Recently added articles from The Modern Language Review:
Statues and normalization.(Critical essay)
Oct 01, 2007; Hobson, Marian ... ABSTRACT After some remarks about the normalization of language through the preponderance of English, the paper considers the background to the normalization of measures in eighteenth-century France. It proposes that, long before the development of the metrical system in ...
Chaucer's Wife of Bath and John Fowles's Quaker Maid: tale-telling and the trial of personal experience and written authority.(Critical essay)(Character overview)
Oct 01, 2007; Arnell, Carla ... ABSTRACT This article examines the medieval influence of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales on John Fowles's postmodern novel, A Maggot. I argue that Fowles's fiction reimagines and ultimately transforms the Wife of Bath's debate about experience and written authority through the ...
The travels of ideology: Niccolo Machiavelli at the court of James VI.
Oct 01, 2007; Petrina, Alessandra ... ABSTRACT This paper analyses William Fowler's translation of Niccolo Machiavelli's Principe, reconstructing the historical circumstances of the work, and its author's political and cultural activity at the court of James VI of Scotland. A number of hypotheses are discussed: ...
Sappho, Mary Wakefield, and Vernon Lee's 'A Wicked Voice'.(Critical essay)
Oct 01, 2007; Maxwell, Catherine ... ABSTRACT Vernon Lee's Venetian ghost story 'A Wicked Voice' has received more critical attention than any other of her supernatural tales. The narrator Magnus experiences an ambivalent homoerotic attraction to the ghost of Zaffirino, a castrato singer who haunts him. This essay ...
Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and Girodet: illustrating the 'luxury' edition of Paul et Virginie.(Critical essay)
Oct 01, 2007; Cook, Malcolm ... ABSTRACT In 1806 Bernardin de Saint-Pierre published what is now called the 'luxury' edition of his novel Paul et Virginie. In 2005 Sotheby's in Paris auctioned a series of letters sent by Bernardin to the painter Girodet. These letters, studied here for the first time, offer a ...
Notions of evil in Baudelaire.(Critical essay)
Oct 01, 2007; Catani, Damian ... ABSTRACT This article seeks to resituate and revivify a debate of very long standing--the problem of evil--through a philosophical and literary reading of Baudelaire. Its objectives are twofold: first, to show that in the post-Enlightenment era Baudelaire makes a decisive ...
Camus's La Peste: sanitation, rats, and messy ethics.(Albert Camus)(Critical essay)
Oct 01, 2007; Davis, Colin ... ABSTRACT Critical readings of Albert Camus's La Peste (1947) tend to concede an element of ambiguity in the novel, but also to tie it to relatively clear and fixed moral positions. This is reflected in the novel itself by the narrator's endeavour to find clarity in a confusing ...
The ethics of science: Leonardo Sciascia and the Majorana case.(Critical essay)
Oct 01, 2007; Farrell, Joseph ... ABSTRACT The enquiry into the unexplained disappearance in 1938 of the Sicilian physicist Ettore Majorana takes the form of an inchiesta, a quasi-historical genre devised by Leonardo Sciascia, whose nature is subjected to analysis. Sciascia acknowledged a twin debt to Voltaire ...
Imperfect portraits of a postcolonial heroine: Laura Restrepo's La novia oscura.(Critical essay)
Oct 01, 2007; Davies, Lloyd Hughes ... ABSTRACT This article considers the conjunction between postmodernism, postcolonialism, feminism, and magical realism. The colonial legacy of Colombia provides for the opposition between timeless female values and the chronological urgency and linear motion of masculine ...
Beyond the shadows of solitude: self, desire, and (dis)embodiment in Ana Clavel's Los deseos y su sombra.(Critical essay)
Oct 01, 2007; Lavery, Jane Elizabeth ... ABSTRACT Mexican writer Ana Clavel's Los deseos y su sombra (1999) is a socially engaged text which explores questions of gender within a broad context. Its endeavour to challenge monological versions of historical truth and to reconstruct alternative conceptions of national ...
