offerings for the "last word" on the matter. In this way, Wrathall's intention that the Lexicon be used "both for a quick reference while trying to decipher Heidegger's prose, but also as a means to dive more deeply into scholarship on Heidegger's philosophy" succeeds on the first point but flounders somewhat on the second. The Lexicon thus presents itself as a comprehensive list of "key terms" that are "clearly and concisely" defined. In other words, it serves as a kind of standing-reserve of Heideggerian terminology, with the words neatly ordered and available for the reader's use. (Somewhat ironically, Wrathall uses the example of Zuhandenheit ["readiness-to-hand"] in order to show how subentries work, and this is precisely how the entries themselves come across within the volume: as neatly catalogued ready-to-hand definitions waiting around to be put to use by the Heidegger scholar.) In this way, the Lexicon can be seen as providing a kind of grid or frame—a Gestell, if you will—by means of which Heidegger's sprawling corpus is turned into, to draw on Wrathall's own definition of Gestell from the Lexicon, "a stock of goods" that sits "on call and...

Georgette de Montenay, Emblemes, ou devises chrestiennes (1567). Édition d’Alison Adams

This is a fine edition of a monumental work from the early French emblem canon. It contains an Introduction, notes on the current edition including explanation of some textual choices, a facsimile copy of Georgette de Montenay’s work, an annotated transcription of the facsimile, an extensive bibliography, an index of motifs and main ideas, a table of mottoes, and a table of contents. Alison Adams guides the reader between the book’s constituent parts, as well as through the dense forest of references and allusions found in the original work. Every page of the facsimile indicates the corresponding page in the annotated transcription, and vice versa. The table of mottoes is cross-referenced for both the facsimile and the transcription. Image reproduction quality is high, although the greyscale print will not make it seem that way to anyone accustomed to using Glasgow’s digitized copy online, from which these page reproductions are taken. This is an inevitable aspect of medium, however, rather than a failing of the volume in question. In the transcription, Adams’s explanatory notes on the motto, pictura, and eight-syllable verse subscriptio of each emblem are highly detailed, indicating where elements of an image appeared in other emblem books, what they symbolized there, then what they symbolize in Montenay; the ways the texts of each emblem interplay with the image and how that alters our understanding of the emblem overall; the specifically Protestant reading of motto, image, and verse, with their biblical allusions; and other secondary scholarship discussing the emblem. Montenay’s other poems, a part of this work that generally receives little critical attention, are extensively footnoted. Adams’s Introduction is an excellent account of the genesis of Montenay’s work and its subsequent publishing history. She discusses the dating of the first known edition (the 1567 ‘Copenhagen’ copy), making sense of the 1566 privilege and putting to rest any speculation over what was previously presumed to be a five-year delay between privilege and first edition, between 1566 and 1571. Adams also explores how this first printing alters any presumption of the date of composition of the texts themselves, and shows the implications for interpreting the work, especially when comparing it with contemporaneous events linked to the Wars of Religion. Of interest too are questions concerning how far Montenay was involved in the development of the emblem images, her known and possible travel, her marriage date, and her conversion to Calvinism as they relate to the writing of the verses. Adams elaborates on reprints and later editions, including the multilingual versions printed in Protestant strongholds. Where she excels is in her careful treatment of the data available, making clear what is established fact, what is the most likely scenario given what can be known, and what is currently unknowable. She avoids unfounded speculation that could serve any wished-for historical narrative, and as such provides a template for any scholar faced with historical records that are patchy at best. Adams has given us a model for how to produce a critical edition, accessible for both the new student and the established scholar.

