Reviewed by: Bertolt Brecht in Context ed. by Stephen Brockmann Karen Leeder Bertolt Brecht in Context. Ed. by Stephen Brockmann. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2021. xxviii+354 pp. £84.99. ISBN 978–1–108–42646–6. This compilation of thirty-seven essays is usefully structured into three roughly equal parts: i, 'Brecht's World'; ii, 'Brecht's Work'; iii, 'The World's Brecht'. It offers a wide range of international contributions, some providing tight summaries of recent books and others venturing into surprising new areas. The result is the sense of Brecht as 'an eternal shapeshifter', as dramatist Mark Ravenhill calls him in his Preface (p. xxvi), while Stephen Brockmann's Introduction demonstrates that Brecht's position in any context is best described as uncomfortable. Part i provides necessary and important context, organized along chronological biographical lines: Augsburg (Jürgen Hillesheim), Munich (Meg Mumford), Weimar (Ronald Speirs), early poetry (Dorothee Ostmeier), music (Joachim Lucchesi), political theatre (Laura Bradley); then looking to Germany (Stephen Brockmann), women collaborators (Paula Hanssen), and interviews (Noah Willumsen); before finishing with exile (Johannes F. Evelein), the German Democratic Republic (Mark Clark), and the Berliner Ensemble (David Barnett). Hillesheim considers Brecht's formative years in Augsburg, his early influences, and the deliberate self-reinvention as a 'city-dweller' with the move to Berlin. Mumford highlights the cabaret influence of Wedekind and Valentin and the desire to subvert the social order (p. 30); Speirs adds Chaplin to the mix and offers an overview of the early dramas culminating in the important Man Is Man. Some essays offer a new lens. Lucchesi traces the experiments of the early poetry sung to guitar, and shifts Brecht closer to Wagner's practice than one might expect. Bradley provides new insights on the less known political plays and links Brecht to Piscator. Ostmeier explores the resistant female figures in Brecht's early poetry, while Hanssen gives a cautious account of Brecht's lifelong collaborations with women. Willumsen tackles Brecht's fraught relationship with the genre of the interview, followed by four pieces in which Brecht is shown as 'obstinately non-assimilationist' (p. 95)—whether in Germany as a whole (Brockmann), the precarious exile of Hollywood (Evelein), the rigid structure of the new socialist state (Clark), or even in his own newly founded theatre (Barnett). [End Page 284] Part ii positions Brecht's work in relation to its various contexts: theatre (Marc Silberman), film (Theodore F. Rippey), photography (Tom Kuhn), fiction (Ernest Schonfield), and music (Vera Stegmann); Marxism (Anthony Squiers), ethics (Markus Wessendorf), dialectics (Joseph Dial), and Gestus (Sabine Hake); and East Asia (Antony Tatlow). This section will doubtless be of great use to students. Sil-berman offers an excellent overview of Brecht's practice designed to rouse the audience from 'its passive consumerist mode' (p. 116) to 'reveal sociopolitical causality' (p. 116) and stimulate dialectical thinking, but emphasizes throughout that it was developed from his collaborative work in the theatre. Hake's useful account of Gestus reiterates this central point, though a similar chapter on Verfremdung might have been helpful. Squiers's chapter on Marxism grounds the theories, tracing Marxist influences on Brecht, Marxist reactions to Brecht, and Brecht's own importance for subsequent thinkers, not only Benjamin, but also Althusser, Rancière, Jameson, and others. Rippey and Kuhn tackle aspects of the visual in film and photography respectively, revealing that this is an under-researched area, important for understanding Brecht's relationship to realism. Schonfield details Brecht's works of prose fiction, including the Threepenny Novel and the often underrated Keuner stories, also signalling the importance of these for later writers, while Stegmann's neat account of Brecht's work with composers covers Weill, Dessau, and Eisler. Wessendorf and Dial look at Brecht's ethics and dialectical thinking through the lens of Taoism (in Me-ti) and Hegelianism respectively, indicating the importance of both of these avenues to apprehend 'a world in constant flux' (p. 167). This is picked up in Tatlow's account of Brecht's many connections with Asian philosophy, culture, and aesthetics. Finally, Part iii explores the reception in various areas, generic, geographical and institutional: feminism (Helen Fehervary), biographers (Jost Hermand), editions (Erdmut Wizisla), fiction (Robert...

