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Book Reviews/
Critiques de livres
Denis Diderot’s “Rameau’s Nephew”: A Multi-Media Edition,
ed. M. Hobson, trans. K.E. Tunstall and C. Warman,
music by Conservatoire National de Musique de Paris
with director P. Duc
Cambridge and London: Open Book Publishers, 2014.
http://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/216
Review by Tili Boon Cuillé, Washington University in St. Louis
Denis Diderot expressed a preference for viewing sketches over
finished paintings and hearing music from afar, for the completed work
of art or music he imagined inevitably surpassed reality. Diderot and
D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie—the vast compendium of knowledge whose
network of keywords and cross-references the reader can navigate at
will—is considered the precursor of the library card catalog and the
internet. Diderot cast beyond the technological limitations of his own
era, reforming the genres of painting, opera, theatre, and the novel, as
well as anticipating film. How suitable, then, for Diderot to be published
online. Rameau’s Nephew seems to cry out for a multimedia edition,
bringing its realization in line with its conception as a protean com
bination of dialogue, music, and pantomime. Does Marion Hobson’s
online edition under the musical direction of Pascal Duc and featuring
an English translation by Kate E. Tunstall and Caroline Warman live up
to the viewer’s vision?
As musical advisor to William Christie and Les Arts Florissants, Duc
has played a crucial role in the revival and recording of eighteenthcentury operas over the past thirty years—particularly those of Rameau
the uncle—and he is uniquely qualified to select, direct, and perform
the musical numbers in this edition. I recommend that readers refer
to the interactive pdf version (which allows you to peruse notes and
figures simultaneously, in sufficient resolution and in full colour, via
the available hyperlinks) on a device that supports MP3 files in order to
listen to the music while reading. Rameau’s Nephew is one of a handful
of literary works—including the Bible, Lewis Carroll’s Annotated
Alice, and Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire—composed of more copious
(fictional, factual, or exegetical) notes than text. The extraordinarily
helpful glosses of the multitude of contemporary references are con
siderably enriched by the addition of sound and image. The reader has
Eighteenth-Century Fiction 28, no. 2 (Winter 2015–16)
ECF ISSN 0840-6286 | E-ISSN 1911-0243 | DOI: 10.3138/ecf.28.2.375
Copyright 2016 by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, McMaster University
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the unique opportunity to watch a gripping performance of Pergolesi’s
La Serva padrona, the two-part Italian intermezzo that touched off the
Querelle des Bouffons in 1752, not between the acts of Lully’s tragédie
en musique, Acis et Galatée, on the stage of the Opéra but rather
between the pages of Rameau’s Nephew on YouTube. We are alternately
transported, during the Nephew’s extended medley known as the
pantomime de l’homme-orchestre, by exquisite recordings of Jommelli’s
“Lamentations,” harbinger of the “new music,” and of Rameau’s “Tristes
apprêts, pâles flambeaux,” harking back to the best of the old. The only
discordant note is struck when Marian Hobson refers the reader to
her 2013 French print edition of the text to discover more about key
figures, such as Rameau’s uncle or Mlle Clairon, rather than reproduc
ing her notes in English translation here.
