Project MUSE®: Modern Language Review - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/822
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Modern Language Review.daily12026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 96 (2001) through current issueLatest Articles: Modern Language ReviewTWOProject MUSE®Modern Language Review2222-43190026-7937Latest articles in Modern Language Review. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Travel, Interrupted: Stasis and Early Modern Spain at Yu Fest and Bitef (1993)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986346
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U staru Španiju ne vjerujem, jer je gnjila kao gnjila jabuka, a u Novu Zemlju ne vjerujem, jer je nema na Zemlji.(I don’t believe in Old Spain, because she is rotten like a rotten apple, and I do not believe in the New World, because she does not exist in the World.)In 1993, two major theatre festivals held in Serbia, by then a rump Yugoslavia — Yu Fest and the Belgrade International Theatre Festival (BITEF) — announced their upcoming programmes, both of which framed travel as a central motif. In a nod to the quincentenary of Columbus’s ‘discovery’ of the Americas, Yu Fest dedicated its 1993 edition to the Spanish Golden Age. Meanwhile, and following a muted edition with no international participation, BITEF
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/822/image/coversmallTravel, Interrupted: Stasis and Early Modern Spain at Yu Fest and Bitef (1993)2026-03-29text/htmlen-USTravel, Interrupted: Stasis and Early Modern Spain at Yu Fest and Bitef (1993)2026-03-292026TWOProject MUSE®1677432026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-29Traumatized Queens in Tamburlaine, Part One and Dido, Queen of Carthage
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986347
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In his 2015 study of Marlowe’s plays, Mathew R. Martin declares that the ‘tragedies are trauma narratives’.1 He notes that some criticism ‘posits the traumas of the twentieth century as radically new, not experienced in previous centuries’, but argues that ‘Marlowe’s plays themselves, however, lead us to question that presupposition simply through the subject matter they dramatize: the staggering slaughter created by Tamburlaine’s military campaigns, or the massacre of thousands of Huguenots in Paris’ (pp. 3–4); indeed, Sarah E. Johnson and Georgina Lucas baldly declare that ‘The early modern period was an era of atrocity’,2 while Patricia A. Cahill draws attention to ‘the theatre-of-cruelty tactics undergirding
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/822/image/coversmallTraumatized Queens in Tamburlaine, Part One and Dido, Queen of Carthage2026-03-29text/htmlen-USTraumatized Queens in Tamburlaine, Part One and Dido, Queen of Carthage2026-03-292026TWOProject MUSE®689082026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-29Balzac and ‘the mystery of fiction’: The Limits of Omniscience in Ferragus
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986348
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It has long been suspected that there is a link between policing and the realist novel. Writing in 1857, man of letters Hippolyte Babou compared Champfleury unfavourably with Balzac, claiming of the former’s novels that:L’imitation de Balzac y est flagrante, dans vos personnages [. . .]. J’ajoute pourtant qu’avec les meilleures intentions d’atteindre au comique, vous arrivez tout au plus à l’espiègle, ou, pour mieux dire, au cocasse. Quand Balzac découvre les toits ou perce les murs pour donner un champ libre à l’observation, vous parlez insidieusement au portier, vous vous glissez le long des clôtures, vous pratiquez de petits trous dans les cloisons, [. . .] vous faites, en un mot [. . .], ce que nos voisins les
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/822/image/coversmallBalzac and ‘the mystery of fiction’: The Limits of Omniscience in Ferragus2026-03-29text/htmlen-USBalzac and ‘the mystery of fiction’: The Limits of Omniscience in Ferragus2026-03-292026TWOProject MUSE®746442026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-29From Verse to Voice to Silence: Giovanni Pascoli, Enrico Bossi, and the Pursuit of Lyric Drama
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986349
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‘Il poeta è colui che esprime la parola che tutti avevano sulle labbra e che nessuno avrebbe detta’, proclaimed Giovanni Pascoli (1855–1912).1 Even as he articulated his personal poetics, Pascoli grew increasingly frustrated with what he perceived as the expressive limitations of verse: ‘Io non credo troppo nell’efficacia della poesia, e poco spero in quella della mia; ma se un’efficacia ha da essere, sarà di conforto e di esaltazione e di perseveranza e di serenità. Sarà di forza; [. . .] forza di poca vista, bensì, e di poco suono, perché, senza gale e senza fanfare, è non altro che forza.’2 For Pascoli, poetry is at best consolatory. He looked to music, which in his view could infuse poetry with affective force
