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Scholars of popular romance fiction have begun to credit the genre with political and aesthetic self-consciousness, a "metatextual turn" that parallels changes in the academic reception of Hindi popular cinema. This essay brings some of these new theoretical models to bear on the Indian rom-com Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na. Sumita Chakravaty closes her essay "Teaching Indian Cinema" with a challenge: "A Bollywood film is something to think with," she writes, "even more than something to think about" (108, emph. Chakravaty's). In this essay, I take up that challenge, thinking both about and with the Indian romantic comedy Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na (Know it or Not). The film, we might say, is both thought-provoking and thoughtful, built around sophisticated insights into the imaginative structures of romantic love, the sexual politics of romantic comedy, and the specifically intellectual appeal of popular romance media: crucial topics in the emerging interdisciplinary field of popular romance studies. The idea that popular romance culture might appeal to the mind, as well as the heart, is relatively new to scholarship. For example, in the opening pages of The Romance Fiction of Mills & Boon, 1909-1990s, British scholar jay Dixon insists that "to enter the world of the romance, the method of analyzing literature which is taught in schools and higher education must be abandoned" (10). To appreciate such books, she writes, "the analytical part of the brain has to be switched off" (5) so that we can "feel every emotion, see every setting, burn at every injustice, fall in love with the hero and become the heroine" (11). By contrast, in her 2008 study Historical Romance Fiction: Heterosexuality and Performativity, Lisa Fletcher argues that middlebrow and popular historical romance novels deserve close reading not only as aesthetic and political artefacts, but also as sites of unexpectedly complex thinking about love, gender, and aesthetics. Romance novels "theorize and thematize" significant issues in their own right (14), she claims, displaying an unexpected degree of "analytical self-reflection" (91). Laura Vivanco's For Love and Money: The Literary Art of the Harlequin Mills & Boon Romance devotes a full chapter to metafictional romance novels, and several contributors to the recent collection New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction: Critical Essays (Frantz and Selinger) and to the biannual Journal of Popular Romance Studies likewise take this metatextual turn, attributing sophistication and self-consciousness to these texts, both as individual works of art and as participants in a robust and evolving generic system. (1) A comparable turn is underway in the study of Hindi popular film. The same year as Fletcher's study, 2008, Ulka Anjaria and Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria contested the "derision" that meets clips of Indian film in academic contexts. "It is still commonplace," they write, "for critics and lay audiences alike to describe Hindi film as excessive, formulaic, escapist and morally totalizing with an intrinsically conservative agenda" (125). Against these charges--the same still filed against romance novels--they propose a "dialectical reading" strategy, which attends to the dialogue between individual films and generic conventions. "Conformity to conventions can be generative, rather than merely restrictive, of meaning," they write, and a properly "expansive" reading of Indian popular films would show that they "do not merely reflect social and political changes, but critically comment on them" (127). The cultural and generic competence needed to spot such dialogic subtleties comes easily to the intended audience of these films, in the Anjarias's account. Not only do "urban Indian filmgoers of all classes, as well as many diasporic filmgoers, see nearly every film that is released, and often multiple times," but filmmakers acknowledge this fact by integrating "metatextual commentary on viewing practises within the films themselves" (129). …

This essay explores an experimental method for how an academic interested in popular romance fiction might study this bestselling genre. It sets out a practice for negotiating the “aca-fan” tension in the growing field of popular romance studies, based on methods of the aca-fan-writer, observant participation, and performative ethnography.

Abstract The presence of a lexical stock of Romance origin in Yiddish has been interpreted differently by various authors. For D. S. Blondheim they represent a direct continuation of Judeo-Latin. For Max Weinreich, those Romance components go back to specifically Jewish languages, which he called southern and western Loez (a variation on the terms “Italkic” and “Zarphatic” once used by Salomon Birnbaum). This study reconsiders the history of those Yiddish words of Romance origin, focusing on the phonetic development they underwent as they integrated into Yiddish. The contribution of Romance historical linguistics confirms the huge importance of the Italo-Romance connection in this lexical stock, which may reflect the phase when Jews from Byzantine Italy began to settle beyond the Alps. A pinpointed examination of the morphophonemic shape of the loanwords may even hint at specific places of origin on the Italo-Romance dialectal maps. In spite of the dominance of Italo-Romance dialects in the Romance-borrowed lexical stock of Yiddish, some terms attested in both Western and Eastern Yiddish obviously have an Old French origin.

As the most popular of the popular genres, romance novels are an important site of investigation for cultural disability studies, a field concerned with the effects that representations of disability have on the world. The article explores the productive potentials of a dialogue between cultural disability studies and popular romance studies. With a focus on selected novels by Mary Balogh, a bestselling author of historical romance, the argument is that the frequent use of disabled characters, and the way in which those characters are depicted, positions all disabled characters as potential romantic actants, and encourages readers to reflect critically upon how they conceptualize disability.

The prestigious tradition of Romance Philology in the 20th century Italian academic world needs to be reconsidered and renewed; at the same time, the reasons and targets of this discipline (which used to bring together a wide range of competences and perspectives) need to be reshaped. In my paper, I will discuss six major points, outlining strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats: the focus on the Middle Ages, which implies being both fashionable and marginal; the focus on textual culture more than on the models offered by literary theory (sometimes with an excessively narrow point of view); the excellence of textual criticism and manuscript studies (with the risk of not being understood outside Italy); the marginal role of historical linguistics (with the exception of lexicography); the boundary between comparative literature and anthropology; European culture (past, present, and future) as a context and an opportunity for medieval romance studies.

