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The October 2020 issue of Modern Language Review

The Yearbook of English Studies for 2019, edited by Rebecca N. Mitchell, brings together two quintessentially Victorian writers, Margaret Oliphant (1828-1897) and George Meredith (1828-1909). The two authors share a birth year and an extraordinary writerly range - as well as being successful novelists, both worked as publishers' readers, art and book reviewers, and essayists - though their personal lives rarely intersected. Both also share the distinction of falling out of scholarly favour through much of the twentieth century, despite their significant popular and critical success in their own lifetimes. This volume leverages recently renewed interest and increased access to Oliphant's and Meredith's oeuvres evidenced by, for example, the publication of Routledge's twenty-five volume Selected Works of Margaret Oliphant (2011-16) and the first academic conference devoted entirely to Meredith, held in 2015. The ten essays gathered here expand our understanding of both by situating them within a fuller range of contemporary contexts and detailing their often prescient engagement with nascent forms and themes. With an especial interest in understudied texts, including Oliphant's journalism, literary criticism and fin-de-siècle novels, and Meredith's early poems, along with the novels One of Our Conquerors,Rhoda Fleming,and The Shaving of Shagpat, contributors show that both authors' publications manifest the governing social concerns of their time, even as they served as an active force in shaping developing conceptions of art, medicine, gender and authorship itself. What emerges is a revisionary account of Oliphant's and Meredith's work, arising from and contributing to a more nuanced understanding of the Victorian era.

The October 2019 issue of Modern Language Review

For over a thousand years, Arthur has had widespread appeal and influence like no other literary character or historical figure. Yet, despite the efforts of modern scholars, the earliest references to Arthurian characters are still shrouded in uncertainty. They are mostly found in poetic texts scattered throughout the four great compilations of early and medieval Welsh literature produced between 1250 and 1350. Whilst some are thought to predate their manuscript sources by several centuries, many of these poems are notoriously difficult to date. None of them are narrative in nature and very few focus solely on Arthurian material but they are characterised by an allusiveness which would have been appreciated by their intended audiences in the courts of princes and noblemen the length and breadth of Wales. They portray Arthur in a variety of roles: as a great leader of armies, a warrior with extraordinary powers, slayer of magical creatures, rescuer of prisoners from the Otherworld, a poet and the subject of prophecy. They also testify to the possibility of lost tales about him, his father, Uthr, his son, Llachau, his wife, Gwenhwyfar, and one of his companions, Cai, and associate him with a wide array of both legendary and historical figures.Arthur in Early Welsh Poetry, the fourth volume in the MHRA Library of Medieval Welsh Literature series, provides discussion of each of the references to Arthurian characters in early Welsh poetic sources together with an image from the earliest manuscript, a transliteration, a comprehensive edition, a translation (where possible) and a word-list. The nine most significant texts are interpreted in more detail with commentary on metrical, linguistic and stylistic features

For over a thousand years, Arthur has had widespread appeal and influence like no other literary character or historical figure. Yet, despite the efforts of modern scholars, the earliest references to Arthurian characters are still shrouded in uncertainty. They are mostly found in poetic texts scattered throughout the four great compilations of early and medieval Welsh literature produced between 1250 and 1350. Whilst some are thought to predate their manuscript sources by several centuries, many of these poems are notoriously difficult to date. None of them are narrative in nature and very few focus solely on Arthurian material but they are characterised by an allusiveness which would have been appreciated by their intended audiences in the courts of princes and noblemen the length and breadth of Wales. They portray Arthur in a variety of roles: as a great leader of armies, a warrior with extraordinary powers, slayer of magical creatures, rescuer of prisoners from the Otherworld, a poet and the subject of prophecy. They also testify to the possibility of lost tales about him, his father, Uthr, his son, Llachau, his wife, Gwenhwyfar, and one of his companions, Cai, and associate him with a wide array of both legendary and historical figures.Arthur in Early Welsh Poetry, the fourth volume in the MHRA Library of Medieval Welsh Literature series, provides discussion of each of the references to Arthurian characters in early Welsh poetic sources together with an image from the earliest manuscript, a transliteration, a comprehensive edition, a translation (where possible) and a word-list. The nine most significant texts are interpreted in more detail with commentary on metrical, linguistic and stylistic features.

