Work Reception Research Articles

Reception of Anton Chekhov's play "Uncle Vanya" in China

This paper examines several important translations of the play from the play's first appearance in China in 1930 to the present day, as well as research and analyses of the play by Chinese scholars. The author uses comparative-typological, comparative-historical, and interpretive methods as the leading research methods. Through the comparative-historical method the dependence between the socio-cultural conditions of the state and the peculiarities of the work's reception is established. The difference in the viewpoints of literary scholars and critics on the poetics and imagery of the play is explicated by the author of the work through the use of comparative-typological method. The scientific novelty of the research lies in the fact that some articles and books by Chinese critics and literary critics considering the peculiarities of the figurative structure and ideological content of A. P. Chekhov's play "Uncle Vanya" are the first to be included in the research turnover, allowing to establish the dependence of the perception of the work by Chinese readers on the socio-cultural conditions of the country. As a result, the author has shown that the perception of "Uncle Vanya" in China is closely connected with the social and political factors of the country, changing over time. The study showed that in the 21st century, more and more attention is paid to the artistic and literary aspects of the work.

INTERMEDIA NARRATIVE AND PERCEPTIO SENSATIO IN MUSIC CHOREOGRAPHY

The aim of the article is to consider the question: what do technological innovations bring to creative activities, so that we can see in them a new way of creating, and how does a work of multivariate nature affect the viewer, evoking in him/her a peculiar perceptio sensatio.The article presents an intermedia project based on distributed authorship, resulting from the collaboration of a music choreographer, a visual artist and a music theorist. Each of these people brings a different perspective and creation to the project, which integrates the guiding idea of "hearing and seeing" music, and even experiencing it multisensorially.Syncretic activities on the borderline of composition, improvisation and interpretation of music and its choreography, as well as the conscious use of audiovisual objects, expand the fields of artistic activity to reach the audience through multiple channels of sensory perception. The spectator does not perceive isolated fields, because the sensory world is a synthesis of different fields of perception. The same object that we see, we can touch, can be a source of sound and smell. In this constellation, the intermedia narration of the work is not only an experiment that influences the attractiveness of the musical choreography presented, but also an object of research into a new language, the use of which expands the concept of thinking about the form of the composition presented. The amplified dimensions of the work's reception make it an attractive form of expression, which at the same time becomes an artistic-cognitive hybrid.

Ideologies of Voice Type and Ravel's L'heure espagnole

AbstractDespite the advent of voice studies, opera scholars have yet to develop a thoroughgoing conversation about one of the most familiar elements of operatic vocal culture: voice type (categories such as soprano, tenor and the like). To address this, I suggest opera scholars analyse ideologies of voice type: the complex of ideas and practices that guide how individuals understand voice types and their relevance to the operatic experience. I devote the main part of this article to a historical case study of ideologies of voice type in action, focusing on Maurice Ravel, his 1911 opera L'heure espagnole, and the relatively obscure voice type Ravel assigned to Ramiro, the opera's male protagonist, the baryton-Martin. I argue that the characteristically modern ideology of voice type Ravel adopted in L'heure espagnole was unusual for its time and that this helps explains the work's reception.

‘the personal clutter… the painterly mess…’ Tracing a History of Carolee Schneemann's Interior Scroll

Carolee Schneemann's performance Interior Scroll has become iconic in twentieth‐century art history, yet little attention has been directed towards the artist's uncommonly active management of her work's reception and historicization. Schneemann seized the opportunities created by contemporary art's expanding publishing culture to document and disseminate her work as a professional artist, and communicated with a coterie of writers, curators and historians to generate a space for her work in the art‐historical archive. This point of agential labour was essential for a woman artist working prior to, and alongside, the emergence of second‐wave feminism. In this essay Schneemann's insistence on ‘clutter’ and ‘mess’ is adopted as a means of conceptualizing the artist's passionate and persistent incursions within art history. It proposes Interior Scroll as a keystone for understanding Schneemann's extensive multimedia outputs, by reading the performance and its reception in relation to the framework of écriture féminine, a popular notion in poststructuralist feminist philosophy at the time of the work's production.