This reprinted essay, written in 1982 by the co-founder of Romance Studies, examined different ways of considering realism, from Balzac, Stendhal, and Baudelaire to Flaubert, Zola, Robbe-Grillet, and Barthes. In it, Nelson questioned the assumptions underlying la nouvelle critique’s denial of realism.

This paper discusses a number of ways in which historical linguistics is now able to offer a more reliable, and perhaps more realistic, picture of past states of languages, thanks to the use of non-literary texts, the development of electronic resources such as corpora, and the increased tendency to see languages in their social and historical context. Examples of these developments are taken from the Romance languages.

This essay, by the co-founder of Romance Studies, shares memories of the journal’s beginnings and comments on realism in the works of Zola and the nouveaux romanciers.

This essay, written in 2003 by the co-founder of Romance Studies, traces the journal’s history.

This article offers a survey of letters and poems by Friedrich Gundolf held in the Gundolf Archive at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of London. Parts of the holdings, so far scarcely known, are presented here sorted by genre and chronology and by genre and recipient respectively. This provides a list of Gundolf's poetry, including dramatic, epic and humorous didactic works, as well as his correspondences stored in the London Gundolf Archive. A proposal for a reconstructed ‘History of German Literature’, based on Gundolf's lecture manuscripts, concludes the article. Die Miszelle bietet eine Ubersicht zu den Briefen und Gedichten Friedrich Gundolfs im sogenannten Gundolf-Archiv des Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of London. Teile der bisher nur oberflachlich bekannten Bestande werden nach Autopsie generisch-chronologisch beziehungsweise generisch-adressatenalphabetisch geordnet, sodass sich ein Verzeichnis der Lyrik, der Dramolette (‘Zwiegesprache’), der Epyllien, der scherzhaften Lehrdichtung und der Briefe Gundolfs ergibt, die das Gundolf-Archiv in London verwahrt. Abgeschlossen wird der Beitrag von einem Vorschlag zur Rekonstruktion einer ‘Geschichte der deutschen Literatur’ von Gundolf aus dessen Vorlesungsmanuskripten.

Richard von Kraeft-Ebing: Psychopathia Sexualis: The Case Histories. (D. Fall, Trans.). Washington, D.C.: Solar Books, 2011, 213 pp., $16.95. ISBN-13 978-0982046470 Krafft-Ebing's now classic work on deviant sexuality is both a landmark in psychiatric literature and an historical curiosity. His Psychopathia Sexualis was originally published in 1886 in German. It wasn't until the 12 edition that it was published in English. The edition under review is an edited version of the case studies, translated and edited by Dr. Domino Fall, with an introduction by Ms. Terence Sellers, dated 1996/1997 and reprinted 2011. Context for this edition is difficult to establish. Certainly, Sellers is known as the author of The Correct Sadist: The Memoirs of Angel Stern (Blue Moon Books, 1996) and has a long history exploring and documenting so-called deviant sexuality and sadomasochistic lifestyles spanning several decades. The edition under review appears to be a reprint of the 1997 Creation Books edition, billed as the 13th edition of the original Psychopathia Sexualis, for which Ms. Sellers was asked to contribute the Introduction. In her own words, she was, Honored and inspired by the opportunity to write an Introduction to the 13th Edition, published by Creation Books UK in 1997, she was nonetheless disappointed to realize much of her original essay was cut. The most salient points, that Krafft-Ebing's moral stance, though antique, is still valid; that his literary style is more vital and informative than any modern "clinical" text; his use of prostitutes as "colleagues' in his research, are all in this restored version" (Sellers, 2008a). For the interested reader, her complete and unedited Introduction is available online at http://www.terencesellers.com/pdf/psychopathia.pdf (Sellers, 2008b). Without access to this restored version (presumably the 1997 Creation Books edition), it is difficult to assess what might have been restored when compared to the original English version of Krafft-Ebing's work (1922) which is available here http://www.archive.org/details/ psychopathiasexuOOkrafuoft. More difficult to track down was Dr. Fall, the editor and translator of this edition. Her affiliation is not noted on the Solar Books edition. The Creation Books edition is extremely difficult to track down, not showing on the Creation Books website or in various on-line book sellers. There is one reference to Dr. Domino Fall as a lecturer in psychopathology at the University of London, where she specializes in Germanic studies. However, her name does not appear in current listings of the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies (http://igrs.sas.ac.uk/staff/honoraryfellows.html) or the neurosciences department (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ psychoanalysis/unit-staff/staff.htm). While I do not question the existence of Dr. Fall, there is a point to this somewhat naive exercise in academic detective work. Here we have a reprint of an historical landmark in the psychiatry of sexuality and the credentials of the editor/translator are extremely difficult to verify. As well, the introduction is written, perhaps unexpectedly and certainly unconventionally, by a dominatrix whose collected writings were purchased by New York University in 2005. What does this obscurity and unconventionality mean for the text itself? In examining the Solar Books edition, I read various cases side by side with my own copy of the "only authorized English adaptation of the twelfth German edition" (revised edition) published in 1929 by the Physicians and Surgeons Book Company, New York. Immediately several differences are apparent. The Solar Books edition truly is only the case studies. Dr. Krafft-Ebing's roughly 59-page introduction, including his classification theory, physiology and anthropological review, is missing. Case 1 in the Solar Books edition is one paragraph. In the 1929 edition, it is three. Further, reference material including in-text citations and footnotes are missing in the Solar Books edition. …