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/822/image/coversmallFrom Verse to Voice to Silence: Giovanni Pascoli, Enrico Bossi, and the Pursuit of Lyric Drama2026-03-29text/htmlen-USFrom Verse to Voice to Silence: Giovanni Pascoli, Enrico Bossi, and the Pursuit of Lyric Drama2026-03-292026TWOProject MUSE®1130292026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-29Serrano de Vargas’s Chapbook in the Time of Philip IV’s Biopolitics: Sounding the Alarm against Foreigners in 1620s Spain
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986350
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Relación del sacrílego delito, a 1624 Sevillian chapbook printed by Juan Serrano de Vargas y Ureña, describes the case of a foreigner who attacked the church of San Felipe in Madrid.1 During the Eucharist the accused desecrated the host and spilt the wine, then drew a dagger and charged at the priest. Before reaching him, however, he was stopped by other parishioners. This notorious event drew a great deal of attention: a few days later, Philip IV (r. 1621–65) took matters into his own hands and ordered an auto-da-fé at the Court to execute the criminal. At first glance, the Sevillian text seems to fit well within traditional assumptions that chapbooks were used as propaganda to promote devotion to the Church and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/822/image/coversmallSerrano de Vargas’s Chapbook in the Time of Philip IV’s Biopolitics: Sounding the Alarm against Foreigners in 1620s Spain2026-03-29text/htmlen-USSerrano de Vargas’s Chapbook in the Time of Philip IV’s Biopolitics: Sounding the Alarm against Foreigners in 1620s Spain2026-03-292026TWOProject MUSE®1444582026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-29The Poetry of (Anti-) Logical Ideas: Meaninglessness, Nominalism, and the Logic of Abstraction in Begriffliche Mathematik and Dadaism
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986351
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On 7 September 1932 the University of Göttingen’s trailblazing mathematician Emmy Noether became the first woman to address the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in Zurich. Her appearance anchored her as a key figure in the rise of ‘modern’ mathematics in the early 1900s for her innovations in abstract algebra, which came to be known as begriffliche Mathematik in the mathematical community from the 1930s onwards.1 The timing and terminology here gesture to a sense of cohesion between this new wave of modern mathematics and the ‘modernist’ cultural currents of the early twentieth century; fittingly, Noether stridently believed that mathematicians were in fact artists, not scientists.2 She was not
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/822/image/coversmallThe Poetry of (Anti-) Logical Ideas: Meaninglessness, Nominalism, and the Logic of Abstraction in Begriffliche Mathematik and Dadaism2026-03-29text/htmlen-USThe Poetry of (Anti-) Logical Ideas: Meaninglessness, Nominalism, and the Logic of Abstraction in Begriffliche Mathematik and Dadaism2026-03-292026TWOProject MUSE®1307592026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-29The New Journalism, the New Imperialism and the Fiction of Empire, 1870–1900 by Andrew Griffiths, and: Settlers, War, and Empire in the Press: Unsettling News in Australia and Britain, 1863–1902 by Sam Hutchinson, and: Dreamworlds of Race: Empire and the Utopian Destiny of Anglo-America by Duncan Bell
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986352
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Read together or alone, these three valuable contributions to nineteenth-century studies provide us with insights into how Victorian journalism in particular influenced imperial narratives and shaped public opinion on war, race, and empire.Settlers, War, and Empire in the Press: Unsettling News in Australia and Britain, 1863–1901 examines Australian colonist conflicts in New Zealand (1863–64), the Sudan (1885), and South Africa (1899–1902) via their representation in newspapers. In his opening remarks Sam Hutchinson makes the claim that the ‘Anzac legend’, or ‘Anzac spirit’ (the set of courageous characteristics said to be demonstrated by Australian and New Zealanders during the First World War), as articulated by
