Reviewed by: Zola's Painters by Robert Lethbridge Claire Moran Zola's Painters. By Robert Lethbridge. (Research Monographs in French Studies, 68) Cambridge: Legenda. 2022. xiii+ 230 pp. £85. ISBN 978–1–83954–079–0. 'It is difficult to dispute the oft-made claim', as Robert Lethbridge writes in his engaging and meticulously researched monograph on Émile Zola, 'that with the possible exception of Baudelaire, no other nineteenth-century writer enjoyed such a close relationship with the art of his time' (p. 24). What Lethbridge reveals, however, over the course of six chapters on Zola's art criticism, discussions on Cézanne, Courbet, Manet, landscape painters, and, interestingly, the Old Masters, is the complexity of, as well as the many paradoxes and contradictions that define, that relationship. The book could easily have borne a subtitle borrowed from one of the chapter subheadings such as 'tensions and contradictions' or 'reflections and refractions', since what Lethbridge unearths is the complicated history of nineteenth-century art and the figures which shaped it. Zola is important not only as a critic but also as a chroniqueur, although these roles were largely self-defined. In his articles for the annual Salons, he details facts and figures that remain historically significant. In 1876, for example, he notes 104,775 visitors in the opening week of the Salon, with 50,000 visitors on the final day, a Sunday, when there was no entry fee (p. 12). But it is Zola's role as critic that Lethbridge scrutinizes. Through careful reading of Zola's correspondence from the 1860s to the 1890s, Lethbridge questions Zola's artistic 'apprenticeship' and the relationships and personal and professional motives that moulded it. The writer's self-belief is never in doubt as from the outset, in 1859, shortly after moving from Aix-en-Provence to Paris, he distinguishes himself from 'des personnes qui se piquent de se connaître en peinture et [qu'il voit] au Salon prendre des ânes pour des vaches' (p. 16). Zola's immense contribution to nineteenth-century criticism is well known (between 1863 and 1869 alone he penned almost four dozen reviews on aesthetics, scholarly books by art historians, and illustrated editions), yet it is his writing on Impressionism, most particularly directly and indirectly on Manet, as well as what has been largely understood as a veiled portrait of Cézanne in L'Œuvre, that has gained most critical attention. What Lethbridge's book does in a subtle yet convincing way is to question the relationships that underscore these texts, both critical and fictional. The figure of Claude Lantier looms large, and the mutually admiring yet thorny relationship of Zola and Cézanne could, as the author notes in his Introduction, merit an entire book. In this chapter, which stands out for its sensitive portrayal of a friendship that unravels, not, as art-historical and literary legend would have it, because of Zola's damning and wounding fictional portrait of a desperate artist, but more because of political and ideological differences (most notably surrounding the Dreyfus affair), [End Page 624] religious views, and personal resentments. As Lethbridge argues, theirs was an estrangement that had 'multiple threads' (p. 59). In fact, this emphasis on the many interweaving facets of Zola's criticism and his own relationships and self-projection is what makes each chapter of Zola's Painters such a fascinating read. Lethbridge's discussion of Manet's portrait of Zola (1868) deserves a special mention in its careful delineation of another complex set of overlapping and unanswerable questions […] lodged somewhere between documentary reportage and imaginative play' (p. 111). In many respects, Zola's Painters offers an excellent example of why scholarly work on the nineteenth century is so important: the myths and half-truths, as well as the political, social, and personal complexities which shaped the art and literature of the period and their reception, need to be fully interrogated, even if we are left with more intriguing questions than satisfying answers. Claire Moran Queen's University Belfast Copyright © 2023 Modern Humanities Research Association

Reviewed by: Blood of Others: Stalin's Crimean Atrocity and the Poetics of Solidarity by Rory Finnin Katya Jordan Blood of Others: Stalin's Crimean Atrocity and the Poetics of Solidarity. By Rory Finnin. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2022. xiv+ 352 pp. $80. ISBN 978–1–4875–0781–7. In recent years, the question 'Chei Krym?' ('To whom does Crimea belong?') has become a litmus test for differentiating Russian political liberals from conservatives. [End Page 641] It has inspired two neologisms which have since become viral slogans: 'Krymnash' ('Crimea is Ours') expresses satisfaction with Russia's brash annexation of Crimea, and 'Ikhtamnet' ('They aren't there') captures Russia's refusal to admit to a military presence outside its own borders, as in Crimea and Donbass. These linguistic phenomena reflect both Russia's contemporary imperial ambitions and its long-standing interest in neighboring territories, not least the Crimean peninsula. Rory Finnin's new book demonstrates the lengths to which some Russian rulers are willing to go in order to realize that interest. Yet Finnin's monograph also shows the power of resistance and solidarity exercised by the Crimean Tatars in defiance of Russia's colonizing presence. Blood of Others offers a compelling reading of Crimean dissident literature in the context of Stalin's genocidal policies. It spans nearly two and a half centuries of Russian imperialism—from Empress Catherine II's annexation of Crimea in 1783 to the precarious situation on the peninsula today. Finnin's monograph appeared in March 2022, just one month after Russian