Reviewed by: The First Naipaul World Epics ed. by J. Vijay Maharaj Lynne Macedo The First Naipaul World Epics. Ed. by J. Vijay Maharaj. New Delhi: Bloomsbury India. 2021. ix+334 pp. £85. ISBN 978–93–90358–42–7. The First Naipaul World Epics is a collection of articles that focuses on Naipaul's initial seven books. This encompasses his first five novels as well as two travelogues—one of which is the highly contentious The Middle Passage (1962)— that were originally published between 1957 and 1964. The book is intended to be the first of a series of works that draws together critical thinking about the full range of the author's prodigious career, and is an offshoot of a digital collation project on Naipaul that is based at the University of the West Indies (UWI), St Augustine. The articles themselves were mostly written in the last fifteen years, with the exception of a piece on Mr Stone and the Knights Companion (1963) by John Thieme which first appeared as a journal article in 1984. As might have been expected, there are contributions by renowned UWI scholars such as Paula Morgan, Kenneth Ramchand, and Gordon Rohlehr, interspersed with writing by newer voices from universities around the globe. The selection of contributions, which vary in length, style, and critical perspective, has been guided by an emphasis on the 'element of affect that impacts readers of Naipaul's work' (p. 3), rather than any unifying, alternative, or controversial perspective on his writing per se. With such a varied content, it is no easy task to summarize what this book offers anew for those interested in the study of Naipaul and his early writing. It is certainly a worthwhile project to draw together articles that deal with specific elements of the author's output, but in reality this only serves to demonstrate how Naipaul [End Page 267] continues to divide opinion, even with his so-called 'comic' works of fiction. A few of the articles do suggest something of a more nuanced reading of Naipaul's early fiction than previously offered, including those by Bhoendradatt Tewarie and Aaron Eastley, who both argue that Naipaul's vision of Caribbean politics was far closer to reality than many would choose to acknowledge. However, writing about The Mystic Masseur (1958) or The Suffrage of Elvira (1959) from a twenty-first century perspective is necessarily a very different prospect from what was experienced by earlier readers, who felt only the lash of 'Naipaul's predominantly hostile assertions' (p. 203) without acknowledging that if 'read as metaphor, Naipaul's [. . .] first fiction [is] insightful' (p. 230). As far as Naipaul's travelogues are concerned, the articles by Kenneth Ramchand ('Did V. S. Naipaul Hate Trinidad?') and Robert J. Balfour ('Among the Unbelievable') also argue for a re-evaluation of at least some of the writer's more controversial views and comments. Both suggest that Naipaul may have expressed 'rage' at things he saw, but this was because of his passion for understanding what had been lost with the arrival of Islam (Balfour, p. 321) or out of his 'love for the island of his birth' (Ramchand, p. 199). However, both critics also acknowledge that this cannot explain away all of Naipaul's challenging and provocative remarks about the peoples and lands he visited, nor will any such understanding necessarily change the views of many who read his work. So where does this leave us? The editor asserts that these essays 'are meant to develop the idea that literature has power to transform our lives and to exemplify the value of continued attention to Naipaul's work towards this end' (p. 13). As this latest book shows, it is certainly true that Naipaul's early writing continues to be of interest to scholars (re-)evaluating debates about colonization and its aftermath, although it also appears that the value of those views remains as questionable and contested as ever. Perhaps that will continue to be Naipaul's greatest legacy—the power to continually challenge his readers, even if not necessarily in a transformative manner. Lynne Macedo University of Warwick Copyright © 2024 The Modern Humanities Research Association

ABSTRACT: Two markedly contrasting kinds of enquiry are displayed here. Laura Freeman gives a warm and sympathetic biographical account of Jim Ede, who championed major twentieth-century painters and sculptors, while Peter Dayan presents remarkable explorations of a wide range of poets and musicians over a longer historical period.