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/822/image/coversmallThe New Journalism, the New Imperialism and the Fiction of Empire, 1870–1900 by Andrew Griffiths, and: Settlers, War, and Empire in the Press: Unsettling News in Australia and Britain, 1863–1902 by Sam Hutchinson, and: Dreamworlds of Race: Empire and the Utopian Destiny of Anglo-America by Duncan Bell2026-03-29text/htmlen-USThe New Journalism, the New Imperialism and the Fiction of Empire, 1870–1900 by Andrew Griffiths, and: Settlers, War, and Empire in the Press: Unsettling News in Australia and Britain, 1863–1902 by Sam Hutchinson, and: Dreamworlds of Race: Empire and the Utopian Destiny of Anglo-America by Duncan Bell2026-03-292026TWOProject MUSE®301172026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-29Brave Humanism: Black Women Rewriting the Human in the Age of Jane Crow by Mollie Godfrey (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986353
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Brave Humanism is a laudable contribution to the strand of contemporary scholarship revising biased historiography. Mollie Godfrey ‘troubles’, to borrow a verb she often employs, white, male, and Western scholarly understanding of ‘humanism’, a term that she suggests uncritically maintains the trappings of white male supremacy. She argues that from its Enlightenment roots in the ‘rights of man’ (p. 10) to its Civil Rights Era ‘claim to [man’s] dominance’ (p. 11), those defining ‘humanism’ have centralized the concerns of ruling-class white men. Drawing on Kristen Lillvis’s work, Godfrey suggests that this lineage reveals ‘the limitations of this definition of the human for women, people of color, and the poor’ (p.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/822/image/coversmallBrave Humanism: Black Women Rewriting the Human in the Age of Jane Crow by Mollie Godfrey (review)2026-03-29text/htmlen-USBrave Humanism: Black Women Rewriting the Human in the Age of Jane Crow by Mollie Godfrey (review)2026-03-292026TWOProject MUSE®76442026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-29Multisensory Shakespeare and Specialized Communities by Sheila T. Cavanagh (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986354
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This is a fascinating book, in a fascinating series. It aggregates a wealth of interviews, evidence, and scholarship, all of which celebrates the incredible creativity, energy, ‘commitment and resourcefulness’ (p. 10) of many people (often unpaid), in challenging contexts (not least during the pandemic), when doing Shakespeare with or as part of specialized communities. In this context, ‘specialized’ is used ‘to signal inclusivity’ (p. 11) of individuals and communities often marginalized or discriminated against by disability, age, or incarceration, and who have endured ‘considerable trauma’ or ‘fraught lived experiences’ (p. 106). This focus occasions excellent discussions of the significance of breath (pp.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/822/image/coversmallMultisensory Shakespeare and Specialized Communities by Sheila T. Cavanagh (review)2026-03-29text/htmlen-USMultisensory Shakespeare and Specialized Communities by Sheila T. Cavanagh (review)2026-03-292026TWOProject MUSE®82962026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-29Myth and (Mis)information: Constructing the Medical Professions in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century English Literature and Culture by Allan Ingram, Clark Lawlor and Helen Williams (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986355
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This edited collection draws together a range of scholars and case studies to argue for the importance of ‘literary and print cultural forms’ in how medical information was ‘received, interpreted and (often) distorted for an engaged public’ in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (p. 8). By interrogating historical medical myths and misinformation as seriously as one might the ‘real’ treatments and phenomena, the contributors offer glimpses into key concerns of the period, from venereal disease to pet care to body-snatching. The book will primarily be of interest to scholars and students in English Literature, History, and Art History of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and particularly those in the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/822/image/coversmallMyth and (Mis)information: Constructing the Medical Professions in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century English Literature and Culture by Allan Ingram, Clark Lawlor and Helen Williams (review)2026-03-29text/htmlen-USMyth and (Mis)information: Constructing the Medical Professions in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century English Literature and Culture by Allan Ingram, Clark Lawlor and Helen Williams (review)2026-03-292026TWOProject MUSE®70132026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-29Grief and the Shaping of Muslim Communities in North India, c. 1857–1940s by Eve Tignol (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986356