The Older Scots romance Clariodus survives uniquely in a manuscript written in the second half of the sixteenth century (Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Advocates’ MS 19.2.5). The romance itself was composed in the first half of the sixteenth century, most probably during the reign of King James V of Scotland. It is a remarkably close translation into decasyllabic couplets of the French prose romance, Cleriadus et Meliadice, estimated to have been composed between 1440 and 1444. Recent years have seen an increasing scholarly interest in the French Cleriadus, particularly concerning its focus on kingship, moral conduct and the presentation of Clariodus’ rise to power. By contrast, the Scottish romance has received regrettably little attention. This essay focuses on the poem’s authorship and sources. It interrogates a passage unique to the Scots translation in which Clariodus’ unknown author claims to have used two sources—the original French Cleriadus and a previous prose translation, commonly assumed to be in English. The plausibility of this assertion is tested via an examination of the fifteenth-century manuscripts and early reception of the original French romance at the court of Queen Marie d’Anjou. The predominantly female readers of Cleriadus are shown to provide both a ‘Scottish link’ which anticipates the sixteenth-century Scots translation and an ‘English link’ which provides a plausible context for an English prose translation.

The year 2014 marks the bicentenary of the Cuban-Spanish writer, Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda y Arteaga (1814–73), regarded as one of the most important Hispanic writers of the nineteenth century. She pioneered not only Latin American but also Spanish women’s writing in the mid-nineteenth century: she is, therefore, a major figure in world literature. This monographic issue of Romance Studies provides a bilingual platform for specialized studies on her life and work. The volume incorporates a diverse selection of articles that pays tribute to the author on the bicentenary of her birth. Although her Cuban and Spanish background led to a long-standing polemical debate on the author’s literary identity (see Pastor, 2012: 37–53). I adhere to Antonio Martinez Bello’s view that Cuba and Spain form an ‘armoniosa y fecunda sintesis’ (quoted in Scatena Franco, 2007: 14). Gomez de Avellaneda was born into and educated within the Cuban aristocracy in Puerto Principe (now Camaguey), but she spent most of her literary career in Spain. In 1836, Avellaneda left Cuba and moved with her family to La Coruna, Spain, her late father’s home city, and in 1840 she settled in Madrid, here discovering a vibrant literary life that helped her launch her most creative period. With a prolific career, spanning over thirty years, Gomez de Avellaneda confirmed her pre-eminent literary status with an outstanding collection of poetry, six novels, over twenty plays, several short stories (Leyendas), a corpus of letters, biographical writings and travelogues, and two stories of journalistic essays on women, entitled ‘la mujer’ and ‘Galeria de mujeres celebres’. In her lifetime she was highly popular and acknowledged as an outstanding author in what was a male-dominated literary world, but her status diminished after her death. As Hugh Harter states

The network of international collaboration in science traditionally has been dominated by English speaking countries, but this network is rapidly expanding at the global level. Between 40 and 50 countries appear in the center of the international network in 2011, and almost all nations are nowadays involved in international collaboration.1 The origin of Romance languages is Vulgar Latin spoken by the commoners of the Roman Empire. After its fall and fragmentation in the fifth century, the different languages evolved. Beginning in the 15th century, they expanded to other continents due to the Portuguese, Spanish, and French empires. Therefore, Latin-speaking Europe is considered as the area of Europe where Romance languages are either official, co-official, or significantly used. It is a major linguistic subdivision of Europe alongside Germanic- and Slavic-speaking subdivisions. The Latin European countries are mainly France, Italy, Portugal, and Spain. It also includes some regions from other countries, such as Wallonia in Belgium and the French- and Italian-speaking cantons of Switzerland as well as communities from other non-Romance European countries. Some Eastern Romance languages like Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian and Istro-Romanian are spread across the entire Balkans in small communities within Slavic-speaking countries, Greece and the European part of Turkey. The total population of all the Romance speaking areas in Europe is approximately 190,000,000. Spain and France are major players in the network in terms of international coauthorship relations. The polar position of Spain and France is noteworthy and can be considered as a consequence of their leading position in collaborations with Mediterranean and Romance language speaking countries.1 Despite the nearly global use of English as the language of research publication, there are still distinct collaborative groupings of Luso-/Hispanophone nations in Central and South America and Francophone countries in Africa.2 These networks point to cultural and economic factors underlying regional differentiation in the global patterns.1 Latin America is a wide region that includes 41 countries located in North, Central, and South America and the Caribbean region. The estimated population for 2013 is approximately 593 million. Ninety-seven percent of the population speaks Spanish or Portuguese, 64% speaks Spanish and 33% Portuguese, two languages fully intelligible between them.3–7 Spain and Portugal have remained a hub between the EU and Latin America.8 Indeed, Presmanes and Zumelzu9 reported that coauthorship relations among South American countries are less developed than those between some of these Latin American countries and Spain. Countries with languages other than Spanish or Portuguese are peripheral to this network as are some nations in Central America.1 This special issue provides a brief overview of the current state of radiation oncology in Latin speaking countries and the outlook for the future.