Prospects for the Study of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

ABSTRACT Though a major figure in American cultural history, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was relatively neglected by literary scholars until the past twenty years. Recent scholarship emphasizes Longfellow's cosmopolitan and transnational vision, yet a great deal of work remains to be done to understand Longfellow the person, his work, and his work's reception in American culture and the larger world. A particular need is biographical studies, where better understanding of Longfellow and race, sexuality, and gender is needed. Much archival work, particularly on his unpublished journals, remains. Many of his major works have yet to receive the attention from scholars that they deserve. And his reception outside the US is a rich area for future work. However, the key question for the study of Longfellow will be reconciling the transnational vision of the poet with his reception in the US, where he was a key figure in the development of middle-class white culture in the late nineteenth and the twentieth century.

Musical Representation and Vivaldi's Concerto Il Proteo, ò Il mondo al rovverscio, RV 544/572

Vivaldi's concerto titles draw ambivalent reactions from historians, who see them as commercial hooks, rarely reflecting musical substance. But titles condition a work's reception, connecting it to a cultural context by which to steer a listener's reactions, both intellectual and affective. Eighteenth-century writers on aesthetics recognized the role of textual “ideas” in the reception of music. Vivaldi's Il Proteo, ò Il mondo al rovverscio is regarded as a “trick piece” in which the solo violin and cello parts are “reversed,” each being written in the other's clef. The concerto, however, invokes a deeper conception of the mundus inversus metaphor, in that it constitutes a remarkably sophisticated exploration of upside-down compositional practices. While the opening movement challenges notions of “correct” musical syntax, evoking the Carnival celebrations of the “world upside down,” the last presents a well-ordered example of Vivaldian ritornello form. Vivaldi included Il Proteo as the first concerto in a large group sold to Pietro Ottoboni in the mid-1720s, twelve of which bear titles. Some are as concrete as “The Four Seasons,” but others are more abstract, deriving from affective or intellectual subjects such as“Il riposo.” Il Proteo, in this context, seems especially sophisticated, cleverly satirizing some of the composer's own trademark compositional techniques. Its self-conscious treatment of style appears to address contemporary debates regarding music's ability to carry “meaning,” an ability that members of Ottoboni's Arcadian Academy seemed to deny but that others, such as the philosopher Antonio Conti, endorsed. Might Vivaldi have fueled these debates with a provocative set of concertos headed by Il Proteo?

Performing Salome, Revealing Stories ed. by Clair Rowden (review)

Performing Salome, Revealing Stories. Edited by Clair Rowden. (Ashgate Interdisciplinary Studies in Opera.) Farnham, Surrey, Eng.: Ashgate, 2013. [xvi, 217 p. ISBN 9781409445678 (hardcover); ISBN 9781409445685, 9781409474227 (e-book), $109.95.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index. One could be pardoned for assuming that this book is study of single operatic work, Salome, based on Oscar Wilde's play. It is, however, much more than that. This book presents series of essays dedicated to charting history of play's operatic and balletic stage settings and its development as opera on film. This detailed historical, cultural, and analytical survey is presented by authors from various disciplines, both within and outside of performing arts. The diversity in approach and perspective is strength of this volume, edited by Clair Rowden. Contributing scholars come from musicology, comparative literature, film and audiovisual studies, gender studies, English literature, and performance studies. Each author crosses disciplinary boundaries with ease, with reference to dance, stage design, political history, and institutional history. Interdisciplinary dialogue is used to assess various approaches to staged and filmed versions of Salome, which, despite its potential to shock and offend, has become repertoire staple. Fundamentally, book reveals as much about cultural context of these settings as it does about musical work. Much previous scholarship has focused almost exclusively on Dance of Seven Veils, both for its structural placement and explicit content, but Rowden's book draws out themes of and transformation across entire work, and importandy, illustrates how collaborative content in each reworking of this famous story has impact on its retelling. As she notes in introduction: the embodiment of Salome is focus of this volume (p. 1). The public perception to that of [Wilde's] private life (p. 2) informs attitudes about work's reception, and also about interpretation of Salome. Is Salome gazing at Herod through Wilde's eyes? Is Salome feminist (p. 11)? Wilde is presented as transitional figure (p. 4) who utilizes decadent style to develop new approach to drama. Notably Modernism's discontent with bourgeois institutions, mores and morality, values and hopes is explored to reveal that performance of Salome is a self-conscious which has been used as a vehicle for manipulation of concepts of performance and representation (p. 5). This original book is negotiation of multiple meanings, tensions and agency between its different interpretative layers (p. 7). Each version reveals something of its context through interpretation of challenging content (with reference to biblical figures alongside lurid sexual acts and incestuous desire, which was perceived as inappropriate for nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European society). The main issues in book all concern transformation in some form: notably, ways in which Wilde's play has been reinterpreted within opera (chapters 1, 2, 6, and 7), adaptions that resulted in response to censorship (chapters 2 and 4), and changing ontology of Salome as work and character over last century (acknowledged in all chapters). The response of music to text (Richard Strauss), and of dance to music and text (Florent Schmitt), reveals instability in meaning and interpretation (see chapters 3 and 5). In view of gender performance, Salome might be seen as an erotic autonomous female, stripper presented for male gaze as so hotly discussed in late-nineteenth-century works, or re-gendered image of Wilde himself, displaying lust and homoerotic tendencies. But there is also an allegory in ways mediums interact, as music and dance are able to work with and to replace Wilde's text, and in modifications to character (Salome as flirtatious innocent or temptress). …