With regards to the English translation, Kate Tunstall and Caroline
Warman have not only preserved but also enhanced the lively repartee,
fervent diatribes, and virtuosic pantomimes throughout. I would like
to address two instances in which connotations and commentary risk
being lost in translation, with the intent not to detract from the merits
of this edition, but rather to contribute to an ongoing discussion of
the interpretation of Diderot’s works. The first is the decision to trans
late “idiotismes” as “peculiarities.” Here, Tunstall and Warman depart
from a long tradition of rendering “idiotismes” as “idioms.” This
tradition includes dictionary definitions (idiotism, in English, is an
obsolete word for idiom); translations of “idiotisme” into English and
“idiom” into French in bilingual dictionaries; previous English trans
lations of Rameau’s Nephew, including the 1956 Hackett edition trans
lated by Jacques Barzun and Ralph H. Bowen and the 2006 Oxford
World’s Classics edition translated by Margaret Mauldon; and count
less scholarly books and articles. Though “peculiarity” is indeed the
root and a synonym of the term, which preserves, moreover, its double
meaning of both “unique to” and “characteristic of a group,” it does not
have the same sociolinguistic connotations. As the entries in Diderot’s
Encyclopédie on “Anglicisme,” “Barbarisme,” “Dialecte,” “Encyclopédie,”
and “Idiotisme” reveal, “idiome” refers to what we might call a national
idiom, whereas “idiotisme” denotes what we might call an idiomatic
expression. The French “idiome” and “idiomatique” thus correspond to
two different definitions of “idiom” in English. Diderot does not use
the term in isolation; instead, he refers to “idiotismes français” (which
might be better rendered as “gallicisms”) and “idiotismes de métier”
often rendered as “tricks of the trade”). Each of these qualified nouns
constitutes exceptions to the (grammatical, professional, or moral) rules,
but also evokes behaviour characteristic of a (national, linguistic, or
professional) group. They are therefore more akin to the terms idiocrasy,
ECF 28, no. 2 © 2016 McMaster University
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idiosyncrasy, colloquialism, regionalism, or jargon. The term “idiom”—
an expression characteristic of a group that constitutes an exception
to a rule and therefore defies translation, requiring us to resort to
non-literal translation strategies such as borrowings, calques, or
equivalence (example: idiotisme)—preserves these connotations. Short
of conserving the term, an explanatory note justifying the decision to
depart from this translation history is crucial in order to convey to
students that “idiotismes de métier” can refer to practices as far afield
as name-dropping, networking, and business attire, and to ensure that
previous generations of scholarship remain intelligible.
The second instance I would like to consider is the decision to trans
late “espèce” as “species.” Frequently rendered as “type” (see again Barzun,
Bowen, and Mauldon)—a choice born out by Dorval’s remark in Diderot’s
Entretiens sur Le Fils naturel that “le genre comique est des espèces, et le
genre tragique est des individus”—“espèce” is another term that defies
translation, which may be why Hegel chose to leave it in the original
French. The Nephew describes the expression as “de toutes les épithètes
la plus redoutable, parce qu’elle marque la médiocrité, et le dernier degré
du mépris.” An epithet, interestingly, can designate either a species or
an insult (as in espèce de cafard). In Le Mot et la chose of 1863, drama
critic Francisque Sarcey notes a new usage of the term among Diderot’s
contemporaries, stating, “C’est à cette même époque que paraît le terme
nouveau d’espèce, par où l’on exprime le contraire des qualités qui con
stituent l’honnête homme.” Diderot accordingly opposes the espèce—
the contrary of the honnête homme—to the grand vaurien. Sarcey goes
on to specify that “On entendait par espèce l’imbecile, quel qu’il fût,
qui, n’ayant rien de l’honnête homme, voulait en jouer le personnage”
(141), a definition consistent with the Nephew’s running commentary
(and shifting position) on hypocrisy. Neither “type,” consistent with
Diderot’s interest in theatre and physiognomy, nor “species,” consistent
with his interest in natural history and physiology, fully captures this con
temporary usage of the term, which comes closer to the modern French
pauvre type, or loser. This is precisely the sort of neologism that Diderot
savoured. My consideration of these two instances is, I hope, in keep
ing with the spirit of this updated, online realization of Diderot’s works,
which—like an artist’s sketch or a piece of music heard from afar—
renders audience participation irresistible.
Tili Boon Cuillé is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Litera
ture at Washington University in St. Louis and specializes in eighteenthcentury French literature and opera. She is the author of Narrative Interludes:
Musical Tableaux in Eighteenth-Century French Texts (2006) and co-editor of
Staël’s Philosophy of the Passions: Sensibility, Society, and the Sister Arts (2013).
Her current research addresses the impact of natural history on the fine arts.
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Eighteenth-Century Poetry and the Rise of the Novel
Reconsidered, ed. Kate Parker and Courtney Weiss Smith
Bucknell University Press and Roman & Littlefield, 2014.
xxiv + 256pp. US $80. ISBN 978-1-61148-483-0.