ABSTRACT: Das Mädchen vom Goldenen Horn ( The Girl from the Golden Horn ), a novel published in 1938 in Vienna under the pseudonym Kurban Said, was most likely written by Lev Nussimbaum, a multilingual exile from Azerbaijan, who converted from Judaism to Islam in Berlin in the early 1920s and published widely under the name Essad Bey. Although virtually unknown, this novel deserves an important place in the global history of German literature on account of its complexity and self-conscious play with literary and cultural traditions, especially the long-standing presence of Islam in German-speaking Europe, and the Orientalist tropes associated with it.

Reviewed by: Irish Modernisms: Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities ed. by Paul Fagan, John Greaney, and Tamara Radak Lianghui Li Irish Modernisms: Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities. Ed. by Paul Fagan, John Greaney, and Tamara Radak. London: Bloomsbury. 2022. ix+ 268 pp. £85. ISBN 978–1–3501–7736–9. This collection of essays expands the critical purview of Irish modernism by highlighting marginalized writers and fresh frameworks. Specifically, this project is conducted within the context of the new modernist studies, revealing a 'diversity of Irish modernist bodies, technologies, and ecologies', and exalting the local modernism, as opposed to the international modernism, in the pluralization of modernisms (p. 2). In the Introduction the editors, Paul Fagan, John Greaney, and Tamara Radak, aim to further broaden the rubric of 'Irish modernism' beyond the 'politics, ideologies, and ethics of canon formation', and dichotomized terms concerning Irishness and Ireland itself, setting the tone for the collection both to interrogate the received canon of Irish modernism and to reconceive Irish modernism in the process of historicizing the studies (p. 4). The volume is divided into three parts. The first enriches the Irish modernist canon concerning race, genre, gender, and language. For instance, John Brannigan demonstrates Hannah Berman's indelible contribution to Irish modernism as an Irish Jewish writer and translator. In the same vein, Elke D'hoker studies Ethel Colburn Mayne's highly experimental short stories on women's life struggle. Lucy Collins examines the poems and careers of Mary Devenport O'Neill, Sheila Wingfield, Freda Laughton, and Rhoda Coghill. Collins explores these poets' close association with the modernist theme of melancholia. Beyond this, Maureen O'Connor explores death and the non-human in Elizabeth Bowen's works. Lastly, Eoin Byrne compares Máirtín Ó Cadhain and Samuel Beckett in terms of language and style to emphasize the modernist writings in Irish as a minority language. [End Page 147] In the second part, contributors draw attention to biopolitics in Irish literature, pushing the boundaries of Irish modernism. Barry Sheils takes a psychoanalytical approach to skin, particularly blushing, and examines the complex cultural situations that confronted Yeats, Burke, and Joyce and literary texts such as Ulysses and Beckett's 'First Love'. The relationship between Revivalism and Irish modernism is investigated in Seán Hewitt's study of queerness in the works of Yeats, Lady Gregory, Synge, Eva Gore-Booth, etc. Similarly, it is a central question in Lloyd (Meadhbh) Houston's research on the role that the discourse of medicine played in the riot instigated by Synge's The Playboy of the Western World. Informed by Freud's and Derrida's theories on death and sex, Katherine Ebury brings Joyce and Yeats into conversation with the 1916 generation of writers on the executions of Robert Emmet and Sarah Curran. Additionally, Laura Lovejoy studies the complicated portrayals of prostitutes in Liam O'Flaherty's popular writings. Subsequently, Cleo Hanaway-Oakley explores the convergence of the Irish modernist writings of Joyce and Beckett, bardic tradition, and silent cinema. The third part of this volume challenges dichotomies between high and popular literature. Drawing on the rising conception of 'weakness', which celebrates uncertainty, incompleteness, and fluidity instead of closure and containment within the theorization and scope of modernism, Maebh Long argues that letters as a literary form facilitated a decentred and enriched network of Irish modernist writers. Jack Fennell argues that the anti-scientific sentiment in Irish modernism derives from a nationalistic desire to defend Gaelic culture against English discourse. Michael Connerty problematizes the high and low art forms, revealing the significance of the comic strips of Jack B. Yeats. Daniel Curran considers Thomas MacGreevy an Irish modernist war poet for his first-hand experience on the battlefields of the First World War and his depiction of the ekphrastic experience in verse. At the end of this part, Catherine Flynn examines Flann O'Brien's newspaper column, noting its relationship to his works of high literature and the ways this genre helped shape the Irish state. This book is essential for scholars specializing in Irish literature. It would be equally useful for researchers in the field of modernism because of its close alignment with new modernist studies and...