The July 2019 issue of Modern Language Review

The April 2019 issue of Slavonic & East European Review

At the end of Molière's masterpiece Le Misanthrope (1666), the irascible anti-hero Alceste storms off the stage, resolved to spend the rest of his life in a remote wilderness rather than to spend another moment mixing with corrupt Parisian society. Molière's comedy is thus, in an important sense, unfinished, and various writers over the centuries, from Fabre d'Églantine in the eighteenth century to David Ives in the twenty-first, have written sequels - works that aim simultaneously to exploit the popularity of the original play, to resolve its narrative, and to lay to rest some of its more troubling implications about society. This volume brings together two of the first sequels. As their titles imply, both Jean-François Marmontel's 'moral tale' Le Misanthrope corrigé (1765) and its dramatic adaptation, Charles-Albert Demoustier's three-act verse comedy Alceste à la campagne, ou le Misanthrope corrigé (c.1790), follow the gradual rehabilitation of Molière's bad-tempered misanthrope. This critical edition traces the two plays' complex relationships both to each other and to Molière's original comedy. It situates them both in the context of Molière reception in the Enlightenment, and particularly in relation to Marmontel's debates with Jean-Jacques Rousseau about the ethics and aesthetics of Molière's original play.

Aphra Behn's spectacular farce, Emperor of the Moon (1687), so engaged audiences that it was restaged well into the eighteenth century. Her play was largely adapted from Anne Mauduit de Fatouville's Arlequin, Empereur dans la lune (1684), a commedia dell'arte production by the Comédie-Italienne troupe, a performance which also proved immensely popular with Parisian audiences. Within its witty and amusing three acts, Behn's play explores a number of contemporary concerns - from commedia dell'arte, to gender and politics, to science and astronomy, including a plurality of worlds, for example - all culminating in the third act's operatic spectacle. This volume offers a transcription of Behn's 1687 play with extensive annotations, a critical discussion of Behn's text, and the first English translation of Fatouville's eight French and Italian scenes.

This volume explores the literary, cultural, social and political climate in Britain during the reign of William IV (1830-37). Rarely discussed by scholars searching to define the 'Romantic' period, and overshadowed by Queen Victoria, William IV's reign signifies an important moment within the long nineteenth century, one whose literary output is marked by experimentation and generic instability. Rather than simply blurring the boundaries between the Romantic and Victorian periods, this diverse collection of essays demonstrates how the spirit of reform, creative experimentation, and an increasingly politically active middle-class readership produced a peculiar literary and material culture of its own. Responding to a wide range of print culture, including periodicals, albums, graphic satires, novels, poetry, travel writing and guidebooks, by canonical and non-canonical authors, such as Catherine Gore, James Hogg, John Ruskin, Mariana Starke, Thomas Hosmer Shepherd and Thomas Pringle, the essays in this volume map a complex network of conversation, personal and national identities, radical and conservative ideologies, and contested domestic and public spaces, both in Britain and abroad. By addressing various aspects of this remarkable period's material culture and aesthetic innovations, the essays in this collection complicate our contemporary understanding of the long nineteenth century in Britain and open up new spaces for discussion.