Review by Ingrid Horrocks, Massey University Wellington, New Zealand
This provocative collection brings large historical and theoretical
claims together with close attention to individual eighteenth-century
texts and in particular to the workings of literary form. This dual focus is
true of both the collection as a whole and the individual essays, some of
which lean more towards the theoretical, some more towards individual
readings, but all of which keep an eye on larger contextual questions and
are built on readings of a small number of texts. In mapping out the still
relatively uncharted territory of the relationship between poetry and
the novel in the eighteenth century, the essays work collectively to find
and demonstrate approaches to reading across genre. For the most part,
they do this in ways that work not to obscure formal distinctions, but
to reveal the diverse and very particular effects of genre. The collection
extends current questioning of some of our fundamental assumptions
about cultural and literary history, in particular the narrative of the
“rise of the novel” and parallel understandings of the development of
interiority and the autonomous subject. Many of the essays are based
on an insight from an eighteenth-century commentator: Anna Letitia
Barbauld on Laurence Sterne in David Fairer’s essay (135); Elizabeth
Carter’s friend Hester Mulso on Edward Young in Joshua Swidzinski’s
(161); Alexander Pope and Henry Fielding on Eliza Haywood in Kate
Parker’s (45); and Hugh Blair and Lord Kames on personification in
Heather Keenleyside’s (108–17). This is indicative of the spirit of the
collection, which uses the responses of eighteenth-century readers to
trouble what have become our later-day assumptions about literary
history, shaped by the anachronism of “what happened next.”
As Kate Parker and Courtney Weiss Smith lay out in their fine critical
introduction, and Sophie Gee develops in the opening essay, the collec
tion builds on exciting new revisionary work in eighteenth-century
studies, such as Sandra Macpherson’s Harm’s Way: Tragic Responsibility
and the Novel Form (2010), which moves away from understandings of
the novel as a technology for producing interiority, towards exploration
of subjects who move across genres and who are defined more troubl
ingly against interiority, intentionality, or agency itself (16). These essays
expansively demonstrate the ways in which such new work has made way
for far-reaching reimagining of the eighteenth-century self “by deflating
its pretensions to autonomy, subsuming it in collectives, questioning its
self-enclosedness, and making its boundaries more permeable” (xvii).
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Wolfram Schmidgen’s essay most directly challenges the rise of the
novel narrative and the parallel rise of the modern. He suggests that
our current moment of post-colonialism and global capitalism, with
its increasing emphasis on hybridity, mobility, and porous boundaries
(between people, places, things, and genres), offers an opportunity for
a radical reassessment of how we understand literary history. Rather
than privileging “an idea of the modern in which differentiation is the
organizing paradigm,” this new understanding would seek to theorize
and historicize how mixture works (90). Schmidgen shows how this
argument might work in relation to the shared aesthetic of James
Thomson and Daniel Defoe, which cuts across generic boundaries and
sees variety as enabling (98).
In Heather Keenleyside’s and Sophie Gee’s accounts, and in a number
of the other essays in the collection, the blurring of insides and outsides
is more troubled and troubling, and this tension becomes the very stuff
from which much eighteenth-century innovation emerges. Gee argues
for a more novelistic version of Pope’s Belinda than we are accustomed
to, but one in which his poetry prefigures prose fiction not in develop
ing interiority but in highlighting the mismatch between internal
and external worlds. Her essay presents a pained Belinda, a figure of
“profound emotional and cognitive disorientation” (13); she is a woman
with feelings that she is unable to access or understand, and with an
interior life no sooner revealed than brutally foreclosed in a single
rhyming couplet. Keenleyside’s fascinating essay on personification in
eighteenth-century poetry and fiction presents a similarly pained image
of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, wrenched from a brief, much-discussed
moment of self-reflection, by the personification of the pond in which
she had thought to drown herself (“Quit with speed these guilty
Banks, and flee from these dashing Waters, that even in their sounding
Murmurs, this still Night, reproach thy Rashness!” [125]). Keenleyside
points out that this eighteenth-century mode of personification associ
ated with poetry is also omnipresent in Richardson.
The literary-critical story told here is certainly not Ian Watt’s of the
growth of the self-reflecting subject, and neither is it quite Deirdre
Lynch’s of the development of novelistic character, given depth by
the suggestion of an inner self that transcends relationships of social
and financial exchange, although it is unquestionably influenced
by Lynch’s work. The collection as a whole presents a more troubled
story than Lynch’s, less interested in the invention of interiority itself
than in its blurred, porous borders. Like Schmidgen’s, some of the
power of Keenleyside’s argument comes from an appeal to our current
moment. Keenleyside suggests that, with “their capacity to ‘introduce
... us into society with all nature’ [Hugh Blair], eighteenth-century
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personifications might help us to imagine the sort of world that
scholars like Bruno Latour and Jane Bennett envision: one that is not
divided into persons and things, agents and instruments, animate and
inanimate beings,” but instead imagines self as “an impure, humannonhuman assemblage” (125). So Pamela, like Belinda, becomes
visible as a figure seized upon and surrounded by peculiarly animated
things; and Pamela, along with a significant body of much-maligned
eighteenth-century poetry, become participants in a cross-genre tradi
tion with its own kind of realism, “a realism true to our experience of
being objects among others, some of which are at once intimate and
oddly alien” (125).