Reviewed by: Making Italy Anglican: Why the Book of Common Prayer Was Translated into Italian by Stefano Villani Anastasia Stylianou Making Italy Anglican: Why the Book of Common Prayer Was Translated into Italian. By Stefano Villani. Trans. by Frank Gordon. (Oxford Studies in Historical Theology) Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2022. xiv+ 292 pp. £64. ISBN 978–0–19758–773–7. Making Italy Anglican is an unusual and intriguing close study 'of failure' (p. 1)—that is, of the Church of England's unsuccessful attempts to use Italian translations of the Book of Common Prayer as a vehicle for missionary activity during the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. This case study, Stefano Villani argues persuasively, encapsulates the broader failure of English apologists to persuade many of the Italian elite to take the Church of England as their model for religious and political reform. The English national mentality of anti-papism led to the 'orientalization' of Italy (p. 15); the Italians (because of their Roman Catholic faith) were seen as 'exotic […] but corrupt' (p. 11), and in need of 'civilizing missions' (p. 14). Villani's work is structured chronologically, around accounts of the key editions. Part i begins with an account of William Bedell's (now lost) translation of 1608 and the broader religio-political context of Anglo-Venetian affairs; it then considers the possible (plagiaristic) use of Bedell's translation by Alessandro Amidei in his late seventeenth-century manuscript translation, and the hypothesis that Amidei intended his translation for the use of Italian Protestants in London. Part ii discusses the first complete Italian edition of 1685 ('a pointed gift' (p. 4) to James II and Mary of Modena), translated by Giovan Battista Cappello and promoted by Edward Brown. In reviewing the reception of Capello's and Brown's work in a number of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century editions, Villani argues that by this date they were largely intended as reading texts for studying Italian. Part iii analyses the subsequent editions that were intended 'as religious propaganda rather than a language resource' (p. 105), beginning with George Nott's 1831 edition, printed on behalf of the Anglican missionary organization SPCK. It considers the impact of the Unification of Italy upon Anglican missionary activity, and examines the Anglican presence in Malta, attempts to evangelize the Waldenses, and missions to Italian immigrant communities in Britain and the USA. Throughout, Villani deftly weaves the stories of individuals and their translations or editions into the much larger picture of concurrent religious and political affairs. One of the book's many strengths is its treatment of the complexity of religious and ethnic identity in this period, and of the mutable (and sometimes contradictory) nature of religious beliefs and allegiances. While the work's key focus is Anglicanism, there is interesting material on Roman Catholicism, Judaism, and Greek Orthodoxy. A weaker point in Villani's discussion of Italian–Greek identity is his treatment of Andrea Calbo: in highlighting Calbo's Italian identity, Villani rather neglects Calbo's Greek heritage and nationalism. Likewise, more extensive analysis of the complex ethnic, colonial, and national identities of the Ionian islands could have added further nuance. An especially informative aspect of the book is its detailed discussion of the Italian Protestant community in London, and the history [End Page 161] of its churches in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. This will be invaluable to researchers looking at Protestant religious refugees in England and their places of worship. The text is a translation by Frank Gordon from Villani's Italian, and reads engagingly and very smoothly. The volume provides a useful list of the Italian translations of the Book of Common Prayer and the location of copies, but there is otherwise no full bibliography, making it harder for researchers to navigate the very detailed endnotes (running to nearly a hundred pages). The index is reliable for the main text, but does not reference the endnotes. Finally, the appendix of Italian translations of the General Confession and the Preface of the Book of Common Prayer is a useful addition, and will be of especial interest to linguists. Anastasia Stylianou University of Cambridge Copyright © 2024 Modern Humanities Research Association

Hubert Montague Crackanthorpe (1870-1896) is well-known among those interested in the fin de siècle, although unfortunately this is more to do with his mysterious death by drowning in Paris at the age of 26 than for his writing, which has remained pre-dominantly out of print. Hubert Crackanthorpe: Selected Writingsthe 7 th volume in Stefano Evangelista and Catherine Maxwell's Jewelled Tortoise seriesis therefore a much-needed edition that successfully presents the range and importance of Crackanthorpe's writing.