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Eve Tignol’s book operates with two languages, Urdu and English, in a remarkably lucid fashion, which allows us to attend to a period that witnessed an interaction between Britain and India — their languages and cultures. The engagement of both languages gives the work a linguistic depth that would not be possible otherwise. Tignol’s note on transliteration and a fine glossary of Urdu terms open up new spaces for anglophone scholars to delve into studies of imperial India.This exemplary work of scholarship looks at the Muslim community of India in its formative stages. Tignol uses the history, theories, and practices of emotion to evaluate the Urdu-speaking Muslim elites of North India faced with a changing
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/822/image/coversmallGrief and the Shaping of Muslim Communities in North India, c. 1857–1940s by Eve Tignol (review)2026-03-29text/htmlen-USGrief and the Shaping of Muslim Communities in North India, c. 1857–1940s by Eve Tignol (review)2026-03-292026TWOProject MUSE®80732026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-29Proust’s Songbook: Songs and their Uses by Jennifer Rushworth (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986357
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‘Pourquoi chante-t-on?’, wonders Reynaldo Hahn in the title of his first lecture at the Université des Annales in 1913. Hahn was, famously, Marcel Proust’s first love, as well as a composer, conductor, singer, and critic in his own right. In a letter to his lover, Proust compares the lecture to the first volume of his own Recherche (and to John Ruskin’s critical work, which he admired and translated). The question in Hahn’s title lies at the centre of Jennifer Rushworth’s accomplished monograph. While the field of Proust musical studies is fairly well established, as she herself acknowledges, her reading of the Recherche as a songbook is wholly original.Rushworth’s meticulous approach displays both deep knowledge
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/822/image/coversmallProust’s Songbook: Songs and their Uses by Jennifer Rushworth (review)2026-03-29text/htmlen-USProust’s Songbook: Songs and their Uses by Jennifer Rushworth (review)2026-03-292026TWOProject MUSE®57922026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-29The Tremors of Translation: An Edition of Voltaire’s ‘Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne’ (1756) by Clive Scott (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986358
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‘Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne’ was Voltaire’s visceral response to Lisbon’s devastating 1755 earthquake, one of the worst natural disasters of the eighteenth century. In a uniquely dark composition, the poet sketches the fatal physical and infrastructural aspects of the worst urban natural disaster on record, acutely capturing the psychological trauma attaching to it, while contemporary systems on evil, particularly fashionable Leibnizian theories, are satirized as quaking after a philosophical seism. During one of many Europe-wide aftershocks, the shaken poet (in long-term exile) himself witnessed a bottle of Muscat fall off his Genevan dinner table and smash to the ground.Clive Scott’s edition of Voltaire’s
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/822/image/coversmallThe Tremors of Translation: An Edition of Voltaire’s ‘Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne’ (1756) by Clive Scott (review)2026-03-29text/htmlen-USThe Tremors of Translation: An Edition of Voltaire’s ‘Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne’ (1756) by Clive Scott (review)2026-03-292026TWOProject MUSE®57822026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-29Sarah Bowdich Lee (1791–1856) and Pioneering Perspectives on Natural History by Mary Orr (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986359
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In her meticulous and innovative study, Mary Orr examines Sarah Bowdich Lee’s book-length publications concerning West Africa to foreground this nineteenth-century female naturalist’s pioneering contributions to natural history in Great Britain and France from 1825 to 1856. Countering the still widely overlooked historical contribution of women to STEMM, she decouples Sarah (purposefully addressed by her first name in the book) from her fellow scientific traveller and husband T. Edward Bowdich to credit her with the discovery of new information on West African natural history, stressing that her endeavours in this field pre-date those of Mary Kingsley (1862–1900). The book’s greatest merit lies in painstakingly