An “Extension of the Occupier’s Hold”

Drawing from Frantz Fanon’s writings on racialized alienation and psychopathology, this paper argues that Fanon’s engagement with phenomenology shaped his framing of the sociogenic origins of racialized perceptions of criminality in French psychiatry and that such a novel etiology reflects a commitment to political transformation. First, I trace Fanon’s notion of sociogeny as it develops both in his early writings, and in secondary scholarship on Fanon that highlights the phenomenological dimensions of sociogeny. In the second section, I turn specifically to racialized conceptions of criminality within French colonial medicine and Fanon’s writings on psychiatry to trace some complicated aspects of his critique of colonization and its relationship to medical institutions, including the forced confinement of psychiatric patients. I then conclude by briefly returning to how Fanon’s conception of sociogeny functions in a phenomenological register, and I propose that Fanon’s interests in Merleau-Ponty are based on important shared political and sociological commitments across their respective writings. However, I propose that Fanon’s interventions in phenomenology during the mid-twentieth century contain core critical insights, not shared by his predecessor, that remain relevant for critical phenomenologists today.

Tolkien and the Classical World ed. by Hamish Williams, and: Tolkien and the Classics ed. by Roberto Arduini

Reviewed by: Tolkien and the Classical World ed. by Hamish Williams, and: Tolkien and the Classics ed. by Roberto Arduini Victor Parker Tolkien and the Classical World, edited by Hamish Williams. Zurich: Walking Tree Publishers, 2021. Cormarë series no. 45. xxvi, 414 pp. $32.00 (softcover). ISBN 978-3-905703-45-0. Tolkien and the Classics, edited by Roberto Arduini, Giampaolo Canzonieri, and Claudio A. Testi. Zurich: Walking Tree Publishers, 2019. Cormarë series no. 42. xix, 245 pp. $24.30 (softcover). ISBN 978-3-905703-42-9. Investigation of Tolkien's quarrying of medieval literature for his own works has been proceeding apace with good results for some time now. Tolkien and the Classical World focuses on the less developed study of Tolkien's use of classical (i.e., Greek and Roman) literature.1 Unfortunately, two methodological problems stand in the way. The first has to do with classical literature's pervasive influence during the medieval period. When Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings describes the siege of a great, walled city ruled by an aging man who does not himself fight and therefore relies on his son(s) to defend it, of course one thinks of Troy. But did Tolkien have in mind the Iliad itself or Roman retellings (e.g., that in Vergil's Aeneid) or medieval retellings (e.g., the Geste Historial of the Destruction of Troy on which he worked when compiling the glossary for Kenneth Sisam's Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose)? Or all of them at once or some combination thereof?2 Second, even when there is no direct link between a potential classical and a medieval source, either is often just as likely to have been an inspiration as the other. In The Lord of the Rings the Stewards of Gondor maintain a network of beacons. So did the kings of classical Persia ([Aristotle], De mundo, 398a), but then again so did the kings of medieval Norway (Snorri, Heimskringla, 4, 21); and Tolkien could have been thinking of either (or both).3 Before turning to commentary on specific essays, let me first characterize the volume as a whole. After a spirited introduction by Hamish Williams, it is divided into five sections: "Classical Lives and Histories" (Tolkien as a classical scholar as well as the influence on Tolkien of interpretations of classical history in regard to Númenor); "Ancient Epic and Myth" (focusing on Homer, Vergil, and the myth of Orpheus); "In Dialogue with Greek Philosophers" (Plato and [End Page 205] Aristotle); "Around the Borders of the Classical World" (largely the interactions of the Germanic world with the classical); and "Shorter Remarks and Observations" (one essay on pastoralism and one on music). Apart from the last catch-all these divisions are logical and hang together well. A useful Afterword closes the collection; there is also an index. Each individual essay at least shows that Tolkien could have drawn on the classical sources discussed, whether directly or indirectly; and all the essays are conducive to further discussion. In this way already the authors collectively provide a useful companion to Tom Shippey's studies on Tolkien's use of medieval literature, though there is still some distance to go before scholarship on Tolkien's use of classical sources reaches the level found there or in the volume edited by Jane Chance, Tolkien the Medievalist. That said, the essays in the volume here under review are much stronger when they discuss the classical sources directly (see, e.g., Peter Astrup Sundt's essay on Orpheus and Michael Kleu's on Plato and Atlantis) than when they rely on generalizations and summary analyses drawn from recent secondary scholarship which Tolkien himself could not possibly have known. It is, however, a different matter entirely when, for instance, Philip Burton discusses scholarship which Tolkien almost certainly worked with professionally (275). More work probably needs to be done on what sorts of secondary books on the Classical world Tolkien is likely to have read before this approach becomes fruitful. Finally, some of the essays content themselves with merely pointing to the presence of possible classical sources of inspiration, whereas the stronger ones attempt to demonstrate direct use.4 Under this...

