Remews

803

have been soatysed in much greater detail. Similariy. he overstates the significiance (rf'the autonomous thewy of art: the evidence erf" his own discussion points to a basic anti^autontmnous cmfisensus throughout this {^riod, from Menxel's mobilixaiimt of the Enlightenment modd oftitei^ture against Young Germany to the conservatives' stress on art's mcnaiiy edticative role. Indeed, the volume as a whole conveys the dktinct impression that the dominant paradigm in the literary public sphere from 1730 to 1870 was pragmatic or Enlightened, ratho- than autonomous or ClassicalRonnantic, K> much so thai autonomous aesthetics was an anomaly which did not initiate a paradigm shift in conceptions of literature and criticum rven in the heyday (rf'modernism. This latter point comes across particularly forcefully in Russell Berman's essay. Despite the rise of aesthetidsm in the late tiineteenth century. Imperial Germany and the Weimar Republic were dominated by politicized models erf" critidsm. This period in German history is esp:ially complex and contentious in political and cultural terms, not least because of the emergent mass appeal of Marxism and fascism, and Professor Berman's valiant attempt to assimilate its wide-ranging and contradictor)' trends ultimately founders. More than any other contributor to this volume, he is faced by an unsurveyable excess of material, but his lack of any clear sodohistorical perspective means that although he engages in some superb analyses of individual critics and essays, as a whole his chapter fragments into that feuilletonistic impressionism castigated by late nineteenth-century conservatives. 'The bourgeois institution of literary criticism saves itself by fleeing into a system of fkmotis personalities'. Russell Berman observes, and a similar case can be made against his own focus on Frenzel, Kerr, and Benjamin, instead of sodologically and discursively representative tendencies of the age. On the other hand, it is doubtful whether any one investigator could deal adequately wilh the picthora of material produced from 1870 to 1933. and in the final essay Bemhard Zimmermann has the considerable advantage ofbeing able to specify three main historico-political areas of inquiry: literary critidsm in the National Socialist period, the Federal Republic, and the GDR. At the same time. Professor Zimmermann holds more rigoroush' than other contributors to Peter Hohendahl's methodological prescriptions, and succeeds in demonstrating throughout his chapter 'how criticism as an institution (as a subsystem of art as an institution) "changes not only its outward manifestations (attitudes, judgments) but also in its basic structure (organization, social institutions, character of the public) and moreover in conjunction with the changing conditions of production"'. This appntach is well exemplifini in his judicious account of antt-fasdst critidsm in exile, as he skilfully intertwines analysis of key debates, major figures, individual essays, and sodopolitical a)ntexts. It may well be that th volume as a whole will twt 'serve as a model for a new aptproach to literary history in America and elsewhere', but the contributions of Peter Hohendaht and Bemhard Zimmerman in particular certainly set the agenda for any approach to the history of literature or critidsm which wishes to claim theoretical or methodological sophistication.
or NOTTINGHAM STEVE GitES

Verbal Morphoiegy: A StrucUirai Analysis. By MARX. J . E U O N . Columbus,

Ohio: Slavica. 1989. 147 pp. I'4.95This is a dense and diiScutt monograph which needs to be resui several times. I found that the autbw uiofMed a 'stream trf'consdousitess' approadi (ocdting but poiiaps not beet suited ut a u^nical monograph) and craft] cmivoluted sentences which often conceafed a i l i

Reviews I sympathize with the author. He wrote the wcwk some years ago a i ^ roust have been severely constrained in the matter <tf the appearance ef hu hook. Many ofthe terms and abbreviatiotis will be unfamiliar, and his numerous tables cmiU have been presented more compactly, something which would have created space for tbe data in c>'riUic as well as in transliteration. I ana sure, however, that much of this was b^ond his control. iTie work will certainly be helpful to those interested in theoretical morphology. Essentially, the author looks into the relevance of linguistic change in a synchrooic study ofthe standard form ofa language, using as starting-point what may be a psychologically real system. In hisfirstchapter, 'Prdiminanes', he emphasizes that his contribution is vojustijfy a description which may have |:^ychol<^cal reality. He sets out his descriptive framework and assumptions. In the second chapter, 'Verbal Morphology', he describes verbal stems and forms, which he follows with forty pages of tables. The third chapter, 'Discussion', consists of an examination ofhis assumed thirteen verbal constituents. He states: 'We proceed from diachronic evidence for the existence of boundaries in word-level units. Such evidence provides a basis for the identification of morphemes and,fi'omtheir meaning, the constituents they represent' (p. 92). The whole is drawn together in his fourth chapter, 'Concluding Remarks', where he summarizes his own new claims and observations. Overall, his work explores the complex relationship between form and meaning, w'nh jumtionai meaning (the system of grammatical meaning which is independent of form, but represented by it) 'not itself responsible for all ofthe meaning expressed by word-level units' (p. t4t). His suggestion, for further research, is that form may be the source of grammatical meaning. Words, in this work, may not be what they seem.
MARY AND WESTFIELD COLLEGE, J. IAN PRESS

Atlas of Russia and the Soviet Union. By ROBIN MiLJSER-GtiLLAND, with NIKOLAI DEJEVSKY. Oxford: Phaidon. 1989. 240pp. 19.50. In a certwn mood the academic reviewer, browsing through this kind of book, feels almost obliged to respond with a kind of defensive superciliousness. Here is an attempt to cover the whole of Russian history and culture from the ninth century to 1988, plus an excursus into gec^raphy and prehistory, plus a whirlwind tour of the other republics ofthe USSR, plus a couple of dozen 'special features' double-page spreads on topics ranging from 'Scythian Gold' through 'Ivan the Terrible' via 'Tolstoy the Revolutionary' to 'Religion in the Soviet Union' plus mrare thaui forty maps arid over three huiidred phot(^ra{^s and illustrations. AU this comes with American spelling from Oxford, in a text ofjust two hundred pages. And it has the temaity to be attractivdy produced, and (most provocative cfali) it is far cheaper than the average obscure and learned monograph. Recovering our professional composure we sneer 'coffee-table' and settle down to the smug satisfaction erf exposing its superfidality. Unfortunately Robin Milner-Gufland refuses to oblige. He has written a careful, serious, and lively book which one can reojmmend to any sixth-form library or non-specialist almost without reservation. Of course, he ovcr-simplifi at every tum, states his answers rather than raisit^ the questions, reduces issues to personalities. But if one reads the book tat what it is, rather than for what it cannot fee, then it has considwaUe virtues. The ma|^ arc clear and inftHrmative, the phmographs are mostly relevant and hd^^l, while in his text Mr Mit^r-Gutlaiui performs an impossible task as near to adcquatdy as one could h c ^ for the genre.