Abstract: This article analyses the ethically suspect processes of identification and empathy mobilized by Miguel Dalmau's 2009 work of perpetrator fiction, La noche del Diablo . It draws on narratological perspectives on character identification and narrative empathy and on philosophical discussions on the necessity of attempting to comprehend the motivations of those who commit evil acts. Informed by these narratological and philosophical insights, the article argues that perpetrator fiction about the Spanish Civil War is a psychologically useful tool for expanding our understanding of how individuals commit atrocities and for enhancing our awareness of ourselves as potential agents of perpetration.

Reviewed by: Delw y Byd: A Medieval Welsh Encyclopedia ed. by Natalia I. Petrovskaia, and: Hystoria Gweryddon yr Almaen: The Middle Welsh Life of St Ursula and the 11,000 Virgins ed. by Jane Cartwright Helen Fulton Delw y Byd: A Medieval Welsh Encyclopedia. Ed. by Natalia I. Petrovskaia. (MHRA Library of Medieval Welsh Literature) Cambridge: Modern Humanities Research Association. 2020. x+ 183 pp. £37.85. ISBN 978–1–78188–949–7. Hystoria Gweryddon yr Almaen: The Middle Welsh Life of St Ursula and the 11,000 Virgins. Ed. by Jane Cartwright. (MHRA Library of Medieval Welsh Literature) Cambridge: Modern Humanities Research Association. 2020. x+ 133 pp. £39.99. ISBN 978–1–907322–59–4. With the publication of these two edited volumes, the MHRA Library of Medieval Welsh Literature now comprises six editions representing some key works of Middle Welsh prose and poetry, including court poetry, nature poetry, and historical writing. The series aims to make Middle Welsh texts accessible to students and scholars who may have little or no knowledge of the language and, as someone contracted to produce an edition for the series in the future, I welcome this initiative for the support of medieval Welsh literature and its importance within comparative medieval studies. These two new volumes perfectly represent the aims and achievements of the series. Each of them makes available a significant Middle Welsh text illustrative [End Page 604] of a specific genre of interest to medievalists. The first, Delw y Byd, presents a selection of chapters from a thirteenth-century Welsh prose translation of Book 1 of the twelfth-century Latin encyclopedia by Honorius Augustodunensis, Imago mundi (whose title, 'image of the world', is exactly repeated in the Welsh title). The second, Hystoria Gweryddon yr Almaen (literally, 'the story of the virgins of Germany'), is the first edited text of the Welsh Life of Saint Ursula, adapted from Latin versions by the poet and hagiologist Syr Huw Pennant, active in the first half of the sixteenth century. Though differing in dates, both texts exemplify the interest among medieval Welsh writers and patrons in Latinate non-fiction prose from the worlds of secular and religious learning. In her edition of Delw y Byd, Natalia I. Petrovskaia presents 67 of the 136 chapters of the Welsh text, justifying her selection on the grounds of'structure, use, and representativeness' (p. 27). In other words, she has selected chapters which are necessary to preserve the basic structure of the text in its geographical description of the world, chapters which were evidently the subject of discussion, and chapters representative of particular sequences, such as lists of countries, planets, or constellations. She provides a full list of chapter numbers in the complete text, making it clear which chapters have been selected for this edition. The edited text itself is not very long, representing just under 30 pages sandwiched between the slightly longer introduction and notes. A comprehensive glossary and bibliography complete the volume, enabling students of Middle Welsh to work their way through the text. Petrovskaia has provided her own editorial section headings, starting with 'The Structure of the World' and moving on to 'Earth', 'Water', Air', and 'Fire', following the structure of the Latin text. The two versions of the Welsh text that are found in the Red Book of Hergest (late fourteenth century) are clearly distinguished in this edition, and in general the complexity of the manuscript transmission of Delwy Byd is dealt with very adeptly. The Introduction includes a full account of the syntactic and orthographical features of the text, along with some reflections on practices of translation, such as the authorial challenge of changing Latin syntax into idiomatic Welsh prose. The notes cover textual, linguistic, and background information, with useful references for further reading. Petrovskaia's book is a very useful addition to the 1928 edition of Delw y Byd by Henry Lewis and P. Diverres, which was based on only three of the five medieval manuscript sources. In contrast to the manuscript complexity of Delw y Byd, the text of Hystoria Gweryddon yr Almaen survives in only one manuscript (Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Peniarth 182), making Jane Cartwright's...