The Rhetoric of Death and Discipleship in Premodern Japan: Sōchō's "Death of Sōgi" and "Kikaku's Death of Master Bashō." by H. Mack Horton

Reviewed by: The Rhetoric of Death and Discipleship in Premodern Japan: Sōchō's "Death of Sōgi" and "Kikaku's Death of Master Bashō." by H. Mack Horton Gary L. Ebersole The Rhetoric of Death and Discipleship in Premodern Japan: Sōchō's "Death of Sōgi" and "Kikaku's Death of Master Bashō." By H. Mack Horton. Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 2019. 142 pages. ISBN: 9781557291844 (hardcover; also available as softcover and e-book). In The Rhetoric of Death and Discipleship in Premodern Japan, H. Mack Horton offers his readers annotated translations of two modest texts—Sōgi shūenki (The Death of Sōgi; 1502), by Sōchō, and Bashō shūenki (The Death of Master Bashō; 1694), by Kikaku. Although these texts were composed almost two hundred years apart, Horton justifies bringing them together because they are both death accounts (shūenki) written by a disciple of a well-known master of linked verse. The texts are, he asserts, "among the most important death accounts in the premodern Japanese literary corpus" (p. xvi). Initially, Horton translates shūenki as "thanatographies" (p. xi). This may be an allusion to Harold Bolitho's coinage "thanatologues" in Bereavement and Consolation, but whatever the case Horton thankfully abandons this awkward neologism thereafter for the perfectly serviceable term "death accounts."1 According to Horton, accounts of the death of a well-known poet increased in number in the early modern period. Regrettably, he declines to investigate why this should have been the case: "The trajectory of the development of death accounts is complex and imbricated into the variegated history of death writing in its various Chinese and Japanese forms, a subject that would require a separate volume to detail. Suffice it here to say that The Death of Sōgi was an important precursor to the many accounts of the deaths of linked-verse poets that subsequently appeared during the Edo period" (p. 21). I must demur. The simplistic intertextual history proffered here—text X preceded and influenced the form of text Y—does not suffice as a historical explanation of either change or continuity. Horton is clearly capable of more and, I believe, he owes his readers more. After all, when he published an annotated [End Page 322] translation of Sōchō's journal in 2002, he simultaneously issued a separate volume that provided historical context for the poet's life and his journal more broadly.2 My dissatisfaction with this study does not seem to be widely shared, however, at least if the dust jacket comments of three reviewers are indicative of the state of the field of Japanese literary studies. Midorikawa Machiko clearly finds Horton's study to be more than sufficient, calling it "a model of what an annotated translation should be." For his part, Steven D. Carter lauds this work not only as a "masterful study, well researched and elegantly written," but also as one that provides "original answers to two important questions: how disciples of a dying master respond to his death in their own relationships and practices and how they represent loss and recovery in their own writing." Laurel Rasplica Rodd, too, praises the author's "meticulous scholarship and elegant translation." I do not question Horton's abilities as a translator. His renderings are accurate, and his copious annotations are based on an in-depth knowledge of the Japanese secondary scholarship. Whether his translations are "elegant" or not, however, is a matter of aesthetic and, thus, subjective appraisal. Suffice it to say that translating poetry is much trickier than translating prose. I have two intertwining reservations concerning this study: First, is this model of annotated translation sufficient as scholarship in the twenty-first century? Second, is the author's sociohistorical contextualization of these texts adequate and accurate? The book's structure seems to indicate that Horton has checked each box in the list of requirements for a "masterful" work in the academic genre of an annotated translation of a Japanese literary work. Horton's study in toto consists of 166 numbered pages, 24 of which are occupied by front matter. The translations of the two primary texts occupy only...