Portraits of the artist: Gerhart Hauptmann's Kollege Crampton and Michael Kramer.(Critical essay)
Oct 01, 2007; Corkhill, Alan ... ABSTRACT The problematic of artistry is a central preoccupation in several of Gerhart Hauptmann's Naturalist plays. This article focuses on two Malerdramen which provide snapshots of artists at critical junctures in their lives: Kollege Crampton (1892) and Michael Kramer (1900) ....
Rilke's 'left-handed lyre': (1) multilingualism and the poetics of possibility.(Rainer Maria Rilke)
Oct 01, 2007; Catling, Jo ... ABSTRACT This article traces the development of Rainer Maria Rilke's French verse in the context of his perceptions of language and translation and his emerging 'lyrische Zweisprachigkeit'. This is considered both in terms of his biographical trajectory, from the confines of ...
Remapping arcadia: 'pastoral space' in nineteenth-century Russian Prose.
Oct 01, 2007; Platonov, Rachel S. ... ABSTRACT This article examines the hitherto neglected role of space in the pastoral, as distinct from place. The concept of 'pastoral space' (based on archaic world models) is developed and proposed as a template for various physical settings. This concept of 'pastoral space' ...
Translating Voices, Translating Regions.(Book review)
Oct 01, 2007; Polezzi, Loredana ... Translating Voices, Translating Regions. Ed. by NIGEL ARMSTRONG and FEDERICO FEDERICI. Rome: Aracne. 2006. 421 pp. 19 [euro]. ISBN 978-88-548-0619-1. This useful and varied collection of articles takes as its focus one of the classic 'problem areas' of translation: the ...
Menippean Satire Reconsidered: From Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century.(Book review)
Oct 01, 2007; De Smet, Ingrid A.R. ... Menippean Satire Reconsidered: From Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century. By HOWARD D. WEINBROT. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2005. xviii + 375 pp. $60. ISBN 978-0-8018-8210-4. This is, in its primary focus, a study of the Menippean characteristics of the ...
De amore libri tres/Von der Liebe Drei Bucher.(Book review)
Oct 01, 2007; Chinca, Mark ... De amore libri tres/Von der Liebe Drei Bucher. By ANDREAS CAPELLANUS. Ed. and trans. by FRITZ P. KNAPP. Berlin: de Gruyter. 2006. x + 669 pp. 178 [euro]. ISBN 978-3-11-017915-6. Andreas Capellanus's treatise De amore has long been a central reference-point in the debate about ...
The Idea of Latin America.(Book review)
Oct 01, 2007; Castillo, Susan ... The Idea of Latin America. By WALTER MIGNOLO. Oxford: Blackwell. 2005. 224 pp. 16.99 [pounds sterling]. ISBN 978-1-4051-0086-1. Blackwell Publishing, in its Manifestos series, has provided leading scholars in the social sciences and humanities with a forum in which they are able ...
Creole Crossings: Domestic Fiction and the Reform of Colonial Slavery.(Book review)
Oct 01, 2007; Castillo, Susan ... Creole Crossings: Domestic Fiction and the Reform of Colonial Slavery. By CAROLYN VELLENGA BERMAN. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press. 2006. xi + 240 pp. $39.95; 21.50 [pounds sterling]. ISBN 978-0-8014-4384-8. In many ways, the term 'Creole' is the site where the ...
Die Wahlverwandtschaften: Transformation und Kritik der neuen Heloise.(Book review)
Oct 01, 2007; Brown, Jane K. ... Die Wahlverwandtschaften: Transformation und Kritik der neuen Heloise. By ANNELIESE BOTOND. Wurzburg: Konigshausen & Neumann. 2006. 97 pp. ISBN 978-3-8260-3186-1. This handsome, small book identifies many parallels between Goethe's Wahlverwandtschaften and several texts of the ...
John Stuart Blackie: Scottish Scholar and Patriot.(Book review)
Oct 01, 2007; Dochartaigh, Pol O. ... John Stuart Blackie: Scottish Scholar and Patriot. By STUART WALLACE. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 2006. 342 pp. 70 [pounds sterling]. ISBN 978-0-7486-1185-0. John Stuart Blackie was, indeed, a scholar and a patriot. He was a man of immense learning and wide ...