The aim of this paper is to propose a system of the demonstrative pronounsin Brazilian Portuguese within the broader context of the other Romancelanguages. The results of the qualitative research show important differencesbetween the spoken and the written variety. Thus a double-faced systematizationis developed. The multi-faceted process of reduction and re-establishment fromtwo- to three-terms-paradigms and vice-versa from Latin to neo-latin languages,esp. from Portuguese to Brazilian Portuguese might be of interest not onlyfor linguists working on Romance Languages but also for those interested intypology, language change and processes of grammaticalization.

The project Open Access Database - Adjective-Adverb Interfaces in Romance aims at the creation of an annotated and lemmatised corpus of various linguistic phenomena related to Romance adjectives with adverbial functions. The project is funded by the FWF (Austrian Science Fund) and is a cooperation between the Department of Romance Studies and the Centre for Information Modelling of the University of Graz. In this paper, we will explain the currently ongoing process of data compilation as well as the morphosyntactic and semantic categories for a thorough annotation by means of some Spanish examples.

Conference report for: Association for the Study of Modern Italy Annual Conference, Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of London, 27–28 November 2009.

Cristina Garosci i jej siostra Clotilde urodziły się w Turynie w drugiej połowie XIX wieku. Obydwie ukończyły filologię romańską, a polskiego nauczyły się same – korzystając z nielicznych książek do nauki tego języka, które w owym czasie dostępne były we Włoszech. Dokonały przekładów największych dzieł polskiej literatury indywidualnie lub (nierzadko) współpracując ze sobą. Przedstawienie sylwetek obydwu tłumaczek jest istotne ze względu na fakt, że są one w Polsce praktycznie nieznane, choć na początku XX wieku to właśnie one przybliżyły włoskiemu odbiorcy utwory między innymi: H. Sienkiewicza, J. Słowackiego, A. Mickiewicza, B. Prusa, S. Żeromskiego, Z. Krasińskiego. Cristina Garosci and her sister Clotilde were born in Turin (Italy) in the second half of the 19th century. Both sisters graduated from Romance studies at the University of Turin but what is worth stressing is the fact that they learnt the Polish language by themselves by using not that many textbooks of this language that were available at that time in Italy. The Garosci sisters made individual translations of the greatest works of the Polish literature, but also often worked on their translations together. The presentation of these two translators is essential due to the fact that they are virtually unknown in Poland, although at the beginning of the 20th century they were the ones who brought forward the most important works of the Polish fiction e.g. the works of H. Sienkiewicz, J. Słowacki, A. Mickiewicz, B. Prus, S. Żeromski, and Z. Krasiński to the Italian audience. The paper lists all the works of the Polish literature translated by the Garosci sisters. Publishing houses and years of issues of re-edited translations are specified in the article as well.

What are Romance studies in this day and age, and where does my own specialization, Renaissance Italian, fit into them? Has Italian ever really fit in that well--particularly given the fact that in large Romance language departments, the Italianists are almost always outnumbered by those who teach Spanish and French (if not Portuguese)? And should Italian fit by virtue of its distinctiveness--or by what Paul Ricoeur, in an essay to which I will return, calls its "comparabilities?" (1) My brief intervention will suggest that one way to think about "Romance languages" and the often vexed relationships among them is to invoke translation: particularly the history of translation, and particularly a history that focuses on the moment when the vernaculars as we now know them finally established their hegemony over Latin in the sixteenth century. (2) I will confine my remarks to thinking about Italian and French, although the work of Paul Julian Smith among others on Spanish is vital to filling out a picture important for our understanding as to where our increasingly threatened "language and literature" departments have come from, and where they are heading. For those departments to remain vital, they must explore ways of interconnecting with one another--both to understand what their historical relationships have been and to make the case for their necessity in the future. (3) This is why we might consider translation studies as a way to rethink relationships among national languages. Translation has usually been peripheral to the university. Translations don't count because they're not reflective of "original" work, while translation studies bas been perceived, particularly in the United States, as too technical to be a scholarly or humanistic field. Many of out best translators have not been affiliated with universities: William Weaver, Electa Arenal, Edith Grossman, and Michael Moore, to name just a few. And yet the study of translation's history, its theory as well as its practice, is vital to learning about the "particularities" of language--and to impressing upon students the importance of thinking about the way that language works. John Dryden's claim that he never paid so much attention to Latin as to when he was trying to put it into English epitomizes what the process of translation does: it forces one to consider both the specificities of individual languages and the relationships between them--and to clarify the extent to which one language can, and cannot, be translated into another. To this extent, translation forms the basis for a truly comparative understanding not only of languages, but of literatures. The early modern period witnessed the triumph of the vernacular as a literary language across eastern as well as western Europe, inclusive of the "Romance languages" to which Romanic Review has been dedicated since its inception. The ensuing contest among different vernaculars as to which would take the place vacated by Latin is felt in a variety of ways throughout the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century struggle for linguistic primacy. Dryden's sensitivities to Latin may seem to be the reverse of what we find in one of the earliest reflections on translation and its relationship to emergent vernaculars in sixteenth-century Europe: Joachim du Bellay Deffence et illustration de la langue francoyse. As Du Bellay's most recent translator, Richard Helgerson, has put it, during the prosperous 1540s, Du Bellay wanted "a rebirth of the Roman Empire with France as the new Rome." (4) In this text devoted to exploring the role of the vernacular in a newly-constituted Europe, Du Bellay first laments the effects of Babel and claims that it is too bad that there isn't just one language: it takes so many years "pour apprendre des motz!" (349). But he then stumbles onto the key: to translate everything into French, turning it into the vehicle through which one can learn all things. Envisioning a return to the day when Latin was the "universal language," Du Bellay predicts that King Francois I will be like Augustus and that French will become like Latin--which in any case, Du Bellay observes, "is already dead" (352). …