American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination

American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination

Pierre Boaistuau ou le génie des formes. Sous la direction de Nathalie Grande et Bruno Méniel

The work of the sixteenth-century polygraphe, Pierre Boaistuau, has long been studied by a modest number of experts. In recent years, their numbers have grown considerably. In the present volume, Nathalie Grande and Bruno Méniel have put together a collection of twenty studies that builds upon Jean-Claude Arnould’s edited volume, Les Histoires tragiques du xvie siècle: Pierre Boaistuau et ses émulés (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2018). If Boaistuau has hitherto been studied as a translator-compiler of histoires tragiques and histoires prodigieuses, the present volume asks us to consider these in the context of a broader œuvre: one that includes a treatise on princes, a history of the persecuted Catholic Church, and reflections on the dignity and misery of humankind. To this end, Grande in her ‘Avant-propos’ presents the volume according to three thematic continuities. Firstly, a pessimism oriented at the political situation of mid-sixteenth-century France: for Boaistuau, the prince is but a leading example of a declining humanity. Secondly, a pessimistic outlook on the whole of human history, suggesting an Augustinian approach to the notion of theatrum mundi (Boaistuau had unfulfilled ambitions to translate Augustine’s City of God). Thirdly, an innovative approach to storytelling, especially in short forms: Boaistuau would produce the first version of Marguerite de Navarre’s novellas under the title of Histoires des amans fortunez (1558), and, more broadly, he would establish the development of both the histoire tragique and the histoire prodigieuse in France. Grande and Méniel are to be credited with an editorial strategy that allows for depth and breadth. Most of the contributions focus on a single aspect of Boaistuau’s œuvre, for instance, his skills as a compiler and translator; his technique of declamatio; his portrayal of Islam. The more ambitious pieces consider several of Boaistuau’s works in a broader literary-historical context (notably the contributions of Jean-Claude Arnould, Hervé-Thomas Campangne, and Nora Viet), taking into consideration, where appropriate, the extent of Boaistuau’s reworking of Italian sources. Méniel’s ‘Postface’ offers insight on the progression of the volume as a whole, whereby Boaistuau moves from a socially inflected model of écrivain (‘artisan majeur du renouveau du genre narratif au milieu du xvie siècle’, p. 16) to a rather more mystical one (‘Le collectionneur est, d’une manière ou d’une autre, un dévot: il sait déceler la présence et la puissance du divin dans les éléments qu’il réunit’, p. 410). Méniel leaves us with a tentative suggestion: Boaistuau’s work might be said to be ‘maniériste’ insofar as it privileges strangeness and especially as it draws attention to its own presumptuous excesses of citation. In terms of secondary scholarship, the reader is generally well served. The coverage of French-language work on Boaistuau is very thorough; and although anglophone contributions are not neglected, works by Lyndan Warner (on the dignity and misery of humankind) and by Wes Williams (on monstrosity) are conspicuous by their absence from the bibliography. These omissions notwithstanding, this volume significantly advances our understanding of Boaistuau as an author capable of analytical perspicacity across a range of literary forms.

The Late Work of Sam Shepard

The Late Work of Sam Shepard

“Nothing is any longer one thing”:

Virginia Woolf's 1928 novel Orlando challenges the very validity of socially constructed ideologies by allowing its titular character to transcend not only the boundaries of physical sex, but also those of time and space. Thus, through the character of Orlando, Woolf explores the farcical nature of ideology by affording them a four-dimensional experience of their own life that exposes their own true nature at the same time as it establishes their connection to capital-N-Nature. Through a close reading of Orlando, interspersed with secondary scholarship and framed with reference to three of Woolf's other works—To the Lighthouse, A Room of One's Own, and Three Guineas, this essay situates Orlando's four-dimensional phenomena within Woolf's larger personal philosophy as it is articulated across her body of work.