troops officially crossed the border of sovereign Ukraine, and eight years after Russia had annexed Crimea for the second time. As he shows, both events, although celebrated in state media as a reunification or even a 'return home', remain both politically and culturally controversial in Russia. Finnin aims to understand 'the textual conditions' for those 'inconsistent, infrequent, even rare' moments 'when the work of the imagination makes us more attuned and responsive to the welfare of strangers' (pp. 8–9). Deriving his methodology from comparative literary analysis, he conceptualizes past events as 'vibrational phenomena organizing and reorganizing human relationships across cultural surfaces' (p. 9). He avoids representing any form of cultural nationalism in isolation, instead striking a delicate balance between critical analysis of historical events and intimate narration of private lives. In order to show just how deeply impersonal political decisions can affect individuals and shape the fates of generations, Finnin opens his narrative with the story of Liliia Karas, an ethnically Jewish woman displaced to Siberia from Kharkhiv during Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union. In 1963 she returns to Kharkiv, where she meets the poet Boris Chichibabin, whose readings sent 'shivers up her spine' (p. 3). Their private lives are among many to be shaped by the actions of Hitler, Stalin, and Khrushchev. Finnin returns to Chichibabin's story later in his book, weaving it into the tragic fate of the Crimean Tatars. This ability to simultaneously keep in focus events on two different scales—individual and national, private and public—makes for an engaging reading experience, despite the difficult subject matter. Finnin analyses the work of numerous authors and artists native to or associated with Crimea, from Pushkin (whose 1837 poem 'The Fountain of Bakchisarai' was set in the region) to the Ottoman intellectual Namik Kemal, the Crimean Tatar novelist Cengiz Dagci, the Ukrainian writer Lesia Ukrainka, and many others. Intentionally breaking with the traditional, dichotomous view of literature as 'canonical versus non-canonical, official versus unofficial, high versus low, centre versus periphery', Finnin challenges the tendency to delimit analytical itineraries 'at the borders of the nation-state, our tether to national predicates' (p. 9). Still, his focus remains the fate of Crimean [End Page 642] Tatars, excluding the cultural legacies of other ethnic groups to inhabit Crimea over the course of its history, such as the Greeks, Karaites, Armenians, and Roma. The Introduction provides an overview and explains Finnin's theoretical approach, and the main body of the monograph is divided into three parts. Part i, 'Possession', describes Catherine II's early attempt at colonization and Pushkin's contribution to Russia's mythologization of Crimea. Finnin balances...

Reviewed by: Laurence Sterne and the Eighteenth-Century Book by Helen Williams Shaun Regan Laurence Sterne and the Eighteenth-Century Book. By Helen Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2021. x+ 217 pp. £75. ISBN 978–1–108–84276–1. In this illuminating and often ingenious monograph, Helen Williams extends our understanding of the most striking visual and textual features of Sterne's Tristram Shandy, as they would have appeared to readers of its first edition (published in five instalments between 1759 and 1767). Six chapter-length case studies present forensic analyses of the novel's material and graphic devices: its 'manicules' (printed images of pointing hands); textual interpolations (notably the 'Abuses of Conscience' sermon in Volume 11); black, marbled, and other illustrated pages; and playful manipulation of catchwords and footnotes. If some of the textual effects under consideration here might easily seem small-scale, Williams's focus is nevertheless broad as well as narrow, as she situates these features in relation to an array of contemporary discourses and objects ranging from literary fiction to botanical illustrations, funereal iconography, and medical wrappers. Such novel contextualizations generate fascinating accounts of Sterne's creative practice with textual design, which confirm the author's close involvement in the printing and illustration of his narrative. A key aspect of Williams's method lies in separating particular devices into their constituent parts, her superb discussion of [End Page 611] the marbled page being a case in point. Before turning to the technique of marbling itself, Williams shows how unexpected any coloured page would have been, at a time when even the most prestigious works of literature rarely ventured beyond a touch of red ink to enliven a title-page, and always highlighted the (expensive) inclusion of colour as a distinctive selling point. As Williams observes, 'to include coloured ink and not advertise the fact', as Sterne does, constituted 'a lavish act of book design' (p. 105). The chapter goes on to present a complex contextual web—of medical packaging, obstetrics, and eighteenth-century rhinoplasty—as informing the meaning of the marbled page, situated as it is within an instalment of Tristram Shandy concerned with Tristram's safe delivery and the emasculating, nose-crushing efficacy of Dr Slop's forceps. Elsewhere, a chapter on the interpolated sermon shows how Sterne comically reverses the conventions of printed plays by placing the 'main dialogue', rather than stage instructions, within square brackets (p. 94). Throughout the study, Williams is not afraid to take analytical risks, pinpointing precursors that initially seem tangential but which ultimately reveal the provenance of particular effects. This is not least the case in a final chapter that aligns Trim's famous 'flourish', and