The essays in the collection most acutely aware of the distinct work
ings of different genres are those by Christina Lupton and Aran Ruth,
and by Shelley King, which look at the appearances of poetry, lyrics,
and ephemera within prose forms. King’s essay in particular moves for
ward from earlier critical work on blended forms by G. Gabrielle Starr
and Leah Price (and Lynch too, although King does not mention this).
She rightly suggests the critical corrective that lyrics in novels should
not be understood as moments of parenthetical artifice, but as central
to the psychological and literal realism of novels such as Amelia Opie’s,
whose work King uses as her case study. Against Price’s “inscribed
lyric” and Starr’s “absorbed lyric,” King proposes the more active and
centralizing term “integral lyric” (65–66). Lupton and Ruth’s lively
essay takes up a wider frame, examining the relationship between the
circulation of ephemera, graffito, billet-doux, and the novel (including
treating such gems as the anthologized “From the Playhouse Boghouse”
and its scatological response). Together these two essays emphasize the
social role of the lyric, demonstrating not just its centrality to action and
plot within novels, but within the everyday of the eighteenth century.
Surprisingly and convincingly, in Lupton and Ruth’s essay the novel
emerges as the duller form, produced by professionals to be consumed
by static readers in domestic spaces, while the lyric moves between texts
and life, and between people and spaces, in “the performative sphere to
which occasional, ephemeral, and materially-charged writings can claim
to belong” (49).
As a whole, the collection brings together discussions of a wide range
of eighteenth-century authors and forms, presenting fresh approaches
to the work of Sterne, Richardson, Pope, Haywood, Opie, and others.
Like Margaret Doody, who wrote the afterword, I miss Gray—and
Cowper in particular, about whose claims to be writing the language
of everyday life there is much to say. I also miss a greater engagement
with literature of the later century: Austen keeps popping up, as though
there’s not much between Pamela and Emma, and poetry largely stops at
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Swift, Pope, Thomson, and Young. Opie’s presence as a late eighteenthcentury novelist, and as a woman poet, makes her an outlier within the
collection on all counts—a welcome one. It is hard to imagine that a
figure like Charlotte Smith is not central to this effort to think about
poetry and the novel alongside each other. But one book cannot do
everything, and Parker and Weiss Smith have produced a collection
that provides a varied, engaging, and challenging snapshot of where
eighteenth-century studies is now that we have begun the important
work of bringing genres back into conversation with one another, and
which suggests exciting directions for this discussion to go next.
Ingrid Horrocks is an academic at Massey University Wellington, New
Zealand. Her articles have appeared in journals such as ELH, Studies
in Romanticism, and Studies in the Novel, and she is completing a book
manuscript on wandering forms in late eighteenth-century literary culture.
Inspiration in the Age of Enlightenment by Sarah Eron
Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2014.
xiii+251pp. US$85.00. ISBN 978-1-61149-499-0.
Review by Kathryn Ready, University of Winnipeg
While scholarly interest in secularism has undergone a bit of a
revival in recent years, this concept (as Sarah Eron reminds us) has
long been fundamental to our understanding of both the Enlighten
ment and Romanticism. In her recently published book, Eron offers her
own ambitious reinterpretation of Enlightenment and Romanticism
in their positioning vis-à-vis secularization. Essentially, she sees
efforts to reform enthusiasm, a term she employs synonymously with
“inspiration” (based on the once familiar understanding of enthusiasm as
a supernatural form of inspiration), as a key project of Enlightenment
secularization. At the same time, she challenges scholars who (following
M.H. Abrams) identify Romanticism with secularization in encouraging
“natural supernaturalism.” Eron insists that the fundamental tendency
of Romanticism is to “unworlding,” as it encourages a “slipping back into
a private realm of transport that idealizes metaphysical transcendence”
(218), a tendency that in her view continues to operate today in tension
with Enlightenment “worlding.”
