Recently added articles from The Modern Language Review:
A Lover's Complaint Cymbeline, and the Shakespeare canon: interpreting shared vocabulary.(Critical essay)
Jul 01, 2008; ... A Lover's Complaint was published in the 1609 Quarto of Shakespeare's Sonnet and was given its own ascription to 'William Shakespeare', but in recent years several specialists in attribution have questioned its authenticity. Brian Vickers has argued that the true author is John Davies of ...
Lies, damned lies, and statistics: epistemology and fiction in Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year.(Daniel Defoe)(Critical essay)
Jul 01, 2008; ... This article considers Defoe's use of statistical data in his historical novel A Journal of the Plague Year, a device generally considered as a means of supplying a work of fiction with verisimilitude. Re-evaluating Defoe's attitude to the science of political arithmetic and the earliest ...
George Eliot and racism: how should one read 'The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!'?(Critical essay)
Jul 01, 2008; ... A number of recent critics have accused George Eliot of racism and even anti-Semitism. Her essay 'The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!' has been widely cited to support these claims. Critics have tended to take passages from it as straightforward statements of Eliot's views which they identify with ...
Parisian literary fields: James Joyce and Pierre Reverdy's theory of the image.(Critical essay)
Jul 01, 2008; ... This article examines Joyce's Parisian works through the lens of Reverdy's aesthetic of the image, which was symptomatic of the intricate tensions between innovative ideas and the rivalries surrounding avant-garde practices, thus showing possible links between Parisian avant-garde ...
The epistemology of the mantelpiece: subversive ornaments in the novels of Guy de Maupassant.(Critical essay)
Jul 01, 2008; ... This article examines episodes from three novels by Guy de Maupassant, Notre Coeur (1890), Bel-Ami (1885), and Pierre et Jean (1888), and analyses how mantelpieces and ornaments become a privileged topos for the fictional investigation of epistemology and the phenomenon of disavowal ....
Exile, language, and trauma in recent autobiographical writing by Jorge Semprun.(Critical essay)
Jul 01, 2008; ... This article traces a link between Jorge Semprun's autobiographical representation of exile and loss in Adieu, vive clarte ... (1998) and his recent Holocaust-related texts, L'Ecriture ou la vie (1994) and Le Mort qu'il faut (2001), arguing that Adieu sheds important light on the aesthetic ...
Subject and space in Catherine Millet's La Vie Sexuelle de Catherine M.(Critical essay)
Jul 01, 2008; ... This article departs from the prevailing focus in critical interpretations of La Vie sexuelle de Catherine M. on the textual display of female sexuality, and seeks to explore instead the neglected subject of space in Millet's text. The analysis of the elaborate play with spatial concepts, ...
A D'Annunzian Donnafugata? A possible mantuan intertext for a key section of Il Gattopardo.(Gabriele D'Annunzio's 'Forse che si forse che no')(Critical essay)
Jul 01, 2008; ... A central episode in Tomasi di Lampedusa's Il Gattopardo describes how the lovers Tancredi and Angelica explore the neglected parts of the family palace of Donnafugata. This study suggests an intertext for Lampedusa's text in Gabriele D'Annunzio's Forse the si forse che no, where the ...
Unamuno, the reader, and the hermeneutical gap.(Miguel de Unamuno)(Critical essay)
Jul 01, 2008; ... Unamuno's work is full of apostrophes to the reader, and in his novels we find fictional readers as well. Using a number of well-known novels as illustration, this article considers how Unamuno places the reader centre stage and how this rhetorical device functions in forcing the reader to ...
Performativity in Bunuel's The Phantom of Liberty and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.(Luis Bunuel)(Critical essay)
Jul 01, 2008; ... The theory of performativity, as proposed by Judith Butler in Bodies That Matter, offers the analytical framework that elucidates Surrealism's undermining of intelligibility. The present analysis studies Luis Bunuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and The Phantom of Liberty by ...
