BOOK REVIEWS / 105 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 Again somewhat counter-intuitively, while noting the recent rise of scholarly discourse on translation, Emmerich insists that “it has emerged for precisely the wrong reasons” (399). Rather than “simply letting ourselves be bufeted by waves of theory from the cen- ter” (that is, English or Comparative Literature departments), Emmerich suggests that “we should be looking back at the intertwined histories of translation, translations, and dis- course about translation as they pertain to Japanese literary studies, trying to re-create transla- tion studies anew from within” (402). It is just such a project that his current volume hopes to initiate. The Tale of Genji: Translation, Canonization, and World Literature is a rich and extremely well researched volume, and its argument is complex. It is also somewhat overlong and could have benefited from a sterner editorial hand. It remains, however, one of the most thought-provoking and important studies of the reception of classical Japanese literature to appear in any Western language. While many of us have been feeling unhappy about the concept of “reception,” I am not convinced that Emmerich’s “replacement” will win the day. I would prefer something like “appropriation,” emphasizing more its active dimen- sion, but it is clear that Emmerich is aware of the political dimensions of many of the “replacements” he discusses. Joshua S. Mostow The University of British Columbia DOI 10.1215/00104124-3462691 Nabokov , History, and the Texture of Time. By Will Norman. Routledge Transna- tional Perspectives on American Literature, 19. New York: Routledge, 2012. xvi, 205 p. Will Norman’s recent monograph takes as its point of departure Fredric Jameson’s state- ment that Vladimir Nabokov had had “the luck to find a time capsule of isolation or exile in which to spin out unseasonable forms” (qtd. in Norman 31) —an inversion of Nabokov’s own (and many scholars’) sense of his untimeliness and creative autonomy from history. Stepping back from either position, Norman argues and illustrates through perceptive close readings and imaginative comparisons that the desire for ahistoricism is itself his- torically conditioned by the Post- and Cold War moment. Norman moves from The Gift (1937/1963) through nearly all of Nabokov’s major English-language novels, reading pro- vocatively against the critical grain, inasmuch as the dominant narrative builds “precisely on the exclusion of history, which then permits unopposed devotion to formal complexity and thus the celebration of the master” (158). Nabokov, History, and the Texture of Time ofers more than a clever or novel interpretation, re-opening familiar works to fresher modes of study — and reads as a sign of sea change. In the last quarter of a century, the fields of Slavic, comparative, and transnational liter- ary studies have slowly begun to transform the ways in which we read, teach, and think about the work of writers — such as Nabokov and Joseph Brodsky — whose oeuvres and critical reception were profoundly shaped by the politics of the Cold War. The generation of scholars who knew these authors personally or shared with them the traumas of emigra- tion and exile bequeathed, along with invaluable information and insights, a tendency to defend their subjects’ style and politics. The challenge today is to rediscover and reinvent the works, historical artifacts once more, for the twenty-first century. CLJ68_1_07BookReviews_1pp.indd 105 11/30/15 5:18 PM