Eron’s argument regarding enthusiasm and secularization in the
period is grounded, in turn, upon a reading of select works by Anthony
Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Alexander Pope, Henry
Fielding, and Anna Letitia (or Laetitia) Barbauld. Eron identifies these
writers as sharing a common purpose in producing different literary
experiments that “allow the figure of the muse to survive,” albeit “as a
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worldly figure, an apostrophe to a friend or judging spectator, or ... an
allusion to the mental faculties or aesthetic power of the author and his
genius” (27). As illustrated in their use of apostrophe (including the
traditional invocation of the muse), Eron sees eighteenth-century writers
rejecting a model of literary inspiration where these writers are passive
recipients of divine inspiration. Instead, they claim an independent
title to authority and inspiration, although “self-authorization” remains
“circumscribed, attenuated, and mediated by the laws of the eighteenthcentury public sphere” (xi).
As a whole, Inspiration in the Age of Enlightenment is an impressive
piece of scholarship. At first glance, the choice of writers appears
eclectic, but they come together effectively as part of Eron’s overarching
argument. Shaftesbury opens the discussion because of his conception
“of enthusiasm as a natural phenomenon related to the psychology of
the human condition” (24). Pope advances the argument further in
“redefin[ing] enthusiasm’s relationship to the formal dimensions of
poetry” (25), Fielding in creating a pattern for “a realist-modern form
of [prose] writing” through reworking and bringing together “the
power of a theatrical scenario and an ancient reliance on enthusiasm”
(26). Barbauld provides a fitting conclusion for Eron as “a transitional
figure in the divide between eighteenth-century and Romantic models
of enthusiasm” (26). Eron thus demonstrates the gains to be had in
overstepping generic boundaries, not only for illuminating the history
of ideas but also for generating new insights into how genre functions
in the period, beyond the familiar consideration of hierarchy of genre.
Another strength of the monograph is the attention paid to the
scholarship on individual writers, with Eron drawing judiciously on the
work of others and clearly differentiating her own readings of writers
and particular texts from those who have come before.
The general argument might have benefited from a slightly fuller
discussion of the apostrophe within ancient classical literature (which
includes examples of the invocation of the muse in the context of the
lyric, inviting potentially interesting connections to the Romantic lyric,
a genre crucial to Eron’s analysis here). It might have equally benefited
from further discussion of early modern instances of apostrophe. The
monograph includes a detailed discussion of the invocation of the muse
in John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1st ed. 1667; 2nd ed. 1674), which Eron
regards as establishing a pattern for later writers, not in Christianizing
a pagan literary trope but in conceiving a muse with a directing and
restraining function. Yet there is little contextualization of Milton or
mention of the Renaissance lyric, which scholars including Paul Alpers
have fruitfully compared with the Romantic lyric in terms of its use of
apostrophe.
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One might argue other smaller omissions. For example, it seems
curious that Joseph Addison fails to receive even cursory attention,
especially since Eron is evidently familiar with Lawrence Klein’s work
on enthusiasm. In spite of the wide-ranging scholarship represented, the
number of primary sources given substantial analysis is a little narrow.
In addition to passages from Paradise Lost, the focus is on Shaftesbury’s
A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm (1708) and The Moralists (1709); Pope’s
An Essay on Criticism (1711), The Rape of the Lock (1712), An Essay on
Man (1734), and The Dunciad (1743); Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749); and
Barbauld’s “A Summer Evening’s Meditation” (1773) and “WashingDay” (1797).
Questions related to organization arise in connection particularly to
Pope and Barbauld. There are no doubt good reasons for Eron’s choices,
but it would help to have some explicitly stated rationale for the decision
to devote the first chapter on Pope to The Rape of the Lock, treating the
three other poems as a group in the next. The same is true for the chapter
on Barbauld, which starts with “Washing-Day,” although the latter was
composed, according to modern editors, some time after 1783 and
published over two decades later than “A Summer Evening’s Meditation.”
While Eron might well be on to something in reading the first poem as
offering an “eighteenth-century model of poetic enthusiasm” and the
second as employing “the slippery structures of invocation in the
Romantic lyric” (193), it seems she should at least acknowledge potential
complications posed by chronology, especially since “Washing-Day” is
often read as embodying the shift from Neoclassical to Romantic as it
passes from the mock epic into the lyric. The reference to Barbauld’s
“intermittent Romanticism” (195) provides only partial satisfaction in
this context.