Alvin Lucier'sMusic for Solo Performer: Experimental music beyond sonification

Alvin Lucier'sMusic for Solo Performer(1965), often referred to as the ‘brain wave piece’, has become a key work of experimental music. Its setup, in which the brain waves of a solo performer are made to excite percussion instruments, has given the work a central place in the discourse on artistic sonification. However, only a small number of the authors making reference to the work seem to have studied the score, and even fewer have given thought to the score's implications for performance practice and aesthetic reflection. This paper pays detailed attention to these yet overlooked aspects, drawing on accounts of early performances as well as the authors’ participation in a 2012 performance led by the composer. We also trace the history of live-electronic equipment used forMusic for Solo Performerand discuss the work's reception in sonification research.

Ernst Krenek's ‘Problem of Freedom’ inJonny spielt auf

AbstractErnst Krenek's operaJonny spielt auf(1927) was, according to the composer, concerned with ‘the problem of freedom’. But in what ways did it grapple with this problem? This article offers a new interpretation of Krenek's opera in light of the composer's views on freedom, developments in contemporary criticism, and the wider context of German Idealism. By focusing on constructions of subjectivity inJonny, I argue that, much as Krenek lamented the fact that the opera's fundamental message had not been taken seriously enough in the work's reception, he himself had presented this theme of individual freedom ambiguously in musical terms. As a work that mediated between ethics and aesthetics, consistently adhering to an irreconcilable dialectic between the individual and the community,Jonny spielt aufcontributed in important ways to the discourse that would stir so many Weimar intellectuals over the next few years to warn against the power of mass culture.

Staging the French Revolution: Cultural Politics and the Paris Opéra, 1789–1794 by Mark Darlow (review)