Romance philology in American academia started out very much as the enterprise of a handful of individuals and a series of unconnected casual events: Lorenzo da Ponte, who was teaching Italian at Columbia as early as 1825, had failed as a merchant and grocer in Pennsylvania; (1) Aaron Marshall Elliott, before becoming the founder of the Department of Romance Philology at Johns Hopkins, had been a private teacher for eight years and was an autodidact who'd studied all sorts of languages all over Europe. He could have very well taught any kind of language when he was appointed associate professor for languages--and not Romance languages--to the newly founded University of Johns Hopkins in 1876. (2) It took time for the discipline to emerge. Gradually, between 1875 and 1915, things got organized. (3) Departments of Romance philology were founded all over America, first on the East Coast, then, with the turn of the century, in the Midwest and at Berkeley. A new community of scholars separated from the original flock of classical philologists, first as modern philologists--dealing with English, German, Romance languages etc.--then as a tribe of their own, Romance philologists. Modern Language Notes, the first journal devoted to modern philology--as opposed to classical philology--was launched in 1884 in Baltimore, followed, one year later, by the Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, published by the newly founded association of the same name, and Chicago's Modern Philology in 1903. But by 1910, the Romanic Review, as the first journal entirely devoted to the study of Romance languages and literature, marked the advent of specialisation. (4) By and large, this evolution is no different from what had happened in Europe a few decades earlier, where national philologies had emerged, subsequently leading to the creation of specific departments, university positions and journals for Romance philology. (5) Once the discipline was established in the United States, its evolution continued in a very similar manner on both sides of the Atlantic, and medieval studies, including French literature, on which we will be concentrating here, developed in a parallel way. (6) A look at the number of doctoral dissertations in the field of medieval French and Occitan philology is very revealing: in the thirty years from 1880 to 1910, about forty dissertations were written in a few universities on the East Coast. (7) This considerable number is partly due to the fact that linguistics and philology were at that time not hermetically separated and thus many dissertations in historical linguistics were written and supervised by medievalists. Today, between 1995 to 2000, approximately sixty doctoral dissertations were published in the field in the USA and Canada, a number six or seven times higher per annum than one century ago. (8) This increasing output in the field of French literature of the Middle Ages is of course strictly arithmetical: it reflects the growing number of universities with French and Medieval departments, and, thus, the greater number of medievalists active in that area rather than a greater involvement in medieval studies than one hundred years ago. But the numerical increase is undeniable: when the International Arthurian Society and the Societe Rencesvals were established in the 1950s, the members from the USA and Canada could be counted on the fingers of two hands. (9) Today, there are hundreds of us. These figures show the North American landscape being gradually covered by a constantly growing number of citadels of knowledge and teaching of Romance philology, not unlike the famous white cloak of Cistercian abbeys spreading over twelfth-century France. Of course, exactly the same expansion could be registered, simply a little earlier, all over Europe, and the whole phenomenon could thus be dismissed as part of the progression regarding higher education in the western world over the last century. …

