I I44 Reviews In literature,visuality can be found inboth description and narration. Its functions reach fromdescribing the characters' vision to symbolic and structural uses such as leitmotifs,symbols, and the incorporation of visual media. By comparing visual aspects of threenarrative textswith theircinematic interpre tations, Sandra Poppe investigates the relationship between the uses and functions of visuality in literature and film as well as questions of intermediality and of the theoryof description. The lastpart ofMarcel Proust's A la recherchedu temps perdu, Le tempsretrouve,and the eponymous filmby Raoul Ruiz, Franz Kafka's Der Pro cessand Orson Welles's Le proces/Ilprocesso, and Joseph Conrad's Heart ofDarkness along with Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now Redux arewell-chosen examples: not only do they represent a broad spectrum ofmodern culture, but they have also widely been acknowledged for the complexity of theirvisual descriptions and for the importance of visuality forsemantic and structural aspects. In the first,theoretical part, the study establishes forms bywhich visuality ispre sented in literary textsand in cinema, focusing on the relationship between narrative and descriptive elements. The second, analytical part compares different represen tations of visuality in the six examples. Poppe finds 'pure' description, a focus on the actual description of characters and places, mainly in theworks of Proust and Ruiz. Welles, she claims, uses visual aspects to connect his highly political cinematic interpretation ofDer Process to its literary model. InCoppola's free transformation of Conrad's novella, themetaphoric use of visual leitmotifs and of colours gives the two works a similarmeaning, even though they are set indifferent times and superficially tell ratherdifferentstories.Visuality in its many variations and functions,Poppe con cludes, is a common and prominent feature in all texts examined, 'a bridge between themedia' and even 'theaesthetic core of each individual work of art' (p. 32I). The study provides a thorough exploration of the concept of visuality and itsdif ferent forms and functions in literature and cinema. In the chapter on 'Visualitat in der Literatur' in particular, Poppe reaches beyond obvious aspects of visual repre sentation inwriting by exploring structural and semantic functions of visuality. Yet the study's strength-its thoroughness-also runs the riskof being itsweakness. The many details and the sometimes over-complicated language, along with thedifficulty of describing visual phenomena entirely through language, are occasionally indanger of obscuring the general sense. None the less, this is a valuable and broad study that enriches thediscussion of visuality as a feature of comparative interpretation. ABERYSTWYTHUNIVERSITY KARINAVONLINDEINER-STRASKY Sprachratgeber und Stillehren inDeutschland (I923-I967): Ein Vergleich der Sprach und Stilauffassung in vier politischen Systemen. By CLAUDIA LAW. Berlin: de Gruyter. 2007. XV+272 pp. E88. ISBN 978-3-II-OI8363-4. The best German is thatused by Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, and Luther. 'Schreibe, wie du sprichst', use verbs to refer to actions, rather than nouns, never use the pas sive, and keep your sentences syntactically simple. Avoid foreignwords. These are the main grammatical and stylistic recommendations thatwe read over and over again in style guides and prescriptive grammars from their very beginnings, which-for German-can be placed in the seventeenth century and which we can still find in any modern publication advising readers on the ills of language decline and the benefits of speaking and writing properly. Claudia Law's Manchester dissertation unearths very similar pieces of advice in her corpus of twentieth-century works. Her aim is to examine whether perceptions of good and bad language as shown inprescriptive works aimed at a lay audience-are affected by thepolitical system inwhich they are MLR, I03.4, 2oo8 I I45 published. Twentieth-century Germany proves an interesting testing ground with its rapidly changing political history, and Law defines fourperiods significant toher study: the Weimar Republic (I9I9-33), theThird Reich (I933-45), the early Federal Republic (FRG: 1949-67) and the young GDR (I949-1965). For each period she selects four pieces which were well-known and successful publications at the time. Her analysis is fundamentally divided into their treatmentof Sprache and their treat ment ofStil, and these sections are furthersubdivided intokey socio-political factors: with regard toSprache we find sections on the perceptions of language, namely the perception of language history...