Staging the French Revolution: Cultural Politics and the Paris Opera, 1789-1794. By Mark Darlow. (The New Cultural History of Music.) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. [xiv, 421 p. ISBN 9780199773725. $65.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index.On January 27, 1793, Parisians in search of entertainment would have had the opportunity to attend the first performance of Le triomphe de la Republique, with a libretto by Chenier, music by Gossec, and choreography by Gardel. The work smacks of politicization, in the strictest sense of the word: text and sound directly record past and current affairs, with music borrowed from the festival repertoire of 1791 (Chant du 14 juillet) and 1792 (Choeur a la liberte, in honor of the Suisses de Châteauvieux). Its plot cast contemporary events in a generic light that is decidedly baroque, from the pastoral celebration of social harmony to the discordant interruption of a generale calling citizens to arms against a bellicose enemy, and from the music of martial unanimity and military battles to a ballet des nations that, retracing the story of liberty from ancient Greece to the present, culminates in the performance of Republican France. This was a few months after the proclamation of the Republic on September 21, 1792, in the midst of a revolutionary war effort that would soon intensify, and only six days after the execution of Louis XVI; was there ever a more blatant case of the government instrumentalizing the Opera? This, surely, is propaganda in its very essence.Not so, says Mark Darlow, in a refined argument that benefits from his extensive study of primary sources and his thorough knowledge of a secondary literature that encompasses history, politics, theatre, and music. In this volume, Darlow tackles several questions that concern the institution's transition from an Old Regime establishment to a national theatre. There is, first, the question of the supervisory authorities that regulated and funded the theatre. There is, then, the question of the Opera's compliance with official injunctions (and therefore of its degree of freedom). And finally, there is the question of each work's reception and the influence of this reception on operatic productions. To these questions, Darlow brings interesting answers.The Opera's continuous service throughout the revolutionary period, he observes, does indicate a consensus on the institution's pre-eminent importance: in the day-to-day operations of the Opera, this consensus allowed for both procedural continuity and discursive rupture, stability of repertory and tentative reform (p. 384). But it did not prevent confusion and competition among the authorities supervising the institution and its productions. Between 1791 and 1793, the authorities remained uncertain about the legitimacy, nature, time, and scope of the censorship they ought to exercise. Within the Constituent Assembly ( July 1789 to September 1791), legislators oscillated between principled proclamations of deregulation and a reflection on the educational mission of cultural institutions, as Darlow's reading of Le Chapelier's report ( January 1791) makes clear (p. 119ff.). At the same time, the apparent consensus on the virtue of private entrepreneurship did not prevent the Paris municipality from exerting its police power over the Opera (in the name of public order) or from allocating funding to theatres on a case-by-case basis, generally for patriotic purposes (p. 131). Successively under the control of the Crown (March 1789 to April 1790), the Paris municipality (April 1790 to April 1792), the private entrepreneurs Francoeur and Cellerier (from April 1792 to their arrest in September 1793), and the artists themselves (September 1793 to July 1794), the Opera continued to depend on subsidies for its survival. It was, then, vulnerable to the authorities' carrot-and-stick approach: institutional incentives (if not political clientelism) partially determined the Opera's repertoire. …

Kibbutz fiction and Yishuv society on the eve of statehood: The Ma'agalot (Circles) affair of 1945

The novel Circles (1945) by David Maletz, a founding member of Kibbutz Ein Harod, created a furor both in kibbutz society and among its readers in the Yishuv. The angry responses raise numerous questions about the status of kibbutz society at the time and the position of the writer in it. This article examines the reasons for the special interest in Maletz's book and considers its literary qualities. On the basis of the numerous responses to the book, it analyzes how kibbutz society was viewed in that period, both by its own members and by the Yishuv in general, and addresses the special dynamics of the work's reception in a totally ideological society. The case of Circles sheds light on the ways in which kibbutz literature participated in the ideological construction of the new society, while at the same time criticizing its most basic assumptions from within.