There seems to be a return to Romance philology in Anglophone scholarship. When the study of the medieval forms of modern foreign languages began in the United Kingdom about a century ago, the Romance languages taught at the University of Cambridge were French, Italian and Provencal; the same trio was honored in Oxford and London; at Manchester and other provincial universities, Provencal was less prominent than Anglo-Norman; but from about the 1970s, philological work in all these areas declined, and there was a turn in favor of literary, theoretical and cultural research. The Romanic Review has always been hospitable to medieval French and Provencal or, as I call it, Occitan studies, but its publications in these fields as far back as I can remember reflect this literary or cultural emphasis; indeed, it was the leading journal of this new disciplinary turn. (1) In recent years, under the influence of postcolonial and translation theory, Anglophone critics of medieval French and Occitan have increasingly become interested in what I would see as the core concern of Romance philology: not just the development of the individual Romance languages but the relations between them and the movement of texts in these in-between zones. Thus there is an altogether new interest in Franco-Italian, in "the French of England," and in the troubadour diaspora after the Albigensian Crusade. Renewed attention to the interactions between Anglo-Norman, French, Occitan, and Italian--medieval languages that were traditionally strong in the Anglophone academy--has also stimulated interest in Catalan as a conduit of mobility around the northern Mediterranean. (2) My own recent work on the reception of troubadour poetry reflects this Romance philological turn and, in a discussion directed largely to the past of the Romanic Review, I offer this essay as an indication of the kind of submissions it may receive in the future. In northern France and in Germany, troubadour song was imitated and assimilated by poets in their own languages, giving rise to important native traditions. But in what are now Spain and Italy, where many of the troubadours resettled after the Albigensian disaster, rather than this "nightingales' way" of lyric re-creation, poets often composed in Occitan rather than in their own languages. And in Spain, Italy, and the Occitan homeland in between, there also developed a second form of reception in which excerpts of troubadour songs were repeated verbatim in works of an overwhelmingly scholastic or quasi-academic character--grammatical treatises, poetic biographies, and various forms of didactic text. The majority of these works are composed in the same Occitan literary koine as the troubadours they quote, but most originate outside Occitania, are by authors whose first language was Catalan and / or Italian, and were composed for readers or audiences who were not native Occitans either, but Catalan or Italian. Working on this tradition of quotation, I find myself for the first time in my life grappling with medieval Italian and Catalan, at least in their interface with Occitan. I have become a Romance philologist. Two hilarious Occitan short stories featuring a parrot as protagonist can be read as drawing attention to the issues raised by the "parroting" on which this northern Mediterranean practice of quotation relies. Las Novas del papagay or "Tale of the Parrot" and Frayre de Joy et Sor de Plazer, "Brother of Joy and Sister of Pleasure," both present a maie protagonist largely overshadowed by a parrot who serves as his factotum, especially in situations requiring diplomacy and courtship. (3) By turns subordinate and managerial, merely repetitive and wildly imaginative, these parrots provide the main lines of communication in both stories, and are the essential vehicles without which their plots could not advance. Putting a parrot--as opposed to, say, a nightingale--in the driving seat is both comic and unsettling. …

Understanding the future of Romance studies would be an act of prophecy, rather than a forecasting. Since I am completely unable to become suddenly a prophet, mine will be some sort of Augustinian-driven consideration of the past and future of present things. I received my formation as a very canonical Romanist. It was a very intense, almost skill-based training in the history of literatures and languages, in textual scholarship, paleography, classical languages, and other strict disciplines: the hard core of philology. For better or for worse, the rest, I had to do it by myself. I spent ten years of my life teaching Romance literatures of the Middle Ages in Salamanca and at some other European institutions. Looking back to that period after seven years in American academia requires a sort of a critical archaeology of that formation and its conditions of possibility. The field of Romance studies could be perceived as a sort of academic battlefield in the form of a jigsaw puzzle. Different pieces have to be fit together to form the original, historical picture of a mythical Romania, a picture that includes not only the current Romance languages and cultures, the Romania continua, but also the different expressions of the Romania submersa, that is the Romance expressions of those other languages (of Celtic, Germanic or Berber origin, for instance) that, although located at the outskirts of Romania, still claim their historical and underlying romanization as one of the signs of their being higher cultures. The field became a battle from the moment that the jigsaw was puzzled by nineteenth-century national borderlines and by the classification of the Romance languages within those borderlines. All this could not be more obvious, but, at the same time, it bas very evident consequences as well: Occitan cultures are studied, if at all, within French departments, as if Occitan were a part of the monde de la francophonie; the Catalan language is studied, if at all, in Spanish departments and has even become a part of Hispanic studies; we could go on ad nauseam trying to fit pieces of what Walther von Wartburg certified as La Fragmentation linguistique de la Romania within the disciplinary boundaries of academic departments as they have been constituted in the last decades as a result of the complex interplay between linguistic geography, linguistic politics, and political geography. It does not come as a surprise that the program in Romance philology at Columbia University is owned, as it were, by the French department, and, in fact, it would not be a surprise either, if it were owned by the department of Germanic studies, since they established the foundation for Romance studies in the Romania continua as well as the the concept of the Romania submersa, to which nowadays they refer as die verlorene Romanitat, "the lost Romanity." By the same token, but from a completely different perspective, it is not a surprise either that the same program at UC Berkeley is co-owned by several departments, sort of floating among or on top of them and resistant to change despite the fact that those departments have changed their undergraduate and graduate programs radically over the course of the last few years. In other places I am aware of, such a program does not even exist, or it is the result of a process of exhumation and resuscitation, as at the University of Salamanca or the University of Alcala de Henares, both in Spain. To the primitive jigsaw puzzle formed by the archetypal picture of Romania, it is necessary to add another one formed by the ways in which we conceive the relationships between disciplines and academic programs. Romance studies and Romance philology are an exceptional academic space, and it is because of this exceptionality that it is uncomfortably located. In many instances, it is only a name used by the university to bring together colleagues from various smaller fields into a bigger structure in order to ease administrative work. …

The sociolinguistics of the Northern African states is relatively obscure in terms of international research, since these regions do not feature significantly in the areas of Arabic studies/Orientalism, Romance studies or classical African studies. A similar problem holds for the scientific classification of studies on Berber. This article develops an africanist-sociolinguistic approach to central questions refering to multilingualism in the context of historically unfolding geo- and sociolinguistic profiles ofNorthern African nations. This will be discussed within the framework of a historical linguistic stratigraphy. The article broadens the concept of diglossia as used in the arabophonic context in order to include a multilingual dimension (polyglotism), and discusses models of conflict avoidance between native speakers of Arabic, Berber and French, respectively. The article focuses on situationally adequate language political arrangements, especially in the area of education, on the basisof L1-based additive bi- and trilingualism models.Keywords: African studies, Arabic, Berber, education, diglossia, French, Maghreb, multilingualism, polyglotism, sociolinguistics, language policySchlüsselbegriffe: Afrikanistik, Arabisch, Berber, Bildung, Diglossie, Französisch, Maghreb, Mehrsprachigkeit, Polyglossie, Soziolinguistik, Sprachenpolitik

