Book Reviews

BOOK REVIEWS Lawrence Phillips, ed. The Swarming Streets. Twentieth-Century Literary Representations of London. Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi, 2004. 227 pp. Regina Rudaityte (Vilnius, Lithuania) Cities, like people, are living-beings, changing shape, outlines the discourse of desire concentrating on flickering and bustling, deteriorating and coming to flanerie and womens conflicted experience of the life again; they arouse enormous interest and make London street in the early twentieth century(p.18) a fascinating object for dissection and exploration. in the fiction of Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Since the emergence of Modernism, literature has Richardson. It is obvious that the tension between always been concerned with the city as its setting streetwalking, presupposing the pursuit of freedom and metaphorical space. According to Malcolm on the one hand, and the representation of the Bradbury, who notably wrote interesting London street as an arena of potential risk and sexual observations about cities of Modernism in general danger for women on the other hand, puts women in and about London in particular, the London marginalized positions in the city. cityscape becomes important literary subject-matter While in Mrs Dalloway streetwalking is a mind- and the source of new forms. altering and ecstatic activity for V.Woolfs heroine, London and its changing identity throughout the as Vicki Tromanhausers essay Virginia Woolfs twentieth century is also the focus of the collection London and the Archeology of Character demon- of essays under review The Swarming Streets. strates, and London is represented through the Twentieth-Century Literary Representations of projection of the human psyche onto it linking London which alongside the illuminating book space and consciousness was essential for Woolfs Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City, and concept of character. Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) In her excellent essay A Filmless London, by Deborah Parsons is another seminal study of Francesca Frigerio explores the influence of the cinema the city to fill the void in the literary biography of on urban culture in early twentieth century, its London. The essays of the collection in different transformative power of the London space, tracing ways pursue the theme of the urban experience the obvious connection between flanerie and the film providing the reader with many faces of London as technique in Dorothy Richardsons writings. The well as different visions of the cosmopolis ranging cinema, as the essay argues, remodelled the citys from modernist to postmodernist. With each architecture and represented a new public space where consecutive essay on the writings of Virginia Woolf, women could enjoy their flanerie without becoming Dorothy Richardson, Julian Barnes, Graham Swift, the object of the gaze; moreover, the cinema obviously Iain Sinclair, Andrea Levy among others, the reshaped the modern novel and is the main model for psychogeographical and spiritual map of London Richardsons prose. becomes gradually problematized. The traditional Keith Wilson (in Julian Barnes and the modernist wonder at the city, London generally Marginalisation of Metropolitanism) focuses on perceived as a vibrant and enjoyable cosmopolitan Julian Barness cultural cosmopolitanism, the writers city, Woolfs fascination with London, a jewel of attempts to imagine a vision of London from a foreign jewels, give way to the representations of a grieving perspective and identify paradoxes of metropolitan city as a metaphor for modern life, to the new space culture in Metroland and Letters from London. of war-time London defined by sound, the city as an Samantha Skinners short but very interesting imaginative construct, the mythic cosmopolis, and, essay deals with postmodern representations of finally, to the multicultural postcolonial London in London in Iain Sinclairs fiction in which Londons the globalized culture. All the essays address the history is traced through scraps serving as clues to ways in which history, war, class, social, moral and his literary technique. The scholar puts forward an racial issues, identity shaping and existential interesting argument that the modernist figure of paradoxes are negotiated through representations flaneur has been transformed into that of the rag- of London. picker to which the writer is compared. His literary In the essay A Risky Business, Nadine Attewell method, the essay argues, is very similar to rag- 61 The European English Messenger 16.1 (2007) picking reassembling a disturbed and demented pieces of literary scholarship. Although the essays are London from scraps, or glimpses. (p.171) so diverse in terms of critical approaches and texts The two final essays (Images of London in chosen for the analysis, it is the literary representation African Literature by Kwadwo Osei-Nyame, Jnr, and of London that serves as a unifying link for the whole Andrea Levys London Novels by Susan Alice collection. Despite the editor Lawrence Phillipss modest Fischer) address the landscape of multicultural assurance that this collection is not an attempt to London from a postcolonial perspective, which produce a literary biography of the twentieth-century unfolds as ambivalent space a place of refuge for city (p.5), however, he did assemble a stimulating book African and Jamaican migrants as well as a signifier in which London takes on different guises, functioning for their marginalisation, and a city of ethnic tension, not only as background space but at times as a a threatening, unsafe place. personified protagonist in its own right, and in which, All the essays of the collection (including those I with each essay telling its own remarkable tale of the failed to mention in this short review due to the city, the history of the twentieth-century London so limitations of space) present illuminating and valuable vividly unfolds. Diane Davies, Varieties of Modern English. London: Longman, 2005. 172 pp. Loredana Frăţilă (Timișoara, Romania) Diane Davies Varieties of Modern English is Special attention is devoted to English in a designed to function as a general textbook (p. ix) historical context: the evolution of the language is that addresses university or college students traced from the introduction of printing in the Early without prior knowledge of linguistics or of the Modern period to the stage when it became a lingua methods of linguistic analysis. The book is franca (in the twentieth century), enjoying structured around ten chapters, each including a supremacy in the movie and music industry, in general discussion of the issue approached, a tourism, business and education at all levels. The summary, an activities section, and suggestions for author deals with the problems of the borrowings further reading. Although all the chapters contribute from English into other languages and of the attitudes to draw the full picture of the varieties of present- towards English, from careless acceptance to day English, they may also be read individually, and stubborn and unreasonable rejection. not necessarily in the order proposed by the author. English is also approached from a global The writer tackles the issue of linguistic variety perspective, following Braj B. Kachrus (1989) from various perspectives. At first, she clarifies the description of its worldwide spread in terms of three terms idiolects, dialects and accents. Thus, idiolects concentric circles: the inner circle, circumscribing are the embodiment of variation at the individuals the territories where English is spoken as the first level, limited by grammar and pronunciation rules, language; the outer circle, containing the territories on the one hand, and by the extra-linguistic rules of in Africa and Asia to which English was first the community of which the individual is a member, transported in colonial contexts and where it has on the other. Idiolects, the author further explains, since existed alongside very different local may be the exemplification of particular dialects languages (46); and the expanding circle, including (either Standard English or one of the traditional the countries where English is spoken and taught dialects that continue to be used under more and more widely than other foreign languages. Davies more unfavourable conditions in the rural areas), chooses one example for each of the three circles and accents. American English for the inner circle, South Asian Some fundamental analytical tools needed for the English for the outer circle, and English used in description of language variation are presented, Japan for the expanding circle which she discusses starting with the introduction of notions pertaining in greater detail. to phonetics and phonology (phonemes, minimal Unlike the earlier chapters, which approach the pairs, allophones, syllable structure, and the like), varieties of language from a geographical and and continuing with the illustration of various historical perspective, chapters five and six processes of word formation and vocabulary demonstrate how these varieties may be viewed from enrichment (affixation, compounding, borrowing, a sociological angle. The former explores the clipping, the use of acronyms, etc.), and with some relationship between English and ethnicity and basic notions of syntax and text linguistics. provides details about pidgins and creoles in general, 62 and about the features of two ethnic varieties of conversations specific to call centers that may be English in particular (African

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