Royall Tyler's The Algerine Captive , America, and the Blind Man of Philosophy

Royall Tyler's The Algerine Captive, America, and the Blind Man of Philosophy Matthew Pangborn (bio) Royall Tyler's early-republic barbary-hostage tale, The Algerine Captive (1797), owns the distinction of being one of America's first novels and one of its least effective abolitionist texts. The story of a white American's enslavement by African pirates, based on historical events during the Washington presidency, Tyler's narrative has challenged readers desiring to rescue a compelling indictment of slavery's practice in the "Barbary states of America" from a satire that just as enthusiastically targets dueling, medical quackery, and classical education. 1 The work's reception has reflected its uneven focus. Hailed as the emergence of a "tough-minded realism" in the American imaginary and as proof the national character developed from sensibility, the novel has been criticized for its irreligion and its piety, for its didacticism as well as for its failure to sustain a "moral imperative." And it has been condemned as derivative of Roderick Random, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, Rabelais, Candide, Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative, and Montesquieu's Persian Letters, while lauded for its "intertextuality." 2 Some have suggested The Algerine Captive is not a novel at all, a suggestion I want to resist with the claim the text engages period philosophical issues that had great importance for the former colonies, ones the novel as a genre was particularly well suited to address. 3 If Tyler's text suffers from an identity crisis, in other words, it only too accurately mirrors the new nation's struggle to make a place for itself on the world stage. The Algerine Captive appeared, after all, at a desperate time in American history. Fearing contagion from the French Revolution, [End Page 1] re-absorption into the British Empire, and scalping-parties from the natives, Americans also faced internal revolutions, such as the Whiskey Revolt and Shays' Rebellion, which Tyler claimed to have played a role in ending (Tanselle 19-23). In the years leading up to and following the oppressive Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, the American experiment seemed at any moment to come undone, especially along the growing fault-line of slavery. It was in this divisive atmosphere that Barbary-captive narratives, whether factual or fictional (like Tyler's), seized the public imagination like no other subject, supplying a badly needed political cohesion. Indeed, public outcry over Muslim raiders' repeated snatching of American seamen led eventually to the Tripolitan expedition of 1801-05, America's first war against terrorism and an event that catapulted it into the first ranks of global naval powers. Tyler's tale of a young man who grows up during the War of Independence only to become enslaved on Africa's northern coast, published as the "true" story of one Updike Underhill, has been read quite rightly as trading on Americans' concern for their countrymen's distant sufferings. 4 In its examination of its audience's unifying interest in viewing such spectacle, however, the novel also explores the consequences of philosophy's and early science's own fascination with distanced seeing, one that has had an inestimable impact on American culture. Just exactly how early science's techniques of "ocular demonstration" helped shape modern Anglophone society has been the subject of continuing fruitful exchanges between the history of science and literary studies. John Barrell has shown, for example, how the seventeenth-century drive for an "equal, wide survey" of England's population resulted not merely in censuses or art conceived from a "prospect view," but a ruling class that deemed this commanding perspective its political birthright. Likewise, Mary Poovey has traced the way in which the "surveillance system" of double-entry bookkeeping contributed to a British political economy in which an ethical or theological conception of truth and value slowly gave way to an episto-factual one, which subsequent histories have identified as inherently expansionist. 5 Further studies have suggested that the creation of a spectatorial subjectivity helped develop an circum-Atlantic bourgeoisie trained in "a universal yet disinterested sympathy" (Baucom 207). According to such a formulation, repeated investment in images of suffering others in sentimental literature as well as visual and...