the diagrammatic lines used to convey Tristram's narrative progress, with developing conventions for signifying movement in contemporary dance manuals. Beyond these bravura readings, there are a few surprising omissions and missed opportunities. One particular 'eighteenth-century book' notable by its absence is Sterne's other well-known work of fiction, A Sentimental Journey (1768), which Williams barely mentions. More broadly, the study would have benefited from fuller elaboration of the conceptual framework underpinning its inventive case studies. Issues around authorial originality and literary property, for instance, are raised in the opening chapter on manicules—yet the idea of originality, especially, is crucial to Williams's (repeated) claim for Sterne's 'unprecedented and surprising' use of available textual resources (p. 123). While a four-page coda reflects nicely on Sterne's frontispieces and marketing savvy, a chapter-length conclusion might have addressed more extensively how Sterne's textual-material practice corresponds to discussions of originality during the period itself, such as Edward Young's Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), a key work on the subject that was published in the same year as Tristram Shandy's first instalment. Laurence Sterne and the Eighteenth-Century Book is nonetheless a substantial and insightful study, which takes us significantly beyond previous discussions of Sterne's relationship to the book as material and visual artefact. Williams's account is itself original in two main respects: in the intensive and discriminating attention it accords the bookish features it examines and—as Williams herself contends—in its...

Reviewed by: Entre versos y notas: canción de autor en español ed. by Francisca Noguerol and Javier San José Lera Stuart Green Entre versos y notas: canción de autor en español. Ed. by Francisca Noguerol and Javier San José Lera. Kassel: Reichenberger. 2021. vi+278 pp. €39. ISBN 978–3–967280–22–7. In late 2015, as my colleague Isabelle Marc and I finalized our edited volume The Singer-Songwriter in Europe (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), we decided not to mention that betting companies had for some years been touting Bob Dylan as a potential winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Instead, we opted to mention his award in 1990 of the title of Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture to exemplify the cultural prestige of the singer-songwriter figure. Six months after our book appeared in print the following March, the Nobel Committee announced its decision to give him the prize, triggering a heated public debate about the validity of Dylan’s award. The lines of argument employed in this debate are outlined usefully in Alba Agraz Ortiz and Sheila Pastor’s chapter here on responses to the news in the Spanish media. Besides protestations that it was a publicity stunt, that others deserved it more, or that it should celebrate the achievements of someone not already a world-famous figure, two other questions sit at the core of the volume edited by Francisca Noguerol and Javier San José Lera: can song be considered literature and can popular song achieve the status of good literature? Answering both in the affirmative, this collection looks exclusively at the canción de autor as that musical form deemed to possess a ‘calidad literaria, que explica la posibilidad de estudiar las letras desde el costado filológico’, as Noguerol explains in her Introduction (p. 5). This facet of the canción de autor, and the figure of the singer-songwriter more generally, is explored in the first two chapters, open-endedly in the case of Javier García Rodríguez’s reflections on its place in contemporary Spanish letters, more categorically in Emilio de Miguel’s first chapter (‘Es lenguaje elaborado con voluntad de estilo y con mérito objetivo. Es literatura’, p. 35). The literary analysis of song lyrics dominates many of the chapters that follow. Most interesting among them are chapters by Rocío Rodríguez Ferrer and Sabrina Riva on the musical adaptations of the poems of Miguel Hernández by artists such as Víctor Jara and Joan Manuel Serrat. Here, the authors provide detailed studies of the transformations undergone by Hernández’s verse and the often subtle meanings to which such changes give rise, highlighting the crucial significance of transnational dialogues facilitated by this process. Little recognition is given to the musical settings of these poems, however. Likewise, Lorena Peña Jiménez and Carmen Rodríguez Martín’s examination of how Cecilia challenged dominant models of femininity in late Francoism pays virtually no attention to how the power of her words might be strengthened—and even carried—by other unique aspects of her [End Page 409] artistry, such as her voice and orchestral instrumentation. Even a chapter as illuminating and rigorous as de Miguel’s second chapter—a typology of what he calls the metacanción (metasong)—centres exclusively on the various ways this is done through lyrics—songs about songwriting, intertextual references—and does not discuss how this might also be achieved by other means. The question of musical performance is one which those of us working in language disciplines ought to embrace for a fuller comprehension of song, ideally in collaboration with those approaching popular music from other disciplinary perspectives, most obviously music studies and musicology. Such an approach might be used, for example, to challenge the foundations of this volume on the canción de autor and its characteristic literary quality in order to nuance some of its arguments. Meta-love songs abound in genres other than the canción de autor. Take That’s ‘A Million Love Songs’ quickly comes to mind...