Reviewed by: Words like Fire: Prophecy and Apocalypse in Apollinaire, Marinetti, and Pound by James P. Leveque Willard Bohn Words like Fire: Prophecy and Apocalypse in Apollinaire, Marinetti, and Pound. By James P. Leveque. (Studies in Comparative Literature, 50) Cambridge: Legenda. 2021. x+ 221 pp. £85. ISBN 978–1–78188–443–0. This book is a welcome contribution to avant-garde studies in Europe and North America. Devoted primarily to poetry, it examines the early literary activities of three giants who helped shape our response to the twentieth century: Guillaume Apollinaire in France, F. T. Marinetti in Italy, and Ezra Pound in England and America. To my knowledge, this is the only book-length study of all three poets, each of whom—officially or unofficially—headed a major literary movement. Associated with Cubism, Futurism, and Imagism respectively, they strove to create a revolutionary poetry that reflected the values of the modern age. Unlike the Italian leader, who was the official head of the Futurist movement, the other two led largely by example, juxtaposing their revolutionary poems with articles defending the poetics in question. Alternating between prophecy and apocalypse (or combining the two), as James P. Leveque demonstrates, they drew on biblical literature to establish various religious parallels. In particular, the author claims, apocalyptic attitudes and prophetic poses were used by all three men 'to establish poetry as the authoritative voice on the meaning of [the First World War] and the potential for the post-war future' (p. 18). [End Page 587] The following three chapters consider the role played by prophecy in the poets' early works, which in Apollinaire's case was far from negligible. As Leveque is not the first to point out, the French author frequently refers to personages and themes in the Bible. Published in 1966, Robert Couffignal's L'Inspiration biblique dans l'œuvre de Guillaume Apollinaire (Paris: Lettres Modernes) has been a valuable reference for many years. However, since Leveque's biblical knowledge is much more exhaustive, he is able to paint a more detailed portrait of the poet's indebtedness. The prophetic bent of Marinetti's works is not as evident as Apollinaire's because it assumes a different form. Arguing that the Futurist leader considered his writings to be a form of prophecy, the author focuses on Le Monoplan du pape (The Pope's Monoplane) and several Futurist manifestos. In his opinion, the latter represent 'perhaps the modern prophetic mode par excellence' (p. 64). Marinettti hoped to become a modern Joshua, he explains, leading the Italian people into the conquest of a Promised Land. In a similar manner, Pound also viewed himself as a poet and something of a prophet. Unlike the previous leaders' works, which tended to be optimistic, his own were marked by pessimism and a profound sense of loss. Since he believed that modern poetry was vastly inferior to traditional poetry, his works were filled with bitter satire and social criticism. Tn just this way', Leveque observes, 'do prophets acquire their authority to judge the world' (p. 105). Paralleling the previous section, the next three chapters examine the thematic role of the biblical apocalypse in all three poets' works. Defining the concept as 'a cataclysm with meaning', David G. Bromley insists that its ultimate purpose is not destruction but creation (p. 119, referring to 'Constructing Apocalypticism: Social and Cultural Elements of Radical Organization', in Millennium, Messiahs, and Mayhem: Contemporary Apocalyptic Movements, ed. by Thomas Robbins and Susan J. Palmer (Routledge: New York, 1997), pp. 31–46 (p. 35)). Considering each of the three leaders in turn, Leveque begins by noting that Apollinaire's poems were directed towards three distinct audiences: his avant-garde colleagues, the citizens of several European countries, and his fellow soldiers in the First World War. Although these three groups called for different strategies, his poetry constantly poses questions about individual identity and its relation to society. In particular, as the author demonstrates, the war prompted Apollinaire to imagine a brand new world, one in which the contradictions and binary structures of ordinary life would be absorbed into each other in a single apocalyptic moment. Devoted to Marinetti, the next chapter concentrates on Futurist theatrical...