Romance Languages are a less homogenous group than depicted by current typological descriptions. Although Verb-Framing structures are predominantly used, Satellite-Framing constructions are present in all major Romance varieties and prevalent in some minor varieties. The study of the dialects of Italy shows that the presence of Phrasal Verbs (PhV) in the Italian language is due to an internal development (which finds antecedents in vulgar and late Latin) that gave rise to a construction that has been present in Tuscan dialects since their origins. The particular history of the relationship between dialects and the national language helps to explain the more frequent occurrence of PhVs in current standard Italian as compared to the other major Romance languages. The confutation of the hypothesis whereby the origin of Italian PhVs depends on a calque from the German language, although based on diachronic and diatopic data on the presence of PhVs in the dialects of Italy, has important methodological consequences. It shows that a typological model of the encoding of motion events must encompass the processes of internal variations (that may also depend on diamesic and diastratic factors) and not explain the causes of change only through external influence.

With regard to the etymological relationship between chose and cause in Romance languages, Michel Serres, in his Elements d’histoire des sciences, postulates that the best way to approach the history of a subject is to take a close look at the controversies that accompany it. The history of Romance philology is particularly apt to be written from the perspective of its causes, in so far as its beginnings were marked by many disputes, ambivalences and contradictions. Moreover, the discipline itself has seemed to be a controversial construct, an »impossible subject« (Nies/Grimm), whose existence is put in question time and again. Since Romance philology gained its early profile by investigating medieval languages and literatures — notably the poetry of the Provencal troubadours — matters of dispute mainly concerned the Middle Ages. Besides the factual issues, for example the debate over the authority of the verdicts passed by the cours d’amour, the general attitude of the modern age towards the Middle Ages is of great importance here: since Romance philology has its roots in German Romanticism as well as in French National historiography, Romantic poetry and the Romantic sense of nationality also affected the development of the discipline, in an ambivalent way. This essay aims at tracing the formation of Romance studies by focusing on some of its first protagonists and issues of debate.

This article compares the features of older Romance elements in Slovenian with the features of loans of the same kind in other South Slavic languages. In the first part the author examines vocabulary borrowed into Slovenian and Croatian before the twelfth century, paying special attention to the criteria for differentiating between true and apparent older Romance elements.

This article presents Ivan Koštiál’s research in Romance linguistics. Special attention is devoted to the contributions in which Koštiál—who, unfortunately, was somewhat overlooked by Romance linguistics in Slovenia—deals with language contact between Slovenian and the Romance languages.

1. Introduction (by Aboh, Enoch O.) 2. Word order and related pragmatic or semantic effects 3. Focus fronting and its implicatures (by Bianchi, Valentina) 4. Romance causatives and object shift (by Ciutescu, Elena) 5. Conditionally interpreted declaratives in Spanish (by Mayol, Laia) 6. Microparametric variation in Old ItaloRomance syntax: The view from Old Sicilian and Old Sardinian (by Wolfe, Sam) 7. Different effects of syntactic knowledge, associative memory and working memory in L2 processing of filler-gap dependencies: A cross-modal picture-sentence study on L2 Chinese learners of Italian (by Rastelli, Stefano) 8. Morphology and semantics of the verb and verb placement 9. The paradigmatic instantiation of TAM: A novel approach to Romance verb-movement (by Schifano, Norma) 10. Deriving the readings of French etre en train de (by Copley, Bridget) 11. On the syntax of datives in unaccusative configurations (by Cornilescu, Alexandra) 12. The perfect between Latin and Romance: The rise of perfective periphrases and the active/inactive contrast (by Migliori, Laura) 13. Productivity and Portuguese morphology: How experiments enable hypothesis-testing (by Nevins, Andrew) 14. Reflexively marked anticausatives are not semantically reflexive (by Schafer, Florian) 15. Morphosyntax of the DP and its relation to clause structure 16. Deverbal nominalization with the 'Down'-operator (by Iordachioaia, Gianina) 17. The (non-)grammaticalization of possession in Guatemalan Spanish (by Elsig, Martin) 18. On Spanish possessive formation: A DM-based account (by Kim, Sangyoon) 19. Language Index 20. Subject Index

These pages introduce Isogloss, a journal devoted to the study of the variation of Romance and Iberian languages.

Institutions of higher education have placed increasing importance on internationalising their curricula over the past 10 years. At Duke University, a private university in the southern United States, these efforts have led to a unique partnership between the Romance Studies Department and the Duke Global Health Institute (DGHI) that focuses on a curriculum design based on the Cultures and Languages Across the Curriculum (CLAC) model.