Reviewed by: The Male Body and Social Masculinity in Premodern Europe ed. by Jacqueline Murray Caitlin Dahl The Male Body and Social Masculinity in Premodern Europe. Ed. by Jacqueline Murray. (Essays and Studies, 56) Toronto: Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies, University of Toronto. 2022. 297 pp. $39.95. ISBN 978– 0–7727–1114–4. This collection offers a sampling of the complexity of masculinity in premodern Europe. In chronological breadth, the collection ranges from first-century Merovingian Gaul to the eighteenth century. The essays gesture to the variability of masculinity precisely because of its ties to the male body, which, whether in representation or in reality, was mutable. As Jacqueline Murray remarks in her Introduction, ‘just as there was no one masculinity, so too there was no single perfect male body’ in premodern Europe (p. 17). The volume is divided into two parts. The first, ‘Imperfect Bodies: Gender and Social Liminality,’ comprises a series of essays that each concern the malleability of the boundaries of masculinity. H. Peter Johnsson reveals the interdependence of two opposing conceptions of masculinity through the styling of hair in Frankish lay and clerical culture. While among the Frankish laity the cutting of one’s hair was seen as a shameful act of submission, tonsure in the religious context represented a spiritual triumph over worldly delights. Both Alison More and Sara K. Berkowitz illuminate premodern figures of masculine liminality, whose liminal status procured them each a particular position with regard to their masculinity. More’s essay examines Cistercian laybrothers or conversi, who dwelt between the secular and religious worlds of medieval Belgium. Berkowitz’s essay regards seventeenth-century portrayals of the castrati, whose corporeality lingered between the adolescent boy and adult man. Both the laybrothers and the castrati figured in premodern cultural productions as situated somewhere between or in the mixing of femininity and masculinity. Nevertheless, both figures were praised and revered for attributes specific to their status. Yvonne Petry and Kiegan Lloyd’s essay on social, judicial, and religious views of impotence in early modern France and Elena Brizio’s study of legal manœuvres employed by Sienese families lacking a male heir both gesture to the implication of women in cases where the continuation of the patriarchal line is called into question. Pinpointing different conditions in which the male body is cast as imperfect—hairy or hairless, bearded or beardless, castrated, impotent— this section also illuminates the contingency and limitations of this interpretation. The ‘imperfect’ male body could exhibit distinguished qualities sought after in various contexts or find other ways to affirm its masculinity—such as the complex [End Page 351] manipulation of inheritances to preserve family wealth in the absence of a male heir. The second section, ‘Perfect Bodies: Masculinity, Idealism, and Contingency’, attends to the valorization of distinct masculinities in particular contexts. Ivana Elbl recontextualizes the figure of Dom Henrique of Portugal in social and court life and argues that his self-attribution of virginity, though exceptional, fits his lifelong pursuit of virtus and stylization as a Christian warrior. Timothy McCall similarly resituates depictions of Borso d’Este that certain scholars have characterized as effeminate within the context of their production, and convincingly problematizes approaches to premodern masculinity that are unable to cast off contemporary notions of the masculine. Following his persuasive argumentation for these representations’ adherence to dominant conceptions of masculinity in the signoria, McCall’s final assertion of the queer potential inherent in Renaissance power structures seems incomplete. Maya Corry’s essay, appositely positioned after McCall’s, offers a compelling analysis of homoeroticism’s imbrication in power structures of elite sociality in Renaissance Milan. Through an analysis of the rehabilitation of epicene youthful beauty in the Milanese court, Corry outlines a poignant example of the ways in which ‘to endure, patriarchy has had to be mutable and available to diverse populations of men’ (p. 212). The section’s final two essays centre on art and the visual construction of masculine ideals. Tatiana C. String reveals early modern English portraiture’s reliance on ‘stock’ figures and poses which were employed to inscribe individuals within dominant conceptions of archetypal masculinity. Fabien Lacouture’s essay, which closes the volume, traces...