SCRUTINIZINGTHE BATTLE OF DORKING: THE ROYAL UNITED SERVICE INSTITUTION AND THE MID-VICTORIAN INVASION CONTROVERSY

The first major examplein what would become a long line of popular pre-1914 British invasion-scare narratives was the inflammatory 1871 taleThe Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer. Through its vivid depiction of a German invasion and conquest of Britain, this story was designed to serve as a warning to Britons about the necessity of securing the nation's defenses. The dramatic impact of this work on the Victorian reading public and the political culture of the era has been treated by a number of scholars, most notably I. F. Clarke. Yet little attention has been accorded to the reaction it elicited from the professional peers of its author, Lieutenant-Colonel George Chesney. This interdisciplinary essay – which joins the study of literature with military history and politics – seeks to shed new light on the circumstances surrounding this extraordinarily influential tale, as well as on the genre it popularized, in large part by examining its reception by British officers. It begins by describing the tale's prehistory and emergence into widespread popularity and then evaluates the work's reception within armed forces circles. Some of the most trenchant assessments of this literary text, it turns out, were delivered within the austere confines of the Royal United Service Institution, a body whose meetings functioned as the crucible in which British military and naval judgments were forged.

A Companion to Wagner's Parsifal

Reviewed by: A Companion to Wagner's Parsifal Anthony J. Steinhoff A Companion to Wagner's Parsifal. Edited by William Kinderman and Katherine R. Syer. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2005. ix + 364 pages + 13 illustrations. $90.00. Understanding Richard Wagner's mature stage works is far from an easy task. Textually and musically, the Ring, Tristan, Meistersinger, and Parsifal are complex artistic [End Page 561] creations, open to multiple layers of analysis and interpretation. Each of these music dramas also brings up weighty philosophical, intellectual, and political questions, with the result that there is not only considerable debate over the meaning of any given opera, but also an enormous amount of literature on the Wagnerian opus—in whole and in part. Indeed, so labyrinthine are the issues surrounding text (score), context, and scholarship for Wagner's works that even specialists can find themselves overwhelmed. In an effort to offer guidance to the riddle that is Wagner's swan song, Parsifal, Camden House has recently issued a volume in its series of companions to major artistic works, periods, and literary figures. At first glance, this Companion appears to deliver the goods. There are three essays that assess central qualities of the opera's—or Bühnenweihfestspiel (festival stage dedication piece) as Wagner called it—libretto. Mary Cicora examines Wagner's reworking of the medieval Parzival legend; James M. McGlathery probes the theme of erotic love in the libretto and its medieval sources; and Ulrike Kienzle investigates the drama's religious and philosophical dimensions. Next come a trio of pieces on the opera as music: Kinderman's account of Wagner's creative process for Parsifal, Syer's analysis of the Act I Grail scene, and Warren Darcy's fascinating study of "musical magic" in the opening sections of Act II. The volume concludes with two contributions dealing with the work's reception: Roger Allen's remarks on Houston Stewart Chamberlain as Wagnerian nationalist, and Syer's survey of Parsifal stage history. Substantively, however, the book is less than satisfying, especially as a reference work that should be accessible to specialists as well as those with more general interests in Parsifal. Of the eight essays, only two—Cicora's piece and Syer's on staging—provide the type of "background" information that a reader expects from such a volume. Yet, neither one is particularly imaginative or insightful. Cicora's essay is little more than a synthesis of recent work on Wagner's medieval appropriations. It is solid, highlighting Wagner's mystical, Schopenhauerian take on the medieval material, but pedestrian. Syer's article is more valuable, since very little work has been done concerning Parsifal on stage, particularly for the post-1945 period. The comments on Parsifal in the GDR are especially welcome. All in all, however, it is primarily a descriptive piece with only occasional references to non-Bayreuth productions. The remaining essays are more scholarly in their content, but ultimately of limited relevance to the task at hand. Symptomatic of this situation is Kinderman's own introduction. Instead of discussing the volume's aims and approach, as one would expect, he launches into a discussion of the challenges Wagner faced in constructing his libretto (raising themes that Cicora also develops) and his borrowing of the "Dresden amen" figure from Liszt. Similarly problematic is the piece on erotic love. While this is a theme worthy of extended treatment, McGlathery devotes most of his attention to aspects of the medieval texts (e.g. the character of Gawain/Gawan) that play little part in Wagner's account. Not only is Wagner's libretto given short shrift (a mere four pages), but McGlathery never once interrogates it from the perspective of nineteenth-century discourses on love and sexuality. Kienzle also takes up a central issue in her remarks: the long-debated question of whether Parsifal is a "Christian" opera. In her sprawling and overly lengthy piece, she does well to point out the variety of influences—Christian, Buddhist, and philosophic (Schopenhauer)—bearing on the work's unique Weltanschauung. But, precisely for this reason, her conclusion that we might still view this work's mysticism as [End Page 562] consonant with Christian tradition makes little sense. Nor...

"Nobody can translate": a obra enigmática de John Ashbery no contexto internacional

O objetivo deste texto, inicialmente, é apresentar um dos significativos poetas contemporâneos dos Estados Unidos, John Ashbery, e, por meio de alguns poucos exemplos, caracterizar a sua "poetry of belatedness" (Harold Bloom). Em um segundo momento, são questionadas as razões das diferenças do grau de reconhecimento de Ashbery no exterior, assim como a recepção de sua obra na Alemanha, na Inglaterra, na Austrália e na América do Sul.

'Full of All Knowledg': George Herbert's Early Modern Social Discourse by Ronald W. Cooley

