Books published by Modern Humanities Research Association

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.

January 2019 issue of Slavonic & East European Review

The April 2019 issue of Modern Language Review

Thomas Elyot's Image of Governance is an English-language version of the matter of Thomas More's Utopia: a tract de optimo statu reipublicae, likewise replete with imagined 'dialogues of counsel'; but in an anti-utopian, monarchist perspective, calculated to appeal to Henry VIII. Moreover, Image of Governance is not imaginary but historical, translated from the late antique Latin Historia augusta.The present book provides critical editions of Elyot's political writings other than the Governour, all of which are or incorporate extensive translations of ancient Greek and Latin writings, like the Image of Governance. In these related 'Dialogues of Counsel', Elyot takes ancient historical cases - Plato's sale into slavery by Dionysius the tyrant of Syracuse, for example; or the life of the West Asian emperor Zenobia, a woman under patriarchy; or the advice of the Attic orator Isocrates to King Nicocles of Salamis; or the failed but ambitious late Roman imperiate of Alexander Severus; et cetera - and dramatises them, by means of the sort of Lucianic dialogue that Erasmus had used for the Praise of Folly (More too), except in the vernacular, for a relatively broader, more popular English audience.

Thomas Elyot's Image of Governance is an English-language version of the matter of Thomas More's Utopia: a tract de optimo statu reipublicae, likewise replete with imagined 'dialogues of counsel'; but in an anti-utopian, monarchist perspective, calculated to appeal to Henry VIII. Moreover, Image of Governance is not imaginary but historical, translated from the late antique Latin Historia augusta.The present book provides critical editions of Elyot's political writings other than the Governour, all of which are or incorporate extensive translations of ancient Greek and Latin writings, like the Image of Governance. In these related 'Dialogues of Counsel', Elyot takes ancient historical cases - Plato's sale into slavery by Dionysius the tyrant of Syracuse, for example; or the life of the West Asian emperor Zenobia, a woman under patriarchy; or the advice of the Attic orator Isocrates to King Nicocles of Salamis; or the failed but ambitious late Roman imperiate of Alexander Severus; et cetera - and dramatises them, by means of the sort of Lucianic dialogue that Erasmus had used for the Praise of Folly (More too), except in the vernacular, for a relatively broader, more popular English audience.

A distinctively human aspect of the mind is its ability to handle both factual and counterfactual scenarios. This brings enormous advantages, but we are far from infallible in monitoring the boundaries between the real, the imaginary and the pathological. In the early modern period, particularly, explorations of the mind's ability to roam beyond the factual became mainstream. It was an age of perspective art, anamorphism and optical illusions; of prophecy, apocalyptic dreams, and visions; and of fascination with the supernatural.This volume takes a fresh look at early modern understandings of how to distinguish reality from dream, or delusion from belief. Opening with cognitivist and philosophical perspectives, Cognitive Confusions then examines test cases from across European literature, providing an original documentation of the mind in its most creative and pathological states.

The anonymous fifteenth-century French verse translation of Boethius's Consolatio Philosophiae, contained in a single known manuscript, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, fr. 25418, fols 1-74r, is a revised and abridged version of the major French translation, Le Roman de Fortune et de Felicité, edited by Béatrice Atherton as her doctoral thesis for the University of Queensland (1994). The title of the present critical edition is derived from the opening strophe of the reviser's Prologue: 'Pour le Tout Poissant honnourer | ... Contre Fortune ... | Dez dis Böece vueil conter | C'om dit de Consolacion', which indicates the Christian didactic purpose intended and expressed in moral lessons for living in this world. Consisting of books I-IV only of the Consolatio, the text lacks the complex philosophical issues of book V and throws into relief the dichotomy of Fortune and Felicity. Pruning of the mythological narratives, historical examples, and nature images by the reviser produced a somewhat lean abrégé of Boethius's thought, but with Christian emphasis. With prudent editing, the translation constitutes a coherent whole and is recognised as one of the thirteen distinct medieval French translations of the Consolatio Philosophiae.

The beginning of the eighteenth century opened Spain to an influx of people, books and ideas and gave the country its own brief age of Enlightenment. At this time of momentous change, the three authors represented in this volume contributed to the Europe-wide debate over the nature of women and their position in society. Benito Jerónimo Feijoo was an admired scholar and a prolific author. One of his most controversial essays was Defence of Women, which argued that women were men's intellectual equals. This sparked a pamphlet war that continued for twenty-five years.Josefa Amar y Borbón was a writer and translator who submitted her own spirited argument, the Defence of the Talents of Women, to a debate on whether women should be admitted to the new Economic Societies. She also demanded in her Discourse on the Education of Women that women should be given the opportunity to study and learn.At the very end of the century, Inés Joyes y Blake published an Apology for Women, arguing that women should develop self-respect, support each other and refuse to be manipulated by insincere lovers and domineering husbands. All three writers wrote with verve and imagination about one of the most important social questions of their day

