Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2011) Heft 1 125 Waldemar Zacharasiewicz, Imagology Revisited. (Studia Imagologica. Amsterdam Studies on Cultural Identity 17). Amsterdam & New York: 2010). Günther Blaicher The present volume documents Waldemar Zacharasiewicz’s life-long interest in the perception and representation of ethnic groups and nations. Both his Habilitationsschrift on Die Klimatheorie in der englischen Literatur und Literaturkritik (1977) and his monograph on Das Deutschlandbild in der amerikanischen Literatur (1998) have become indispensable sources of information on these subjects. In Imagology Revisited he has assembled twenty-three of his essays on a wide range of imagological issues published over a period of some forty years. Thus this volume offers another opportunity to appreciate Zacharasiewicz’s achievement in this multi-faceted field. In his introduction written in the form of a personal memoir Zacharasiewicz sketches his expanding interest in imagological phenomena. Beginning with his doctoral thesis on the representation of exotic countries in 17 th and 18 th century English poetry, which he submitted to the University of Graz in 1967, he moved on to the study of specific stereotypes and models of thought in the description of ethnic and national diversity in Europe. In his seminal monograph on the theory of climate as the principal source for the stereotypical description of nations he registered the remarkable uniformity of European opinion on this matter and pointed out the rise of comparative and panoramic ways of looking at the field. Continuing his career at the University of Vienna, Zacharasiewicz explored the imagological themes manifested in North American literatures in respect of the acculturation of immigrants and the construction of distinct regional and national identities, with special emphasis on American attitudes and perceptions of Germany, Austria, England, Scotland and Italy. At the same time he widened his field of research to media other than literature and to branches of learning like physiognomy and social psychology. After this introductory memoir the volume offers a review of research on national stereotypes in Anglophone literature encompassing imagological studies from the beginning of the 20 th century down to its publication in 1991/ 2. In this way Zacharasiewicz provides the reader with an overview of basic aspects of imagological research, which serves as an excellent starting point for understanding the subjects elaborated on in the main body of this collection of articles. Writing in the heyday of reception aesthetics he opens up new vistas for future studies by pointing out the importance of readeroriented criticism for a better understanding of the role of stereotypes in the interaction between an author and his or her readership. The twenty-two chapters which follow are grouped thematically in seven sections of two to five chapters each: Imagology and the Theory of Climate (3), Images of Europe and Its Nations (5), Imagology of Germany in American Culture (5), Images of Vienna and Austria in Anglophone Cultures (3), Images Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2011) Heft 1 126 of the English and Scots Abroad (2), Images of Jews in North American Culture (2), and Images of Italians in Anglophone Cultures (2). In these chapters, Zacharasiewicz emphasizes, among other themes, the limited value of the tripartite zonal model within the theory of climate for American writers, according to which the middle regions are privileged at the expense of northern and southern zones, the result not rarely being a combination of theory of climate and notions of race (chapter 4). He follows the intricate reciprocal relationship between American self-perceptions and attitudes to Europe and European heterostereotypes of America through almost two centuries (chapter 6) and probes the function of the transfer of stereotypical notions of European nations to North America or the use of European models in an attempt at identity-construction in America (chapters 9, 10, 19). The volume is concluded by an extensive bibliography of some sixty pages and an index of persons, nations and ethnic groups. In view of the wealth of factual information and of the meticulous presentation of arguments it is impossible to give a satisfactory résumé of this volume. Instead I would like to make an attempt at describing the author’s method and the shifts it has undergone in the course of four decades. Zacharasiewicz’s work is informed by an aetiological interest, which makes him go beyond the mere description of imagological phenomena and their function in literary texts and in the political sphere. Trying to understand how these phenomena came into being he lays open their roots in literary und cultural history. In a substantial article originally published in German in 1975 on “Johannes Kepler, James Howell, and Thomas Lansius: The Competition between European Nations as a Literary Theme in the 17 th Century” his method is affiliated to the tradition of source research. Focussing on James Howell’s A German Diet (1653), a debate on the strengths and weaknesses of the European nations, he puts forward the thesis that this is a translation or an adaptation of an earlier work and proposes Thomas Lansius’ Consultatio de principatu inter provincias Europae (1613) as the immediate source. Comparing the images of the various nations in the two texts Zacharasiewicz hopes to uncover “some of the roots of the intellectual climate which fostered the literary dissemination of national characters” (131). In the process he also discovers the roots of the popular literary convention of juxtaposing the nations of Europe in Cornelius Agrippa’s Of the Vanitie and Uncertainty of Arts and Sciences (English translation 1569). In a chapter on “Transatlantic Differences: (Mis)Perceptions in Diachronic Perspective”, published almost thirty years later in 2004, his starting point is the controversial debate initiated by US politicians on the premises of US policies and on ‘Old Europe’ during the Iraq crisis. Here again Zacharasiewicz is guided by his aetiological interest claiming that “these developments make it necessary to dig deeper, to the very roots of these different modes of perception of vital questions in a globalized world” (171). This chapter, covering a period of two hundred years, is in fact a lucid presentation of six phases of the US American self-conception with regard to its relation to Europe (chapter 6). Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2011) Heft 1 127 Zacharasiewicz’s aetiological interest also includes the roots of stereotyping practices in individual authors. The essay “Sketches of a Traveller: Observations on a Dominant Theme in Washington Irving’s Work”, published in 1977, presents a survey of Washington Irving’s use of national stereotypes before 1825 and an analysis of their functions. It arrives at the conclusion, “that the roots of Irving’s literary practice can be found in the thinkers of the early 18 th century and in Renaissance writers and critics” (206). Ten years later Zacharasiewicz gives up this historyofideas approach, when, in “Remarks on the Tradition and Function of Heterostereotypes in North American Fiction between 1900 and 1940” (chapter 8), he compares Thomas Wolfe’s and John Dos Passos’ use of stereotypes and locates the differences in the social origin and world views of these writers, that is, in factors of their biographies and psycho-history. Willa Cather and William Faulkner are other cases in point. In “Stereotypes and Sense of Identity of Jewish Southerners” (1991), Zacharasiewicz elaborates on this when he attributes Wolfe’s antisemitism to “flaws in his own personality, his way of coping with disconcerting experiences, and his inclination to verbal aggression and xenophobia” (429). A look at the chronology of Zacharasiewicz’s essays thus reveals a widening of perspective. This allows a flexible use of approaches from social psychology, cultural history and perception psychology, which take his studies well beyond the pale of literary imagology in a narrow sense of the word. His digging for roots is essentially a process of enlightenment. This motivation of his works also surfaces in his repeated appreciations of the work of Hugo Münsterberg, a German experimental psychologist who came to teach at Harvard in 1892 and who, in his American Traits: From the Point of View of a German (1901), analysed German and American heterostereotypes of each other tracing “the mutual misunderstandings and prejudices to their roots” (183). In a similar vein Zacharasiewicz describes Sir Thomas Browne (1605- 82) as a tolerant and enlightened thinker whose censure of the use of stereotypes and of the practice of unwarranted and unpremeditated generalisations gives him a respected place in the struggle against “vulgar errors” and prejudices (470ff.). In his digging for roots Zacharasiewicz displays an admirable range of reading and erudition, and this is also true with regard to a second feature of his work: its survey character. More than half of these essays fall into this category. Since he is not only interested in origins, but also in developments, his articles tend to assume the form of imagological and interdisciplinary surveys. This mode of presentation allows him to trace the influence and the reception of individual writers and the dissemination of individual stereotypes as well as the transfer of traditional stereotypes and patterns of thought to different contexts. Here again an early essay such as “Remarks on the Tradition and Function of Heterostereotypes in North American Fiction between 1900 and 1940” (1987) remains largely within the sphere of literature, whereas the more recent survey on “German Ethnicity in the American South and the Permeability of Ethnic Borders” of 2008, which traces the fortunes of the German ethnic group in the Southern states in the 19 th century and in the Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2011) Heft 1 128 first decades of the 20th century reflects “the cultural turn” of literary studies and reaches out into the wider field of immigration studies. The essays collected in Imagology Revisited confirm Waldemar Zacharasiewicz’s standing as one of the leading imagologists in the field of Anglo- American literature and culture. His work is based on the conviction that literary scholars can offer a contribution to an improved understanding between nations and ethnic groups. Not the least of the many merits of his scholarly activities is to have made imagology an esteemed part of English and American studies. Günther Blaicher Katholische Universität Eichstätt Sonja Fielitz (ed.), Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Loves, Layers, Languages. (Anglistische Forschungen 411). Heidelberg: Winter, 2010. Daniella Jancsó The quartercentenary of the publication of Shakespeare’s Sonnets in the year 2009 was celebrated in the daily press and in the theatre, where Peter Brook’s staging of the sonnets was a major event. In the academic world, the jubilee was marked by, among other things, the publication of A Quartercentenary Anthology, a commendable treasury of translations in 72 languages with a critical commentary, edited by Manfred Pfister and Jürgen Gutsch. The anniversary also occasioned a number of academic conferences. Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Loves, Layers, Languages, edited by Sonja Fielitz, is a collection of the papers given by distinguished scholars at an international conference hosted by the University of Marburg. The title of the volume bears upon “three major fields of criticism”, as Fielitz explains in her introduction: “‘Loves’ refers to a section dedicated to the texts themselves, that is, matters of gender and sex, including the fictional identity of the Dark Lady and the ‘sweet youth.’ ‘Layers’ is related not only to the general idea of ‘layers of meaning’ but rather to various degrees of friction and synthesis, that is, between form and content, discourses and expression, word and image”, while “[t]he third section, ‘Languages’, covers [...] the (linguistic) afterlife of the sonnets” (p. viii). This triad, for all its alliterative allure, cannot quite conceal the fact that the book lacks a unifying idea, and the result is a thematically heterogeneous collection. It is also regrettable that the description does not exactly match the actual scheme of the book, which is divided into three