MLR, I0 I .2, 2oo6 5 I9 'Full of all knowledg': George Herbert's Early Modern Social Discourse. By RONALD W. COOLEY. (Mental and Cultural World of Tudor and Stuart England) Toronto, Buffalo, New York, and London: University of Toronto Press. 2004. vii + 238 pp. $50; ?32. ISBN o-8020-3723-2. This would appear to be the first scholarly monograph entirely devoted to George Herbert's attractive, but deceptively limpid, treatise A Priest to the Temple; or, The Countrey Parson. His Character and Rule of Holy Life. It was first printed posthu mously in a collection, Herbert's Remains, assembled by Barnabas Oley, appearing in this form in i652 and subsequently (as a single volume, its text minimally modified) in I67 I and I675. Herbert's preface is dated I632, the year before his death at thirty nine- and three years after Charles I's dissolution of Parliament, an event Ronald Cooley mentions in passing on page 6I. The Countrey Parson is therefore unlikely to have been widely disseminated before theWar of the Three Kingdoms and the establishment of the Commonwealth. Proto-Caroline though its composition may be, its impact cannot have been fully felt before the Protectorate and the Restoration. Cooley does not focus on the work's reception (it was clearly not widely available in manuscript), placing his emphasis firmly on its genesis in the early Stuart English Church. How are we to genericize Herbert's treatise? Its subtitle's 'character' and its 'brief chapters and crisp aphoristic prose' (p. i6) lead Cooley to see it, persuasively, as a form of the Theophrastan 'character'. He may not be the first to do so, but he develops the idea further than his predecessors. (Later, on page 9I, he interestingly proposes the term 'georgic'.) Cooley draws attention to a light self-mockery in the work. Would that his own writing style were lighter and crisper than it frequently is. The most reader-friendly chapter is the sixth: here Cooley proposes, interestingly, that the poems in The Temple (I633) that can reasonably be established as 'later' appear to be moving away from the confessional 'God-man' conversation of the bulk of the Williams collection (? I626) to amore socio-economic 'man-man' one; in other words that the later poet Herbert (? I628-30) is already writing and thinking as a country parson rather than as Everyman. Thus several poems, especially 'The Glimpse', are illuminated as never before with reference to the contemporary crisis in theWiltshire cloth industry (pp. 152-58). Yet the historical framework constructed inCooley's first two chapters is tentative. He has read widely but seems not to have digested this reading in such away as to make his reader feel in sure hands. In his first chapter he falls into the familiar trap of telling us what he is or is not going to do, rather than getting on with it. In his second there ismuch speculation about possible influences. Cooley relies deferentially on a group of historical authorities with such radically different approaches to the period that it is not easy to distil his own from them. Still, as suggested above, when he subsequently homes in on The Countrey Parson itself, Cooley is on much surer ground. If the work's ecclesiological position seems to us at times difficult to define (advocacy, but not prescription, of celibacy; encour agement of the use of incense), its sense of an early modern social community-and the parson's central place in it-is not. In wishing to expound these, Cooley offers four areas for discussion: 'worship, social regulation, agricultural technology and land use, and domestic relations' (p. 5). Here, if presented at times a bit repetitively, there is some genuinely interesting and detailed micro-history; and one certainly gains a strong sense of what Peter Laslett, cited intermittently in this part of the discussion, famously called 'the world we have lost'. That this is so is probably truest of the discussions of the country parson's knowledge of herbal medicine and the practice of pagan-derived seasonal festivity, and of the kind of authority-perhaps among the 520 Reviews earliest to have been lost to his eighteenth- and nineteenth...

Beasts of Love: Richard de Fournival's Bestiaire d'amour and a Woman's Response by Jeanette Beer (review)

Reviews Jeanette beer, Beasts ofLove: Richardde Fournival's Bestiaire d'amouranda Woman's Response. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. Pp x, 214. isbn: 0—80203612 —0. $50. Characteristic ofthe courtly culture ofthe thirteenth and fourteenth century was a love of complexity, of multiple allusions, of games, and of wordplay. Richard de Fournival's Bestiare d'amour typifies this passion for ambiguity and complexity. The Bestiaire is an elaborately self referential and rich work that provides a view of love as the ovetthrow ofreason by passion; a tale told through 'parole et painture.' Each 'beast' presents a different aspect oflove or passion, and is illustrated by illuminations of the wide variety of animals referenced. In recent yeats, much has been written about the uses of animals to represent the passions, vices, or other human characteristics, and theit role in revealing to us something about the medieval understanding of human psychology as well as the sexual mores of the era. The lavishly illuminated Bestiaire lends itself to this kind ofstudy. An evaluation ofthe work's reception by its audience is aided by the Response, a challenge presented to its misogynistic views from the pen ofa late thirteenth-century woman. Jeanette Beer, currently Professor of French at Purdue University, has written extensively on this ttadition, and has prepared translations ofboth the Bestiaire and The Response (1986; West Lafayette; 2000). The present work is a slim but densely argued explication ofthe Bestiary's position and ofthe critique found in the Response. The work is richly illustrated with fine teptoductions from the fourteenth-century manuscript, MS Douce 308. Beer's work is divided into six chapters, ofwhich the first four arc on the text of the Bestiaire. Chapter One, 'Love and Reason,' essentially discusses the well-worn theme ofthe sabotage ofreason by love. ChapterTwo, 'Love and the Senses,' evaluates Richard's lament on his role as victim, and Chapter Three discusses the presentation of possible remedies for Richard's plight. The most important remedy available to him is, very predictably, foresight, or prudence. Chapter Four, 'Love for Women,' stresses the metaphor of love as war, complete with pleas for mercy. The love of women, like warfare, cannot bring satisfaction to Richard. By Chapter Five, Beer has turned to an assessment of the Response. This short work is enigmatic, since neither the name of the author, nor even the date of the work are known. Beer speculates about these issues, describes the extant manuscripts, and finally summarizes its themes. In Chaptet Six, she discusses the legacy ofRichard's work in latet litetaty developments. While the scholarship is excellent within the very narrow scope the author has defined for herself, this work has several significant flaws. First, the genre of the ARTHURIANA 15.2(2005) 64 REVIEWS65 work, the bestiary itself, is a fascinating one, and Beer's expertise could have allowed much more discussion and evaluation of the gente as a whole. Where does the Bestiaire fit in to its tradition? Its rather shop worn views had an audience: who was it and why? What were its authot's sources? More development ofthe context ofthe work and discussion of its antecedents would have been useful and welcome. While these aspects may have been addressed in Beer's other wotks (she refers to them in notes), they are essential to her explication here, and their absence is notable and weakens both the utility and the interest of the work as a whole. Secondly, while 'parole et painture' is an important concept and the reproductions are very nicely handled by the publisher, rhere is no real explanation of analysis of the images. What is their context vis-à-vis the written text? Are all the 'beasts' illusttated? Are thete anomalies, exclusions, novel iconographies? A work so lavishly illuminated deserves to have its 'painture' taken as seriously as its 'parole,' in part, as art historian Robert Calkins has often pointed out, because the manuscript was intended to be experienced as a whole, senatum. The manuscript authot had it illuminated and went to considerable expense to do so. Why? What is the role of the images? What was the social and cultural role of the recipient? How and in what...