Carl Van Vechten (1880-1964) was a key advocate for modernism across the arts in America in the first half of the twentieth century. As a critic of music, dance, and literature, as novelist, as photographer, as patron of the arts, and as saloniste, he exerted an influence on the development and reception of popular and avant-garde forms of modernism - from jazz, blues, and early cinema to Gertrude Stein and Igor Stravinsky. Though currently less well-known than 'Lost Generation' contemporaries such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, Van Vechten was a popular and critically acclaimed figure in his day. Van Vechten's novels are worthy of recuperation for their distinctive take on the raucous spirit of the Jazz Age, bringing a witty and sardonic viewpoint to issues that his modernist contemporaries approached with gravityThis edition brings back into print Van Vechten's second novel, The Blind Bow-Boy (1923), which Van Vechten's most recent biographer has called a 'great, forgotten American novel of the 1920s'. It is thoroughly annotated and provides an introduction that foregrounds the novel's importance for literary modernism and as a treatment of queer identity.

The January 2019 issue of Modern Language Review

Arthur Machen has finally been recognized as a key contributor to the glittering age of British Decadence. Best known for the novella The Great God Pan and for his formative influence on weird fiction, in fact much of Machen's writing profoundly challenges literary and cultural convention. From the demonic horror of "The Recluse of Bayswater" to the plush occultism of The Hill of Dreams and the prose poems of Ornaments in Jade, this selection of works from throughout Machen's career brings to life his unique symbolist aesthetics and spiritual philosophy.This is the first edition of Machen's work to foreground his Decadent and occult writing. It includes a scholarly introduction, extensive annotations, and revealing contextual materials. Engaging with the gems of Machen's oeuvre, the collection invites readers to open their minds to a reality beyond the veil, the reality - in Machen's view - that matters most.

Arthur Machen has finally been recognized as a key contributor to the glittering age of British Decadence. Best known for the novella The Great God Pan and for his formative influence on weird fiction, in fact much of Machen's writing profoundly challenges literary and cultural convention. From the demonic horror of "The Recluse of Bayswater" to the plush occultism of The Hill of Dreams and the prose poems of Ornaments in Jade, this selection of works from throughout Machen's career brings to life his unique symbolist aesthetics and spiritual philosophy.This is the first edition of Machen's work to foreground his Decadent and occult writing. It includes a scholarly introduction, extensive annotations, and revealing contextual materials. Engaging with the gems of Machen's oeuvre, the collection invites readers to open their minds to a reality beyond the veil, the reality - in Machen's view - that matters most.

Alessandria, Italy, 1628: a young woman, Isabella Sori, publishes her only known work, consisting of three different texts, at a time when war and the plague are looming. Written in the form of letters by a mother to her daughter, her Ammaestramenti e ricordi is a treatise on the ideal conduct of women in everyday life which draws from an impressive array of sources and displays an unusual level of erudition for the author's sex and age. Attacked for her literary enterprise by unidentified malicious detractors, Isabella Sori is forced to defend herself (and the female sex) against their criticisms: her Difese still preserves her unfiltered indignation. A Panegirico of Alessandria, a cross between an idealized portrait and a historical document of the city, concludes the work. Amid questions of authorship and attribution, Sori's work, with its immediacy and liveliness offersprecious insight into the life and customs of a long-lost era, as well as a poignant testimony of a local 'battle of the pens' waged by the author with pride and dignity. This rich edition, comprehensively annotated and providing a meticulous reconstruction of her wide-ranging sources, restores Sori's rare writings to the public once more, after nearly four hundred years of oblivion.Contents include: a historical introduction to the author, her times, and her work; a note on the text; the Italian text with notes; a glossary; an appendix; a bibliography; an index of names.Helena Sanson is Reader in Italian Language, Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Clare College.

Like many genres, biography came belatedly to Russia. As with other such late arrivals, biography underwent intensive growth in quantity, sophistication, cultural significance and popularity from the era of Nicholas I onwards. It stands today as a dominant force in post-Soviet publishing. Yet studies of Russian biography's poetics and its role as a literary and cultural institution in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries remain thin on the ground, a fact often lamented, yet not fully addressed, in the scattered writings on the subject. The present volume examines modern Russian biography as a literary form, a publishing phenomenon and a cultural force that reveals and contests hegemonic ideas of the role of the individual in society, and of the make-up of the human personality itself.

The Fortunate Foundlings was one of Eliza Haywood's more successful novels, though it remains one of her lesser known works. Ittells the story of a brother and sister left as babies in the care of a gentleman. Like many another eighteenth-century foundling, the siblings leave their guardian behind and make their own way in the world: Horatio as a soldier and Louisa as a lady's companion, finding love and adventure in the battlefields and courts of Europe. Haywood uses the Continental setting to explore different customs-especially those that might benefit women-and different political choices.Also published here for the first time is her anonymous pamphlet of 1750, A Letter from H--- G---g, Esq., ostensibly a letter from Charles Edward Stuart's aide-de-camp, travelling with him after the prince's expulsion from France. Seemingly a straightforward expression of Jacobite sympathies, it also encodes support for the Patriot cause of the 1740s and '50s.Both works were translated and adapted, having an extended afterlife in the writings of Crébillon fils, Edward Kimber and Robert Louis Stevenson. They add to our expanding sense of the author's range, influence and political agenda.