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/822/image/coversmallSarah Bowdich Lee (1791–1856) and Pioneering Perspectives on Natural History by Mary Orr (review)2026-03-29text/htmlen-USSarah Bowdich Lee (1791–1856) and Pioneering Perspectives on Natural History by Mary Orr (review)2026-03-292026TWOProject MUSE®84512026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-29Transnational French Studies ed. by Charles Forsdick and Claire Launchbury (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986360
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The latest publication in Liverpool University Press’s ‘Transnational Modern Languages’ collection — which includes a 2022 Handbook as well as individual volumes on Transnational Russian, Portuguese, Spanish, German, Italian, and East Asian Studies — this book analyses how crucial aspects of French identity transcend the limitations imposed by national boundaries. Destabilizing the mythically neat ideal of the ‘Hexagon’, its twenty-one chapters probe the porous realities that allow otherness to enter the nation, in ways that challenge monolingual and monocultural emphases on ‘Frenchness’, as well as approaches to the study of language, culture, and society in France that are dominated by methodological nationalism.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/822/image/coversmallTransnational French Studies ed. by Charles Forsdick and Claire Launchbury (review)2026-03-29text/htmlen-USTransnational French Studies ed. by Charles Forsdick and Claire Launchbury (review)2026-03-292026TWOProject MUSE®75092026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-29Vernacular Edens: Tropes of Translation in Medieval European Fictions by Simone Marchesi (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986361
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Vernacular Edens aims to assess how various medieval European authors conceived of their reappropriation of preceding texts, what we would now term ‘translation’. The literary canon of medieval Western Europe is constituted by texts which rework their predecessors, such that this process of reinterpretation is ubiquitous. And although medieval authors, as Simone Marchesi reveals, did not often explicitly theorize translation, and certainly did not use that word for this process, the works in question often include metaliterary meditations on how they repurpose ‘old’ material.The argument of Marchesi’s highly impressive and complex work is, from its outset, bifurcate. It aims to draw together, first, metaliterary
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/822/image/coversmallVernacular Edens: Tropes of Translation in Medieval European Fictions by Simone Marchesi (review)2026-03-29text/htmlen-USVernacular Edens: Tropes of Translation in Medieval European Fictions by Simone Marchesi (review)2026-03-292026TWOProject MUSE®77162026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-29Petrarch and Sixteenth-Century Italian Portraiture by Ilaria Bernocchi, Niccolò Morelli, and Federica Pich (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986362
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This volume is devoted to Petrarch’s influence on the relationship between visual and literary culture in Renaissance Italy, with particular attention to the genre of portraiture in the sixteenth century. Petrarch’s centrality in the volume extends beyond a merely thematic focus, reflecting the pivotal role he played — perhaps more than any other literary figure prior to the sixteenth century — in shaping the interaction between visual and verbal codes. This interplay is evident, to cite just two key examples, both in the enduring authority of Petrarch’s lyric model in sixteenth-century poetry (and thus also in poetry engaging with art), and in the emergence of a conceptual model for reflecting on the relationship
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/822/image/coversmallPetrarch and Sixteenth-Century Italian Portraiture by Ilaria Bernocchi, Niccolò Morelli, and Federica Pich (review)2026-03-29text/htmlen-USPetrarch and Sixteenth-Century Italian Portraiture by Ilaria Bernocchi, Niccolò Morelli, and Federica Pich (review)2026-03-292026TWOProject MUSE®112892026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-29Cervantine Blackness by Nicholas R. Jones (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986363
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Cervantine Blackness meditates on black culture, black expression, and black livingness in the literary corpus of Miguel de Cervantes, author of Parts I (1605) and II (1615) of El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha. In his compellingly conceived book, Nicholas R. Jones examines a significant gap in Cervantine criticism, aiming to highlight Cervantes’s ‘literary construction and cultural codification of black Africans, sub-Saharan Africa, and the African diaspora’ (p. 5).What makes Cervantine Blackness a provocation in the field of Spanish Golden Age studies is how early modernists in other disciplines are now reckoning with the concept of agency and its implications for different communities. Coupled with
