Modern Language Review

Modern Language Review

The Modern Language Review is a quarterly scholarly journal founded in 1905 and published by the Modern Humanities Research Association. It serves as a venue for research on literature and literary history involving authors such as William Shakespeare, John Milton, Geoffrey Chaucer, Jane Austen, and Charles Dickens. Contributors engage with material tied to institutions like University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, University of London, Trinity College, Dublin, and King's College London.

History

The journal was established in the early 20th century by figures associated with British Academy and the Modern Humanities Research Association, in a cultural milieu that included contemporaries such as T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, E. M. Forster, and D. H. Lawrence. Early editorial direction responded to debates at Cambridge Union and events like the aftermath of the Boer War and the lead-up to the First World War. Over successive decades the journal published scholarship engaging with movements traced through Romanticism, Victorian era, Modernism, Postmodernism, and responses to geopolitical moments such as the Second World War, the Cold War, and the European integration initiatives like the Treaty of Rome. Notable contributors have included scholars connected to University of Edinburgh, King's College London, University of Manchester, University of Birmingham, and University College London.

Scope and Content

The journal covers literary analysis, textual criticism, philology, book reviews, and essays on authors from antiquity to the contemporary era, addressing figures such as Homer, Virgil, Dante Alighieri, Miguel de Cervantes, Voltaire, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, Edmund Spenser, Laurence Sterne, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, William Wordsworth, Walter Scott, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Marcel Proust, Molière, Jean Racine, Bertolt Brecht, Federico García Lorca, Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, Gabriel García Márquez, Toni Morrison, Samuel Beckett, Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin, Dylan Thomas, Zadie Smith, Salman Rushdie, Chinua Achebe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Rabindranath Tagore, Kōbō Abe, Yasunari Kawabata, Haruki Murakami, Goethe, Ibsen, August Strindberg, Arthur Miller, Eugène Ionesco, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus. The review also publishes critical notices of monographs published by houses such as Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Routledge, Penguin Books, and Harvard University Press and addresses archival materials held in repositories like the British Library, Bodleian Library, National Library of Scotland, Bibliothèque nationale de France, and Library of Congress.

Editorial and Publication Information

Editors have typically been academics affiliated with colleges of the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge, as well as scholars from Yale University, Princeton University, Columbia University, University of Chicago, University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University, University of Toronto, McGill University, University of Edinburgh, and University of St Andrews. The journal appears in print and digital formats, distributed through institutional subscriptions held by libraries of institutions such as British Library, Trinity College Library, Dublin, New York Public Library, Bibliothèque nationale de France, and university consortia including JISC and HathiTrust. Peer review procedures align with standards common to bodies like the Modern Humanities Research Association and follow academic calendars tied to terms at University of Oxford and University of Cambridge.

Abstracting and Indexing

The journal is abstracted and indexed in major bibliographic services and citation databases used by researchers associated with Modern Language Association, Arts and Humanities Citation Index, Scopus, Web of Science, JSTOR, Project MUSE, EBSCOhost, ProQuest, and university discovery systems at University of Pennsylvania, University of Michigan, Yale University, and Harvard University. Its reviews and articles are cited in publications from presses such as Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Princeton University Press, University of Chicago Press, and repositories including the British Library and the National Library of Scotland.

Reception and Impact

Scholarly reception situates the journal alongside long-established periodicals like The Review of English Studies, PMLA, Comparative Literature, English Historical Review, and English Studies. Citations to its articles appear in monographs on authors including William Shakespeare, John Milton, Dante Alighieri, Miguel de Cervantes, Fyodor Dostoevsky, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett, Seamus Heaney, Toni Morrison, and Salman Rushdie. The journal's influence extends to curricula at departments such as Department of English, University of Oxford, Department of English, University of Cambridge, Department of English, University of Edinburgh, and law- and humanities-related interdisciplinary programs at King's College London and University College London. Its review section has informed collections in libraries including the Bodleian Library, British Library, New York Public Library, and research centers like the Royal Historical Society and the Institute of English Studies.

Category:Literary magazines published in the United Kingdom