But is it gay? Kissing, friendship, and 'pre-homosexual' discourses in eighteenth-century Germany.(Critical essay)
Jul 01, 2008; ... Many queer studies scholars have been too ready to read past cultures through the lens of homosexuality in its modern configurations. Taking as an example the correspondence between Gleim and Jacobi published in 1768, this article uses kissing between men as a touchstone for this issue. It ...
Constructing women's love of women: Sappho and Queen Christina of Sweden in the letters and work of the Viennese poet Marie von Najmajer.(Critical essay)
Jul 01, 2008; ... This article analyses how the Hungarian-Viennese poet Marie von Najmajer (1844-1904) constructs her sexual identity in letters and poetry of the 1870s. Her correspondence with Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830-1916) is a rare private commentary on sexual identity from a woman in this ...
Recent critical approaches to the work Of Isaac Bashevis Singer: a review article.(Book review)
Jul 01, 2008; ... The early twenty-first century has been very productive in terms of scholarship on the Yiddish writer and Nobel Prizewinner Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-91). This review article discusses two major anthologies of Bashevis criticism, two monographs exploring Bashevis's life and works, a ...
Aristophanes in Performance 421 BC-AD 2007: 'Peace', 'Birds', and 'Frogs'.(Book review)
Jul 01, 2008; ... Aristophanes in Performance 421 BC-AD 2007: 'Peace', 'Birds', and 'Frogs'. Ed. by EDITH HALL and AMANDA WRIGLEY. London: Legenda. 2007. xix+390 pp. 48 [pounds sterling]; $69. ISBN 978-1-904350-61-3. This volume, produced under the auspices of the Archive of Performances of ...
Love and Conflict in Medieval Drama: The Plays and their Legacy.(Book review)
Jul 01, 2008; ... Love and Conflict in Medieval Drama: The Plays and their Legacy. By LYNETTE R. MUIR. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2007. xvi+294 PP. 50 [pounds sterling]. ISBN 978-0-521-82756-0. In The Biblical Drama of Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) ...
Joannes Sambucus and the Learned Image: The Use of the Emblem in Late-Renaissance Humanism.(Book review)
Jul 01, 2008; ... Joannes Sambucus and the Learned Image: The Use of the Emblem in Late-Renaissance Humanism. By A. S. Q. VISSER. (Studies in Intellectual History, 128) Leiden and Boston: Brill. 2005. xxx+296 pp. 99 [euro]; $129. ISBN 978-90-04-13866-7. The emblem acted as a point of intersection ...
Phrase and Subject: Studies in Literature and Music.(Book review)
Jul 01, 2008; ... Phrase and Subject: Studies in Literature and Music. Ed. by DELIA DA SOUSA CORREA. London: Legenda. 2006. xii+2i2pp. 45 [pounds sterling]; $69. ISBN 978-1-904713-07-4. This collection, despite its enigmatic title, is largely devoted to questions of narrativity, a disputed area ...
Theatre of Estrangement: Theatre, Practice, Ideology.(Book review)
Jul 01, 2008; ... Theatre of Estrangement: Theatre, Practice, Ideology. By SILVIJA JESTROVIC. (German and European Studies) Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2006. ix + 181 pp. $55; 35 [pounds sterling]. ISBN 978-0-8020-9068-3. Theatre of Estrangement offers fresh perspectives, on the one ...
Die Rezeption Maurice Maeterlincks in den deutschsprachigen Landern (1891-1914).(Book review)
Jul 01, 2008; ... Die Rezeption Maurice Maeterlincks in den deutschsprachigen Landern (1891-1914). By DIRK STROHMANN. (Europaische Hochschulschriften, Reihe I: Deutsche Sprache and Literatur, 1926) Bern: Peter Lang. 2006. 806 pp. 100 [euro]; 65.50 [pounds sterling]. ISBN 978-3-03-910855-8. That ...
The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism.(Brief article)
Jul 01, 2008; ... The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism. By PERICLES LEWIS. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2007. 298 pp. 14.99 [pounds sterling]; $24-99. ISBN 978-0-52153527-4 It is a central objective of Pericles Lewis's Cambridge Introduction to Modernism to reintegrate the diverse ...