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/822/image/coversmallCervantine Blackness by Nicholas R. Jones (review)2026-03-29text/htmlen-USCervantine Blackness by Nicholas R. Jones (review)2026-03-292026TWOProject MUSE®59092026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-29Counter-Hispanization in the Colonial Philippines: Literature, Law, Religion, and Native Custom by John D. Blanco (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986364
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This monograph advances a compelling thesis: the Spanish conquest of the Philippines was met, from the very outset, with various forms of counter-Hispanization. Far from passively accepting Spanish colonization, native Filipinos responded with strategies of adaptation and resistance which John D. Blanco traces across chronicles, legal texts, and miracle stories.Blanco’s first chapter analyses the discursive mechanisms employed by the Spanish to legitimize the conquest under the euphemism of ‘pacification’, a term also employed in viceregal Latin America. Blanco demonstrates that this word not only concealed the violence of conquest but also constructed a potent narrative that linked occupation with legality
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/822/image/coversmallCounter-Hispanization in the Colonial Philippines: Literature, Law, Religion, and Native Custom by John D. Blanco (review)2026-03-29text/htmlen-USCounter-Hispanization in the Colonial Philippines: Literature, Law, Religion, and Native Custom by John D. Blanco (review)2026-03-292026TWOProject MUSE®63122026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-29Reading Portrait Photographs in Proust, Kafka and Woolf: Modernism, Media and Emotion by Marit Grøtta (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986365
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Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, and Virginia Woolf engaged with photography as the nascent medium reshaped human relationships and cultural perception. Rather than treating photography as a backdrop to modernist aesthetics, Marit Grøtta argues that portrait photographs function as ‘modernist media labs’ where the authors under consideration probe questions of truth, power, and sympathy (p. 184). From the outset, the book understands photography as both intimate object and mass medium. The turn-of-the-century fascination with mediated faces offers ‘an exciting approach to modernist literature, as it allows us to reconsider central issues related to modernist writing, the new visual culture, and the possibilities for
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/822/image/coversmallReading Portrait Photographs in Proust, Kafka and Woolf: Modernism, Media and Emotion by Marit Grøtta (review)2026-03-29text/htmlen-USReading Portrait Photographs in Proust, Kafka and Woolf: Modernism, Media and Emotion by Marit Grøtta (review)2026-03-292026TWOProject MUSE®65012026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-29Reading Robert Walser: Criticism, Creativity, Correspondence by Simon Wortham (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986366
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This engaging study of Robert Walser introduces the Swiss modernist author to initiates and the ignorant alike. Born to a large Swiss family in Biel/Bienne in 1878, Walser achieved initial success around the turn of the century in the German-speaking lands. His literary star soon faded and he faced an increasing struggle to make ends meet. Walser moved frequently and in the late 1920s succumbed to a mental illness (a form of schizophrenia), being incarcerated voluntarily at Waldau (Bern). Here Walser wrote prolifically, producing work in an adapted, microscopic form of Sütterlin script that was deciphered only in the late twentieth century. After being moved against his will to Herisau (Appenzell Ausserrhoden) in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/822/image/coversmallReading Robert Walser: Criticism, Creativity, Correspondence by Simon Wortham (review)2026-03-29text/htmlen-USReading Robert Walser: Criticism, Creativity, Correspondence by Simon Wortham (review)2026-03-292026TWOProject MUSE®68692026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-29Poetic Writing and the Vietnam War in West Germany by Mererid Puw Davies (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986367
<p></p>