The Steppe and the Sea: Pearls in the Mongol Empire by Thomas T. Allsen, and: Sudden Appearances: The Mongol Turn in Commerce, Belief, and Art by Roxann Prazniak

Reviewed by: The Steppe and the Sea: Pearls in the Mongol Empire by Thomas T. Allsen, and: Sudden Appearances: The Mongol Turn in Commerce, Belief, and Art by Roxann Prazniak Jennifer Purtle The Steppe and the Sea: Pearls in the Mongol Empire by Thomas T. Allsen. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. Pp. viii + 230. $45.00 hardcover, $44.95 e-book. Sudden Appearances: The Mongol Turn in Commerce, Belief, and Art by Roxann Prazniak. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2019. Pp. xi + 287. $80.00 hardcover, $30.00 paper. As narratives of globalization multiply, scholars and authors of popular nonfiction alike have increasingly turned their attention to the study of the Mongols and their Eurasian empire to understand the premodern processes of this phenomenon. Indebted to Janet Abu-Lughod’s seminal work, which identifies the Mongol empire as one of eight zones of transmission within a thirteenth-century world system, two books of 2019 embody the different methods current in the study of the Mongol empire.1 After World War II, European and North American [End Page 328] programs in Mongolian studies emphasized philology and linguistic facility in the languages both of the Mongol empire and also of the secondary scholarship written about it. Thomas Allsen’s posthumously published work exemplifies scholarship of this type. However, a newer mode of Mongol-empire scholarship is emerging in which authors— including some who are not expert in even one premodern language of the Mongol empire—write historical narratives across the span of the Mongol khanates based mainly on secondary literature and translations of primary sources. The research foundation of such works has greater affinities to popular nonfiction than to academic scholarship. Roxann Prazniak’s book utilizes this latter approach. Different as they are in working method and philological foundation, both Allsen’s The Steppe and the Sea and Prazniak’s Sudden Appearances make visual and material culture central to their narratives of political and economic history. Given the polyglot nature of the Mongol empire, the transmission of images, objects, and people played a significant role in establishing cultural continuity among geographically discontinuous lands outside the framework of language; such movement underpins the narratives of both books. Beyond a shared general interest in how mobility shaped the Mongol empire, Allsen acknowledges that “informal conversations” with Prazniak on Yuan-dynasty empress portraits that depict pearl jewelry and pearl-adorned boqtaq (Mon., headdresses) precipitated his project (p. 231); correspondingly, Prazniak notes Allsen’s engagement with her research (p. ix). These portraits, such as an untitled portrait of Čabi (Ch. Chabi 察必; 1225–1281), consort of Qubilai Khan (Ch. Hubilie han 忽必烈 汗; 1215–1294, r. 1260–1294), indeed figure prominently in both books (Allsen, pp. 52–55; Prazniak, pp. 177–94). The Steppe and the Sea has two main parts. The first, “From the Sea to the Steppe,” traces in eight chapters the mechanisms by which pearls entered new physical and cultural contexts. These chapters first establish contemporary and historical lexicons for describing and analyzing pearls (chap. 1). Then they consider means of acquiring pearls, from pearl hunting (chap. 2) to gifting, commodity trading, tribute paying, and forcible seizure (chap. 3). Allsen documents the amassing and stockpiling of pearls (chap. 4). His narrative subsequently transitions from pearl acquisition to structures of their value (chaps. 5, 6), including their symbolic value (chap. 7) as well as their [End Page 329] significance and circulation after the disintegration of the Mongol empire (chap. 8). Whereas part 1 principally addresses what might in classic Marxist materialist terms be considered the productive forces involved in the “making” of pearls as a commodity in the Mongol empire, part 2, “Comparisons and Influence,” subsequently addresses in six chapters what in similar Marxist terms would be the social and technical relations of production. Put more simply: part 1 follows the logic of production, including the production of value, and part 2 addresses topics that bear upon consumption. Part 2 begins with price and pricing (chap. 9) as well as marketing (chap. 10), then it extends the discussion to market substitutes and competition from fakes (chap. 11). Consumption is also analyzed in relation to routes of distribution (chap. 12) and the economic outcomes shaped by...