Reviewed by: Hermann Broch and Mass Hysteria: Theory and Representation in the Age of Extremes by Brett E. Sterling Andrew Barker Hermann Broch and Mass Hysteria: Theory and Representation in the Age of Extremes. By Brett E. Sterling. Rochester, NY: Camden House. 2022. xii+ 256 pp. £85. ISBN 978–1–64014–004–2. His reputation may rest on the strength of novels such as Die Schlafwandler and Der Tod des Vergil, but Hermann Broch remained sceptical about fiction’s legitimacy in the era of the great dictators. As a result, his friend and correspondent Hannah Arendt recalls him leading a life torn between the conflicting claims of art, philosophy, and practical action (‘Dichten’, ‘Erkennen’, and ‘Handeln’). Today, as in an earlier ‘age of extremes’, democracy remains ‘an inherently fragile institution susceptible to defeat by the insidious charms of fascism’ (p. 210), the root cause of whose appeal, according to Broch, lies in mass hysteria. As this monograph was nearing completion, a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol building in Washington on 6 January 2021, thereby providing ‘a thunderous demonstration’ of the Austrian writer’s ongoing relevance (p. 210). [End Page 414] Unlike Elias Canetti’s partly literary, partly ethno-sociological study Masse und Macht (1960), Broch’s work on the psychology of fascism consists of disparate essays in various stages of completion. These had earlier captured the attention of scholars such as Paul Michael Lützeler, Wolfgang Müller-Funk, Judith Ryan, and Ernestine Schlant, and it is upon their work among others that Brett Sterling constructs this meticulous and challenging monograph, the first in English to examine the relationship between Broch’s fiction and his theoretical work on masses and mass hysteria (‘Massenwahntheorie’). Initially, Sterling analyses ‘Die Straße’, an open letter published in December 1918, where Broch voices unease at the behaviour of the crowd during the proclamation of the First Austrian Republic on 12 November. The ensuing chaos on the streets of Vienna triggered his enduring obsession with mass behaviour. Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler reckoned ‘Die Straße’ was ‘one of the most important literary documents showing how Austrian authors dealt with the consequences of the First World War’ (p. 30). Of still greater significance for Austrian letters and democracy were the events of 15 July 1927, when right-wing protestors set fire to Vienna’s Justizpalast. This seminal event, the stimulus for Canetti’s Die Blendung as well as Masse und Macht and Heimito von Doderer’s Die Dämonen, features here only in a footnote (p. 26). Earlier, however, Sterling points out that 1927 was also the year Broch decided his future lay in producing literary texts rather than overseeing textile production in the family’s mill at Teesdorf (p. 1). Just as in 1918, when he stayed behind in the Café Herrenhof as his companions followed the crowds, in 1927 Broch avoided the mob whereas his friend Canetti was swept up in it. Such detachment may explain why ‘when one reads the Massenwahntheorie, the mass is all but absent as a physical entity’ (p. 10). Writing in 1941, Broch noted that he had spent the years 1928–36 mostly composing fiction. During that time, irked by the anti-metaphysical straitjacket of Vienna’s logical positivists such as Schlick and Carnap, with whom he had earlier studied, Broch considered imaginative literature which embraces ethics and metaphysics to be superior to philosophy and natural science as an epistemological tool. In the chapter ‘The Power of Literature’, Sterling examines the various theoretical essays written also during this period in which Broch explores why literature ‘is able to access, create, and disseminate knowledge’. Hence, an awareness of Broch’s literary theories on ambiguity, immediacy, simultaneity and polyhistory—all elements of the so-called ‘total novel’—is deemed essential ‘when it comes to assessing a concept like the mass, which defies depiction and understanding’ (p. 44). In ‘The Mass Takes Shape: Literary Representations’, Sterling explores the depiction of mass events in the novels Esch oder die Anarchie (1932), Die unbekannte Größe (1933), Der Tod des Vergil (1945), and in the little-known drama Die Entsühnung (1932). It is here that Sterling claims to be at...

Reviewed by: Transplantation Gothic: Tissue Transfer in Literature, Film, and Medicine by Sara Wasson Barry Murnane Transplantation Gothic: Tissue Transfer in Literature, Film, and Medicine. By Sara Wasson. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 2020. xii+217 pp. £80. ISBN 978–1–5261–3286–4. Transplantation Gothic sets out to suture Gothic Studies’ interest in the fantastic representation of societal anxieties around medico-scientific practices with the anthropological and ethnological methodologies of the Medical Humanities in order to uncover a ‘shadow cultural history of transplantation’ (p. 2). This involves a radical interdisciplinarity, combining close reading and rhetorical analysis of fictional and non-fictional texts, films, and images with anthropology, ethnology, historical materialism, postcolonial criticism, and critical posthumanism. Tracing over two hundred years of Gothic representations of tissue transfer and transplantation surgery, with a particular focus on the fiction and film of the periods around 1900, the 1970s, and 1990s, Sara Wasson urges us to engage carefully with the ‘slow violence’ (p. 21 and Chapter 3, passim) wrought upon human bodies and communities in the course of biomedical modernization. The book opens with an Introduction which argues powerfully for the usefulness of Gothic Studies and its critical idioms for the Medical Humanities. Setting the scene for the subsequent multiplicity of themes and methods, Wasson introduces [End Page 356] issues such as medical modernization, neoliberal necropolitics, uncanny chronotopes, and monstrosity, linking them through the framework of ‘slow violence’ and Gothic’s ability to ‘dis(re)member’ (p. 9) the corporeal suffering involved