As the contemporary world is increasingly divided by conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, it is easy to forget the significance of the Vietnam War of the 1960s as a focal point for mass protest movements across the globe. Mererid Puw Davies’s beautifully crafted study builds on her earlier work on West German protest movements, serving as an important reminder of the ways in which the conflict in Vietnam not only inspired writers in the Federal Republic to oppose US involvement in Vietnam, but also triggered a multifaceted debate that challenged prevailing views on the supposed incompatibility of politics and highbrow art. Davies’s study exposes the limitations of such rigid categories while highlighting the prominent
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/822/image/coversmallPoetic Writing and the Vietnam War in West Germany by Mererid Puw Davies (review)2026-03-29text/htmlen-USPoetic Writing and the Vietnam War in West Germany by Mererid Puw Davies (review)2026-03-292026TWOProject MUSE®73692026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-29Horizons Blossom, Borders Vanish: Anarchism and Yiddish Literature by Anna Elena Torres (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986368
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This book fills a gap in Jewish Studies and comparative literature, providing a cultural history of Yiddish anarchist literature, a neglected current within literary modernism and Jewish Studies. Anna Elena Torres seeks to reinstate ‘anarchist diasporism’ (p. 14) as an intellectual strand within Jewish modernism. It builds on the anthology With Freedom in our Ears: Histories of Jewish Anarchism, edited by Anna Elena Torres and Kenyon Zimmer (University of Illinois Press, 2023). In Horizons Blossom, Borders Vanish Torres defines anarchism as ‘a strategy of action and form of social relating that holds comradeship as its highest ideal’ (p. 6), informed by Pyotr Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid (1902), and infused with the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/822/image/coversmallHorizons Blossom, Borders Vanish: Anarchism and Yiddish Literature by Anna Elena Torres (review)2026-03-29text/htmlen-USHorizons Blossom, Borders Vanish: Anarchism and Yiddish Literature by Anna Elena Torres (review)2026-03-292026TWOProject MUSE®78052026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-29When Criticism Goes to War: Njegoš, Andrić and their Detractors by Zoran Milutinović (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986369
<p></p>
Zoran Milutinović’s monograph examines claims that literary works by Petar Petrović Njegoš (1813–1851) and Ivo Andrić (1892–1975) contributed to the genocidal ideology of Serbian nationalists, as pursued against South Slav Muslims in the late twentieth century. The critics have discussed the actions and opinions of characters in works by these authors as if they are events and statements taken from documentary sources rather than fictional texts. They have then integrated their findings into discussions on the historical and political issues which are their real concern. Their methodology takes no account of the conventions of literary criticism or the ways in which imaginative literature produces meanings. This is
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/822/image/coversmallWhen Criticism Goes to War: Njegoš, Andrić and their Detractors by Zoran Milutinović (review)2026-03-29text/htmlen-USWhen Criticism Goes to War: Njegoš, Andrić and their Detractors by Zoran Milutinović (review)2026-03-292026TWOProject MUSE®64482026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-29Soviet Adventures in the Land of the Capitalists: Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip by Lisa A. Kirschenbaum (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986370
<p></p>
Lisa A. Kirschenbaum’s latest book offers a meticulously researched reconstruction of Ilʹia Ilʹf and Evgenii Petrov’s 1935–36 American road trip, situating it within the fraught inter-war context of Soviet–American cultural diplomacy. Her Introduction foregrounds the sheer unlikelihood of this journey: ‘Every detail of the adventure sounds implausible’ (p. 1). The fact that two Soviet humourists traversed the United States with remarkable freedom, producing a travelogue that appeared ‘at the height of the Stalinist terror’ (p. 2), seems scarcely credible. Yet, as Kirschenbaum notes, this book ‘reached a wide and appreciative Soviet audience’ (p. 2). A comprehensive study, Soviet Adventures in the Land of the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/822/image/coversmallSoviet Adventures in the Land of the Capitalists: Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip by Lisa A. Kirschenbaum (review)2026-03-29text/htmlen-USSoviet Adventures in the Land of the Capitalists: Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip by Lisa A. Kirschenbaum (review)2026-03-292026TWOProject MUSE®91512026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-29