Issue 1 of Portuguese Studies for 2019

Situated between two major refugee routes, Austria has formed a key European transit state in recent years, culminating in late 2015 when 600,000 people passed through the country in just four months. Ever since, the Austrian government has sought to push its anti-immigration agenda on the international scene, most recently during its presidency of the Council of the European Union in 2018. Almost twenty years after the first coalition between the conservative Austrian People's Party and the right-wing Austrian Freedom Party in early 2000, Austrian Studies 26 builds on Cultural Studies research on how writers, artists and intellectuals responded to the political shift to the right during the 1990s and 2000s to discuss the contemporary moment. The volume's seventeen interdisciplinary contributions examine cultural responses to forced migration and mass displacement from literary, filmic, musical and photographic perspectives. They document and analyse attempts to find artistic forms for traumatic histories and losses that defy representation, as well as to devise means of testimony which render visible people and experiences all too often excluded from the historical record. The possibilities, as well as the limitations, of the arts in communicating geopolitical persecution and transit are discussed. In a deeply hostile climate, the volume assesses Austria's place in a Europe caught between loudly proclaimed humanitarian tradition and the ever-increasing drive to protect its borders.

Long before the commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution in 2017, scholars of Russia and the Soviet Union had questioned the notion that 1917 might constitute some kind of single, decisive rupture, whether in historiography or history itself. In particular, historians have come to see the October Revolution as an expression of Russia's broader experience of modernity, revealing continuities between Imperial Russia and what was to become the Soviet Union, disputing narratives of exceptionalism, and proposing affinities with models of social development arguably more characteristic of Western European countries.Taking inspiration from a body of scholarship which has problematized the question of how the aesthetic values of the 1920s gave way to what became Socialist Realism, as well as work which has challenged an entrenched divide between the Victorian era and modernism in English literary studies, this collection ranges widely over genres - opera, symphonic music, song - combines complementary methodological approaches - reception studies, cultural memory, librettology, intellectual history - and invokes not only the October Revolution, but other widely cited turning points in Russian history - romanticism into realism, cultural revolution, the Great Patriotic War, perestroika and the post-Soviet landscape, to suggest significant continuities.

Die Waffen nieder! (1889), translated into English in 1892 as Lay Down Your Arms, was an international bestseller. Its Austrian author Bertha von Suttner (1843-1914) chose the medium of fiction in order to reach as broad an audience as possible with her pacifist ideals. Challenging the narrow nationalisms of nineteenth-century Europe, Suttner believed that disputes between nations should be settled by means of arbitration rather than armed conflict. She devoted her life to campaigning for the cause of peace,and in 1905 became the first female recipient ofthe Nobel Peace Prize. Suttner's influential novel yields insights into the early development of calls for a united Europe and an end to the arms race.This English translation of the novel was carried out as a 'labour of love' by the eminent Victorian surgeon and medical scholar Timothy Holmes (1825-1907), the editor of Gray's Anatomy, for whom this was an unusual foray into the world of fiction. Holmes was Vice-Chairman of the London-based International Arbitration and Peace Association and a contemporary of Suttner. His translation helped to spread Suttner's views across the Anglophone world, and contributed to the growth of the peace movement in the period before the First World War.

El Retrato de la Loc¿ana andaluza, compuesto en Roma en 1524 y publicado anonimamente en Venecia hacia 1530, es un libro misterioso y complejo de enorme riqueza verbal.Esta edicion analiza aspectos linguisticos esenciales para entender la obra en su contexto: su recepcion oral y colectiva, el español en la Italia del siglo xvi, el debate linguistico en el Siglo de Oro y la actitud de Delicado hacia las variedades del español (castellano, andaluz…), la mímesis de la lengua hablada a través de la caracterizacion linguistica de situaciones comunicativas y personajes (se añade una tabla con los 139 personajes que aparecen). Para que la edicion pueda usarse en estudios grafematicos/fonético-fonologicos, se han conservado las grafias originales.Francisco Delicado nos ofrece un retrato de Loçana, una prostituta, andaluza como el, que es a la vez un fresco vivísimo de la Roma plurilingue anterior al saqueo de 1527. Este retrato incluye como componente esencial la lengua hablada, las voces multiculturales de sus calles. Y lo escribio consciente de que su obra estaba destinada a la lectura colectiva, y casi nos permite oir -y ese es uno de sus grandes logros- los ecos de esas multiples voces perdidas del espanol hablado en la Italia del siglo xvi.