in tissue transfer. The sensitivity and care with which central terms such as ‘transfer’ rather than ‘transplantation’, or ‘supplier’ rather than ‘donor’, are introduced and explained is exemplary. The subsequent chapters are organized around different agents and figures in the transplantation process, starting with practitioners (Chapter 1), suppliers and the context of surgical procurement (Chapters 2, 3, and 5), and transfer recipients (Chapter 4). Chapter 1 reconstructs the presence of Gothic narrative tropes and intertextuality in medical debates around defining death, including brainstem death and clinical death, as central factors in practices of tissue transfer. Chapter 2 discusses fictional responses to transfer economies, analysing the medical horror genre in texts chosen from 1970s and 1980s transplantation fiction such as Robin Cook’s Coma. Chapter 3 turns on a discussion of Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest to trace the slow violence of neocolonial and racist violence in transfer economies, but it also deconstructs the simplistic displacement strategies by which agents in the Global North localize such violence in the peripheries of the Global South. Chapter 4 merges Gothic fixations with themes such as possession, haunting, and paranoia to discuss fantasies about transfer tissue altering the recipients in meaningful and horrifying ways, looking notably at autobiographical texts by Jean-Luc Nancy and Francisco Varela. Chapter 5 discusses speculative fictions exploring the vulnerability of tissue suppliers, noting that these fantastical representations often make it easier to distance the ongoing reality of people rendered vulnerable to predatorial harvest. Transplantation Gothic will be of interest to scholars in literary studies and the Medical Humanities in different ways. Scholars of the Gothic may find some of the discussions of the fictional texts and films somewhat rushed (such as the whistle-stop discussions of Charles Gardner Bowers’s ‘The black hand’, Dennis Etchison’s ‘The machine demands a sacrifice’, Walter Mosley’s ‘Whispers in the dark’, and Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring on pp. 111–19); they will profit greatly, however, from the careful and sensitive accounts of the economic and institutional framework of medical research and practices of tissue transfer. Scholars in the Medical Humanities may find many of the contextualizing discussions familiar, but they will profit immensely from Wasson’s excellently illustrated account of a Gothic longue durée ‘both mediat[ing] and destabilis[ing] discourses’ (p. 8) with its strange, symbolically overdetermined, and often anti-realistic representational modes. This raises questions which Transplantation Gothic only partially answers, including the historical relationship between nineteenth-century Gothic’s interrogation of medical discourses, by rendering them strange and destabilizing them, and contemporary (post-)millennial Gothic’s response to a transplantation discourse that is itself always already coloured and shaped by the intertextual traces and tropes...

Reviewed by: Companion to Victor Pelevin ed. by Sofya Khagi Sarah Gear Companion to Victor Pelevin. Ed. by Sofya Khagi. Boston: Academic Studies Press. 2022. xxxiv+208 pp. $32.95; £23.99. ISBN 9–781–64469776–4. In her essay in the volume under review, 'Transformative Reading for Tailless Monkeys: Metamorphoses in The Sacred Book of the Werewolf ', Grace Mahoney describes Victor Pelevin's novels as 'metamorphs' which 'resist qualification and elude decisive conclusions' (p. 185). Mahoney's statement is thoroughly tested by the comprehensive examination of Pelevin's work in her own essay and elsewhere in this Companion to Victor Pelevin, edited by Sofya Khagi, a leading specialist on the often controversial author. While Pelevin's major novels Chapaev and the Void (1996) and Generation 'P' (1999) receive the most attention here, Khagi's project is intertextual, elucidating both Pelevin's highly self-referential writing and its relation to Russian literature as a whole. Her holistic approach to Pelevin's fiction is demonstrated by the extensive footnotes outlining literary theories and politics, and linking to multiple Russian authors, elevating the Companion from a sourcebook on 'Peleviniana' to a masterclass in post-Soviet literature. Khagi's thorough Introduction schools the reader in Pelevin's literary output. She charts the author's creative evolution from his first short story 'Sorcerer Ignat and People' (1989), then summarizes his work during his early, so-called 'classic', and later periods, ending with the appearance of his novel iPhuck (2017). Khagi also explores Pelevin's critical reception in both Russia and the West, discussing principal debates around his œuvre. The Companion's subsequent chapters underscore Pelevin's thematic preoccupations: the section headings 'Space, Time and History', 'Simulation and Mind Control', and 'Metamorphosis and Utopia' lead the reader through thematic and temporal explorations of his novels. In the first section, Michael Martin's article 'The Early Years: Post-Soviet with a Capital "S"' focuses on Pelevin's The Blue Lantern (1991) and Omon Ra (1992) as reactions to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Characterized by Pelevin's subversion of Soviet literary norms, this early writing became ground zero for his subsequent experimental work. This first chapter is echoed by the Companion's final essay, in which Mahoney considers the theme of metamorphosis in Pelevin's work in relation to the author as well as his texts. Theo Trotman's essay 'The Mythic and the Utopian: Visions of the Future through the Lens of Victor Pelevin's S.N.U.F.F. and Love for [End Page 277] Three Zuckerbrins' considers S.N.U.F.F. (2011) as a reprise of Soviet utopian themes, finding parallels with Evgenii Zamiatin's We (1922) while exploring Pelevin's role as an (anti-)utopian prophet. The central chapters of the Companion focus on Chapaev and the Void and Generation 'P'. Although repetitious at