Modern Language Quarterly articles

Recent articles from Modern Language Quarterly

Redefining Elizabethan Literature.(Book review)
September 1, 2006... Redefining Elizabethan literature. By Georgia E. Brown. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. viii + 261 pp. Georgia E. Brown's take on the English literature of the 1590s offers a frisson of recognition for anyone still resisting the more or less obvious: with its "widespread...

The white Oriental.(The Manchurian Candidate, novel)(Critical essay)
September 1, 2006... Translated into nineteen languages and the basis of two major motion pictures, Richard Condon's novel The Manchurian Candidate (1959) describes an American GI captured by the Chinese during the Korean War and returned to the States with his brains "not merely washed" but "dry-cleaned." (1)...

"The queen of the Waste Land": the endgames of modernism in Angela Carter's Magic Toyshop.
September 1, 2006... It is easy to forget that most of the great male geniuses of Western European culture have been either depraved egomaniacs or people who led the most distressing lives.--Angela Carter, "Notes from the Front Line" Since her premature death in 1992, Angela Carter has assumed...

Sade and the Cynic tradition.(Critical essay)
September 1, 2006... In his dedication of Philosophy in the Bedroom, Sade urges the "gentle, debauched reader" to take the example of "the cynic Dolmance," the notorious libertine master of Sade's parodic bildungsroman. (1) What does Sade mean by giving us, his trusting readers, a Cynic as our guide? This essay...

French tragedy and the civil wars.
September 1, 2006... Les moeurs d'une nation forment d'abord l'esprit de ses ouvrages dramatiques. Bientot ses ouvrages dramatiques forment son esprit. [At first a nation's mores shape the spirit of its dramatic works. Soon enough its dramatic works shape its spirit.]--Marie-Joseph Chenier, De la...