As a final caveat, one of the most compelling aspects of Eron’s general
argument is her resistance to the binary of Enlightenment reason versus
Romantic feeling. Yet, in setting Enlightenment secular enthusiasm
against Romantic sacred enthusiasm she posits her own binary. It
may be worth asking, can either the Enlightenment or Romanticism
ultimately be equated with secularity or non-secularity (for want of a
better term) or are there not multiple and contradictory tendencies in
both? Barbauld provides a case in point. Eron chooses to emphasize
a different angle from recent Barbauld criticism, which has been pre
occupied with her place within the culture of Dissent, but in doing so
she overlooks the complicated relationship of Dissent to secularization.
The promotion of rational and liberal religion, one of Barbauld’s lifelong
aims, is undeniably part of this process. Yet Dissenters simultaneously
sought to make a continuing case for the cultural and social relevance
of religion (and for enthusiasm, which Barbauld champions in both
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its religious and secular aspects in her 1775 essay “Thoughts on the
Devotional Taste, on Sects and on Establishments”).
Such considerations might have added yet more to a piece of
scholarship that deserves wide reading, for the vital and valuable con
tribution it makes to literary and intellectual history.
Kathryn Ready is an associate professor of English at the University of
Winnipeg. She has published articles on a number of eighteenth-century
women writers, including Anna Letitia Barbauld and Lucy Aikin, and has
general interests in religious and political culture during the eighteenth
century, as well as in eighteenth-century literature and science.
Utopian Geographies and the Early English Novel by Jason H. Pearl
Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014.
x+204pp. CAN$56.25. ISBN 978-0-8139-3623-9.
Review by Juliet Shields, University of Washington in Seattle
Utopian Geographies and the Early English Novel is an ambitious
and original study of a group of texts that have been overlooked in
studies of literary utopias and given short shrift in histories of the
novel: prose fiction written between 1660 and 1730. Whereas previous
scholars such as A.L. Morton have described the eighteenth century as
the nadir of utopian literature, Pearl argues that the period’s utopian
literature has gone unrecognized in part because it participated in a
transition whereby euchronias—imaginary societies existing in the
future—gradually replaced utopias—imaginary societies positioned
geographically in unexplored regions of the globe. This transition from
spatial to chronological coordinates, and from the geographical to
the temporal imaginary, Pearl suggests, was due largely to European
exploration of the globe, which left increasingly less of the earth’s
surface unmapped and unknown. The spaces in which a literary utopia
might be set shrank rapidly as geographical knowledge grew.
While scholars of utopian literature have neglected late seventeenthand early eighteenth-century texts that do not seem to fit a narrow
definition of utopia, studies of the rise of the novel have marginalized
the same texts because they do not fit definitions of the genre that
privilege the exploration of individual subjectivity and a commitment
to empirical realism. By showing how these works participated in
the process of “geographical disenchantment,” Pearl explores the com
plicated relationships between global exploration and an emergent
realism. He uncovers lingering utopias in works set in geographically
concrete contexts, such as Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) and Daniel
Defoe’s Captain Singleton (1720), and finds the beginnings of formal
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realism in works set in imaginary worlds, including Margaret
Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666) and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s
Travels (1726). Utopian Geographies contributes to recent, wide-ranging
attempts to map the emergence of fiction as a discursive category (for
example, Nicholas Paige, Before Fiction: The Ancien Régime of the Novel
[2011], Franco Moretti, Maps, Graphs, and Trees: Abstract Models for
Literary History [2007], and Catherine Gallagher, “The Rise of Fiction
ality,” in The Novel, Volume 1: History, Geography, and Culture, ed. Franco
Moretti [2006]) by exploring the impact of geographical knowledge on
the representation of place and the development of realism.