times, the five essays on these novels are justified by the variety of themes they explore. While Khagi's 'Space-Time Poetics in Chapaev and the Void' focuses on Pelevin's references to Zhuangzi, Nietzsche, Freud, and Kant, Christopher Fort's 'Parody of Past and Present in Chapaev and the Void' looks instead at the novel's interaction with Socialist Realism. Fort highlights Pelevin's exploitation of the Socialist Realist preoccupation with dreams and sleep as a vehicle for satire. In 'Masking the Void, Voiding the Mask: Victor Pelevin and the Performance of History', Alexander McConnell reflects on Pelevin's 'restaging of the twentieth century' (p. 103), relying on what he terms 'hyperhistory' (p. 76). McConnell's approach complements Khagi's in her Introduction and her separate essay 'Space-Time Poetics in Chapaev and the Void', examining the themes of temporal and spatial reality in Chapaev in relation to Pelevin's historical fiction. Generation 'P' is also scrutinized from different angles. Dylan Ogden considers the influence of social theorists such as Jean Baudrillard, Herbert Marcuse, and Guy Debord on Pelevin's work in '"The Battle for Your Mind": Transformation of Western Social Theory in Generation "II"'. Ogden explores simulacra, conspiracy theories, and capitalism in its corporeal form, noting that these themes and motifs are developed in Pelevin's later novels Empire V (2006) and...

Reviewed by: Elena Ferrante as World Literature by Stiliana Milkova Carlotta Moro Elena Ferrante as World Literature. By Stiliana Milkova. (Literatures as World Literature) New York: Bloomsbury Academic. 2021. x+214 pp. £90. ISBN 978–1–5013–5752–7. Published in the wake of a global onset of Ferrante fever, Stiliana Milkova's Elena Ferrante as World Literature is the first comprehensive English-language monograph on the acclaimed Italian author. The volume provides an original and accessible analysis of Ferrante's corpus of writings, encompassing both fiction and non-fiction, and rigorously drawing on an impressive multidisciplinary array of interpretative tools that range from classical mythology, to Freudian psychoanalysis, to feminist theory. Addressing the crucial role of translators in Ferrante's international rise, the introductory chapter argues that her powerful impact on the world literary scene stems from her creation of a universal feminine imaginary that resists the mechanisms of violence and gender inequality that characterize our age. Following this, the neologisms frantumaglia and smarginatura are proposed as the lexical, psychic, and spatial parameters of Ferrante's theory of feminine experience. Unfurling the semantic layers of these terms, Milkova observes that frantumaglia and smarginatura are used to excavate and describe the turmoil that [End Page 264] afflicts Ferrante's protagonists, who fall into an abyss of suffering as a result of male violence yet always resurface as creative entities. The opening paragraph of Elena Ferrante as World Literature presents the monograph as the fruit of the intellectual exchange that Milkova had with her mother. In a similar way, Ferrante's writing on maternal identity is also understood as an ongoing dialogue with a genealogy of literary foremothers that includes Sibilla Aleramo, Elsa Morante, Natalia Ginzburg, and Alba de Céspedes, among others. The sweeping chapter on 'Binding and Unbinding the Maternal Body and Voice' identifies the visceral bond between mothers and daughters as the overriding concern of Ferrante's literature. Milkova concludes that by giving life to dysfunctional and devious mothers Ferrante challenges a pervasive cultural paradigm in which creativity has been vanquished by self-sacrificing child-rearing. The chapter entitled 'Outside the Frame: The Aesthetics of Female Creativity and Authorship' brilliantly surveys the signature visual trope of the contained female figure which recurs in Ferrante's universe, where women appear framed by mirrors, as mutilated bodies on a cropped canvas, or in commodified and eroticized paintings and photographs. Imprisoned by an androcentric artistic and literary tradition, Ferrante's narrators struggle to break free from aesthetics that objectify them. With innovative references to feminist art theory and the works of women artists, Milkova illustrates how Ferrante's heroines appropriate the patriarchal iconography of dismemberment in order to wield creative power and to lay the foundations for a feminist artistic legacy. The chapter 'Mapping Urban Feminine Topographies' meticulously examines cityscapes and gendered spatial hierarchies in Ferrante's narratives. The hostile urban settings of Turin and Naples are configured as masculinist spaces: as in the myth of Theseus and Ariadne, Naples is envisioned as a labyrinth designed to punish female desire, while Turin is inscribed with monuments that celebrate male political, military, and cultural dominance. Tracing the journeys undertaken by Delia, Olga, Elena, and Lila across these settings, the chapter suggests that their perambulations remap the patriarchal cartography that erased them, creating new feminine localities that fit their subjectivities. The Epilogue, a short analysis of The Lying Life of Adults, charts the development of defining motifs in Ferrante's thought, such as Naples as the topography of the self, the significance of female genealogy, and the reflection of the female body in the mirror. As she masterfully weaves together a repertoire of tropes and preoccupations that span Ferrante's entire writing career across different genres and media, Milkova deftly untangles common thematic threads, draws out analogies, unveils shared patterns, and displays how Ferrante's feminine imaginary has matured over the course of thirty years. Although she convincingly advocates for the inclusion of Ferrante in the canon of world literature, Milkova never loses sight of the author's Italian roots. Indeed, particularly cogent is the extensive consideration of the profound influence exerted by Italian women writers, artists, and philosophers on Ferrante...