Claudia Mayer-Iswandy, Günter Grass. 2002

Germanisten of a certain age will remember a time when such down-to-earth series as “Rowohlts Monographien” and “Köpfe des XX. Jahrhunderts” were the first port of call for those seeking a combination of biographical contextualization and basic factual information on a major writer. Belonging essentially to the genre of ‘literary biography', this new “dtv portrait” of Grass performs a comparable function, but does so at greater length and in more detail and is designed to be more reader-friendly and attention-holding without losing any of the authority of its predecessors. For a work of its length, Claudia Mayer-Iswandy's biography offers an admirable range of lucidly presented information on Grass the writer, the painter and sculptor, the politically engaged citizen, the essayist and commentator on affairs of state. His private life is treated with discretion, except to note where it has left its mark on the subject matter of his fiction. We are, however, afforded a rare insight into his creative impasses and moments of personal crisis and introspection. Responding to the cliché of Grass the writer as “Im Ausland geliebt – im Inland gehaßt”, the volume pays much attention to his work's reception, both in the German-speaking countries and, following Die Blechtrommel, internationally. Mayer-Iswandy documents the frequent mismatch between critical and popular responses to his fiction in Germany and abroad, with, in particular, örtlich betäubt and Zunge zeigen finding greater favour in the English-speaking countries. The reasons for this are not gone into.

(Re)Writing the Genetic Body-Text: Disability, Textuality, and the Human Genome Project

So this book... maps its particular investigations along double helix of a work's reception history and its production history. But work of knowing demands that map be followed into textual field, where the meaning of texts will appear as a set of concrete and always changing conditions; because meaning is in use, and textuality is a social condition of various times, places, and persons.

Fingierte Mündlichkeit? Zum Prolog des Wolfdietrich D

This essay, which takes as its starting-point an analysis of the prologue of the Wolfdietrich D, investigates the question of how far orality constitutes a generic criterion, and how reference to an oral source is to be understood in interpretative and aesthetic terms. A closely related question is that of the aesthetic perspectives underlying the work's reception. Wolfdietrich D tends to be dismissed by standard medieval literary histories as a second-rate and incompetent compilation, but it was regarded in the 15th and 16th centuries as one of the "bestsellers" of the genre. It is, however, conceivable that it was precisely the work's insistence upon oral transmission, and the fact that the narrative is anchored in a "heroic age" which defies more precise definition, that provided the agenda for ensuring the survival of the genre of heroic poetry - at least for some centuries to come.