Die Berühmtheit eines Wissenschaftlers lässt sich nicht ausschließlich an der Anzahl der auf seine Werke getätigten Verweise ermessen. Auch die Vernachlässigung der Vollständigkeit eines Verweises auf den Urheber einer als grundlegend wahrgenommenen Idee stellt eine – wenn nicht gar die intensivste – Form der Anerkennung dar. Julia Richter ermittelt, mit welchen Strategien wissenschaftliches Prestige erzeugt wird. Im Zentrum ihrer Analyse stehen die Verweise auf Ferdinand de Saussure im Diskurs der romanistischen Linguistik. Die Studie entwickelt sogleich eine diskursanalytische Methode, die geeignet ist, Verweise in wissenschaftlichen Texten auf ihr Potential hin zu untersuchen, bestimmte Akteure des Diskurses aufzuzeigen und die Beziehungen zwischen diesen Diskursakteuren darzustellen. How do linguists become famous? Or are they made famous by others? This volume sheds light on strategies of the construction of reputation by way of the discourses on Ferdinand de Saussure in linguistics and romance studies.

This article offers a new interpretation of the development of insular romance, drawing on texts and events in the pre-Conquest period to suggest a much greater degree of cultural continuity across the Conquest than has previously been recognised. One strand of recent scholarship has elucidated the prevalence of the ‘exile-and-return’ theme in twelfth- and thirteenth-century insular French romance, and the political force of this ideology. Another has discussed the tendency of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Middle English romance to construct the Anglo-Saxon past as a legal golden age, using this trope to support a strong national identity. This article suggests that both of these tropes – the exile-and-return of the king, and the idea of good English Law – are in fact not post-Conquest inventions, as has been assumed, but are rather derived from pre-Conquest events and texts. This is a part of the author's general contention that a strong English identity can be seen to have survived the Conquest, and to have been expressed in French and Latin throughout the twelfth century, before the literary revival of English. Here it is argued that the two ideas are fundamentally intertwined, are essentially English, and are a genuine inheritance from the Anglo-Saxon past, in a manner which has not previously been acknowledged.

According to a German saying, in every discussion there comes the moment when “everything has been said, but perhaps not by everyone”. It seems to me that the thought-provoking critical cluster on the presumable death of a discipline (Dworkin 2003) offers an excellent synthesis of the arguments that can be put forward to demonstrate that Historical Romance Linguistics is a “vital” and “evolving” discipline. This vitality, it seems, is impressively represented by the recent, multifaceted Lexikon der Romanistischen Linguistik (Holtus, Metzeltin, and Schmitt 1988-2001) and the new Romanische Sprachgeschichte (Ernst, Glesgen, Schmitt, and Schweickard 2003-). So, why continue the debate, if tout va bien dans le meilleur des mondes? As I see it, there is a discrepancy between the “vitality” of excellent research represented by the work of distinguished scholars, and the uncertainties that surround the discipline in its epistemological and academic surroundings – not only in the US, but also in Europe. Considerations about the “vitality” of our discipline should include these two aspects. The 2003 debate forms part of a tradition of defenses et illustrations which goes back, at least in Germany, to the 1985 discussions of the Deutsche Romanistentag on Romance Philology as an “impossible discipline” (Nies and Grimm 1988). At that moment, even the most enthusiastic defenders of Romanistik admitted the “difficult unity” of the discipline; and two of the most distinguished German scholars of Romance Philology, Harald Weinrich and Hans Robert Jaus, described their scientific autobiography as an intellectual way out of the discipline. At the same moment, the Romanistentag set up a “section” on the history of Romance studies (Niederehe, and Schlieben-Lange 1988). In 1986, the international congress of the Societe de linguistique romane held at Trier did the same (Christmann 1989). This now twenty-year

This paper surveys several medico-botanical synonym lists that have not been described adequately in the bibliographical literature so far. We pay special attention to their vernacular component, addressing the problem of identifying the languages involved, which—aside from Latin—are different varieties of Romance. In much of the existing literature and many catalogues, the specific Romance language is usually either not identified or misidentified. Notably, the vernacular is often said to be Spanish or Italian, ignoring other languages like Occitan and Catalan. We show that the latter two languages are particularly frequent in this genre of multilingual medico-botanical synonym lists.

The author is Professor of Romance Studies at Cornell University. A version of this paper was presented at the 2003 MLA convention in San Diego. The essential background for a discussion of tenure deliberations at research universities or for speculation about their future is of course the evolution of research universities as we know them. Research universities—public and private—are important institutions from the standpoint of our profession since they grant doctoral degrees to those who will teach in all kinds of colleges and universities and they conduct in their facilities a great deal of the sponsored research that is responsible for the leading position of the United States in the field of education worldwide. Owing to the status of research universities as flagship institutions, their leaders are frequently called on to speak for higher education as a whole, even though such universities constitute only a small fraction of its universe. The standards they set for such procedures as faculty appointments and promotions have tended to have a far-reaching, perhaps inordinate, influence in the profession, if only because institutions below them in the pecking order often see fit to emulate them. Research universities have been changing. Two decades ago, they were still to some degree bastions of the old publish-or-perish order, under which it was possible to proclaim that, for junior faculty members, books, articles, and research grants were the sine qua non for acquiring tenure. Concomitantly, it was understood that the young academic’s performance as a classroom teacher or mentor and his or her contribution as a citizen of the community or of the