A Phonological History of Chinese by Zhongwei Shen

Reviewed by: A Phonological History of Chinese by Zhongwei Shen Zev Handel (bio) A Phonological History of Chinese. By Zhongwei Shen. Cambridge, New York, Port Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2020. A Phonological History of Chinese is an important and welcome contribution, which attempts to fill a glaring gap in English-language scholarship on Chinese language history. It is intended for “both the general phonologist and specialist of Chinese studies, as well as both beginners and experts” (p. xxxiv). The book is divided into six parts. The first presents the complex and daunting set of concepts and terminology that arise from the peculiar history of phonological analysis of Chinese. Mastering this knowledge is essential to an understanding of key source materials and the secondary scholarship derived from them. The remaining five parts correlate with the traditional phonological periodization of Chinese phonology: Old Chinese, Middle Chinese, the transitional period from Middle Chinese to Mandarin, Old Mandarin, and Modern Mandarin. This way of structuring the book implies a conservative—what some would call “Karlgrenian”—understanding of Chinese language history, as a series of northern standards proceeding in a straight line of direct inheritance from the Western Zhou dynasty down to the modern Beijing-based standard Chinese of the PRC. But the author ends up presenting a far more nuanced and valuable understanding of Chinese language history, one that emerges with increasing clarity through the later chapters. [End Page 568] The author, Zhongwei Shen, begins the introductory chapter by stating flatly: “The study of the phonological history of Chinese is in essence a study of a history of phonological standards.” (p.3). As a matter of disciplinary practice this is a fair description of much work in historical Chinese phonology by 20th-century linguists, but as an assertion of fact it is incorrect. So much so that it is contradicted by Shen’s very next sentence: “Historically, the Chinese language is a set of not just variants in time but variants in space as well.” The third sentence of the introduction clarifies that the opening sentence presents an authorial choice, not an immutable truth: “the purpose of this book is not to cover all the available historical variants in time and space, but to focus on the phonological standards of major historical periods.” What Shen’s book covers, then, is but one possible phonological history of Chinese, limited in perspective. It can be taken as an implicit rejection of the call made by Jerry Norman and W. South Coblin in 1995 for a new approach to Chinese historical linguistics that shifts focus away from artificially elaborated literary standards encoded in dictionaries of character readings and onto “the comparative and historical study of human speech in China” (Norman and Coblin 1995, 576). Ironically, however, Shen’s initial characterization of his own book proves to be overly reductive. The second half of the work, which deals with northern varieties of Chinese from the Song Dynasty to the present (i.e., the last 1,000 years or so), ranges far beyond descriptions of “phonological standards” to provide a detailed and fascinating summary of what textual sources can tell us about varieties of Chinese language spoken across space and time. And it is precisely this second half of the book where Shen makes the greatest contribution to Chinese historical phonological studies, and which makes this book so valuable to the linguist or China specialist with an interest in this subject matter. The first three parts of the book are of lesser significance. The first part, “The Keys to Traditional Phonology”, introduces the source materials, concepts, and terminology connected to Middle Chinese, the native phonological tradition that grew up around it, and 20th-century scholarship on its reconstruction. This material is the traditional starting point for teaching and research in historical Chinese phonology, and as many university students have learned, it is rough going. The terminology [End Page 569] is daunting, the concepts are esoteric and opaque, and the connections to actual language pronunciations are often tenuous or unclear. I suspect that for the reader who is not already familiar with this subject matter, the dense and abstract presentation will not be easy to follow. This is...