Reviewed by: Vladimir Nabokov et la traduction ed. by Julie Loison-Charles and Stanislav Shvabrin Suzanne Eade Roberts Vladimir Nabokov et la traduction. Ed. by Julie Loison-Charles and Stanislav Shvabrin. Arras: Artois Presses Université. 2021. 306 pp. €19. ISBN 978–2–84832–517–0. This stimulating collection of articles, edited by Julie Loison-Charles and Stanislav Shvabrin, encourages a re-evaluation of Nabokov as a translator, translation scholar, and object of translation. Moving beyond what tends to be known about his self-translations and the high proportion of footnotes to text in his version of Pushkin's Evgenii Onegin, it includes a new appraisal of Nabokov's literalist approach to translation, analysis of his collaborative translations, and discussion of the challenges of translating Nabokov. The volume, which contains slightly more articles in French than in English, is the latest to appear in the 'Traductologie' series of Artois Presses Université, which regularly publishes Francophone scholarship in Translation Studies, as well as translations into French. Thus, a major benefit of this book is how it presents both Anglophone and Francophone scholarly writing. The Nabokov researchers represented here are based primarily in the USA, the UK, France, and Canada. Moreover, the contributors encompass the disciplines of Translation Studies, Linguistics, English and Slavic Literature, as well as Comparative Literature. The Introduction fascinatingly reveals the hazards of this eclectic approach: in Nabokov's œuvre, it is not always easy to distinguish between a translation, an original, a self-translation, or a collaborative translation, or to harmonize the dates of first publication. Stanislav Shvabrin's enjoyable article begins by reminding us that 'the backlash against [Nabokov's] translation theory and praxis rivals the endurance of Lolita's [End Page 274] grip on its readers' (p. 87). He offers a more nuanced picture of Nabokov's literalism, drawing on Bakhtin to reassess Nabokov's translations, even youthful ones, as 'dialogic encounters' in which he can try out different approaches to literary translation. These experiments vary 'from wilful adaptation to most exacting literalism and everything else in between' (p. 96). Christine Raquet's essay draws attention to the numerous ways both of reading a text and of translating it, even though 'le tempérament littéraire autocratique de Nabokov avait souvent du mal à accepter [les choix d'un autre traducteur]' (p. 23). His collaborations became power struggles in which any other translator was expected to capitulate. In contrast, Susan Elizabeth Sweeney identifies recurrent ideas of ineffability and untranslatability in Nabokov's work, relating them to his synaesthesia. Julie Loison-Charles's contribution examines the treatment of the many foreign words used by Nabokov in Ada and the varying ways in which this multilingualism is conveyed by the novel's French and Russian translations. Similarly, Marta Arnal Gas focuses on how Nabokov's jeux linguistiques are translated into Spanish and Catalan. Russianists, meanwhile, will be interested in Lyudmila Razumova's comparison of the reception of samizdat (Soviet-era), perestroika-era, and post-perestroika translations into Russian of Pale Fire and her conclusions about the changing market for translation in Russophone nations. In terms of comparing Francophone and Anglophone Translation Studies, it may be a coincidence that two French scholars, Isabelle Paulin and Stanislas Gauthier, draw productively on the work of French translation theorist Antoine Berman in their respective analyses of the nature of Nabokov's translations or the reception of translations of Nabokov. The final section of this volume focuses on intersemiotic translation. It includes Yannicke Chupin's enlightening interview with Émilie Moreau, exploring the latter's choice to incorporate shadow play and masks into her theatre adaptation of Lolita. The appendix includes a convenient index of Nabokov's original work and his translations. This volume constitutes both a significant contribution to the different facets of Nabokov's work and an accessible examination of the challenges of translating Nabokov into several European languages. There is much to interest both Translation Studies scholars and Nabokov specialists. Suzanne Eade Roberts University of Bristol Copyright © 2023 Modern Humanities Research Association