The Art of Persistence: Akamatsu Toshiko and the Visual Cultures of Trans war Japan by Charlotte Eubanks

Reviewed by: The Art of Persistence: Akamatsu Toshiko and the Visual Cultures of Trans war Japan by Charlotte Eubanks Max Ward (bio) The Art of Persistence: Akamatsu Toshiko and the Visual Cultures of Trans war Japan. By Charlotte Eubanks. University of Hawai'i Press, Honolulu, 2020. xviii, 314 pages. $72.00. In the last decade, scholars have started to explore the explosion of artistic activity in Japan following the defeat of militarism and the collapse of Japan's empire in 1945. This activity was part of a wider cultural project carried out by writers, intellectuals, and others to find new forms of political subjectivity to account for the past and to develop new liberatory [End Page 527] modes of cultural and social practice. Indeed, recent scholarship has revealed that some of the most intense debates over political responsibility and subjectivity took place in the domain of cultural production, both in the immediate postwar period and continuing later into the 1960s, including William Marotti, Money, Trains, and Guillotines (2013), Namiko Kunimoto, The Stakes of Exposure (2017), and Justin Jesty, Art and Engagement in Early Postwar Japan (2018), among others.1 Whereas much of this recent work has focused on the politics of artist groups and their collaborations in the postwar period, Charlotte Eubanks's well-written and extensively researched new book The Art of Persistence: Akamatsu Toshiko and the Visual Cultures of Transwar Japan focuses on an individual artist and extends the historical scope to the "transwar" period—roughly 1930–60—in order to explore the ways in which one "might have attempted … to live a socially engaged life as an artist across the ages of empire, war, defeat and protest politics" (p. 4). Eubanks's approach thus counters one of the dominant assumptions informing art historical (and historical) scholarship on Japan, in which 1945 functions as a clear divide, distributing artists and their creative works into clean pre- and postwar periodizations, what Namiko Kunimoto has called elsewhere the "postwar paradigm."2 Such a paradigm also elides the more complicated task of understanding the messy political valences across what might be called Japan's "long transwar" period between 1920 and 1960. Writing against this paradigm, Acts of Persistence thus not only contributes to art historical scholarship but can also be read along with other histories—literary, intellectual, and political—that have explored the experiences of imperialism and war mobilization in Japan during the 1930s and 1940s, and the reckoning with such mobilizations in the postwar period.3 The Art of Persistence centers on the experiences, writings, and artwork of Akamatsu Toshiko (1912–2000)—more commonly known as Maruki Toshiko—across the interwar, wartime, and postwar periods. Eubanks analyzes an impressive amount of sources that include Akamatsu's formal artworks and sketches, but also her travel diaries, publications, and manifestos, [End Page 528] thus combining artistic/visual analysis with close textual readings. Eubanks traces Akamatsu's settler-colonial upbringing in Hokkaido and her travels to Japan's South Seas Mandate (chapter 1), her work illustrating children's books during the Pacific War (chapter 2), travels to the Soviet Union (chapter 3), Akamatsu's political transformations and activities during the Allied occupation (chapters 4 and 5), through to what Akamatsu is best known for: her postwar pacifist artwork (chapter 6), in particular her Genbaku no zu (Nuclear panels, 1950–52), created and exhibited with her husband Maruki Iri (1901–95).4 Similar to Namiko Kunimoto's analysis of Katsura Yuki's (1913–91) transwar artistic activities,5 Eubanks hopes to expand our understanding of Akamatsu beyond just her postwar art and activism by exploring Akamatsu's "wartime activity and its moral implications" (p. 5), not to indict or vindicate, but to "narrat[e] a social history of art" (p. 3) through Akamatsu's individual experiences. To this end, Eubanks proposes a "microhistorical" analysis in which Akamatsu's "lived experience" between 1930 and 1960 and the artworks she produced open into larger "issues in modern Japanese history and visual culture: empire, colonialism, violence, and gender" (pp. 2–3). At times, Eubanks returns to a more conventional biographical mode of analysis whereby she contextualizes Akamatsu's primary sources by citing secondary scholarship on particular historical...