Pearl explains that the process of geographical disenchantment
occurred as literary imagination encountered the limits imposed
by increasing geographic knowledge. This process is manifest in a
three-part narrative movement of emplacement, deconstruction, and
reconstruction. First, early novels “emplace utopias in relation to recog
nizable coordinates, making their imagined spaces geographically
accessible and, therefore, logically possible” (9). Next, they “devalue
those spaces, undermining their supposed perfection, and rendering
true utopias inaccessible, impossible” (9). For instance, as Pearl shows
in his discussion of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe trilogy (1719–20), Crusoe’s
island, located somewhere off the coast of Surinam, is transformed
from a desert to a paradise before it is undone by the incursion of
sailors and natives of nearby islands. Yet, in a third step, “the failure of
utopian geography establishes interior space as ... a site of recuperated
possibilities” (11). In other words, utopia becomes an internal state, a
form of subjectivity or selfhood that differentiates the traveller from
his contemporaries at home in England. Thus, in the third, little-read
volume of Robinson Crusoe, Crusoe proclaims his ability to enjoy in his
own mind the peaceful solitude of his island even among the heaving
crowds of London. Pearl refers to this internalized sense of distance
and difference from English society as the “utopian remainder” and
suggests that it is an early version of the modern subjectivity that Nancy
Armstrong finds in mid-eighteenth-century domestic fiction such as
Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740). Voyaging protagonists including
Crusoe and Gulliver choose not to completely re-enter English society
because they fear contamination with its vices. However, they often form
ideal friendships that “expand utopia and delimit its communicability
somewhere beyond the self ” (15). These friendships transform utopian
subjectivity into utopian sociability.
Pearl finds evidence of this tripartite pattern in The Blazing World,
Oroonoko, Robinson Crusoe, Captain Singleton, and Gulliver’s Travels,
amply demonstrating its existence. But there is little sense of develop
ment or differentiation in these case studies. It is unclear whether the
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utopian remainder simply disappears from eighteenth-century fiction
after Gulliver’s Travels, and, if so, why it disappears. Arguably, the
utopian remainder shows up in later works, particularly in picaresque
fiction such as Tobias Smollett’s Sir Launcelot Greaves (1760–61) and
Humphry Clinker (1771), in both of which idealistic protagonists,
horrified by the social ills they witness in their travels through England,
retreat to the sanctuary of the rural estate, where they attempt to
realize a kinder, wiser, and happier community. In another variation
of Pearl’s tripartite pattern, the protagonists of sentimental novels like
Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771) and Samuel Pratt’s Emma
Corbett (1780) are imprisoned by their utopian sensibility and virtually
destroyed by their inability to transform it into a utopian sociability.
That Utopian Geographies inspires such questions about the fate of
the utopian remainder is undoubtedly to its credit. Its intervention in
critical narratives of the novel’s development is limited, but provocative.
One of the strengths of Utopian Geographies is its treatment of
utopia as genre rather than as concept. Instead of asking what qualities
writers attributed to their imagined lands, Pearl asks what conven
tions they used to represent these lands. This approach allows him to
uncover utopias in texts that describe known geographical locations
and dysfunctional, if not entirely dystopian communities, such as the
deeply corrupt colonial Surinam in Oroonoko or the pirate brotherhood
of Captain Singleton’s Madagascar coast. While these texts seem to have
little in common with Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) in terms of content
or aims, they do hinge upon the convention of the voyage, which Pearl
regards as “the definitive feature of early modern utopias” (6) because
the point of departure provides a concrete geographical and historical
context within and against which to read subsequent representations
of utopia. The drawback of this genre-based approach, of course, is that
“utopian” becomes a rather loose and baggy term, as readily applicable to
the planet on which Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World is set as to
Saint John’s Hill in Oroonoko’s Surinam.
Yet the slipperiness of the adjective “utopian” is perhaps no more
problematic than the anachronism of the term “novel,” a term that Pearl
claims to use “advisedly but unanxiously” (16). By bringing these terms
together, Utopian Geographies reminds us that every place in a fictional
text is, in an existential sense, no place—an imaginary land.
Juliet Shields is associate professor of English at the University of
Washington in Seattle. She is author of Sentimental Literature and AngloScottish Identity, 1745–1820 (2010) and Nation and Migration: The
Making of British Atlantic Literature, 1765–1835 (forthcoming, Oxford
University Press).
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Interpreting Sexual Violence, 1600–1800, ed. Anne Greenfield
London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013.
xvi+220pp. £60/$99. ISBN 978-1-84893-439-9.
Review by Carolyn D. Williams, University of Reading
Anne Greenfield and the other contributors to this collection of
essays are to be congratulated on the flair, energy, and originality with
which they demonstrate the richness and complexity of their topic, and
its relevance to surprisingly varied aspects of life and thought in the
long eighteenth century. In the process, they deal with distinctions, and
perilous elisions, between rape, ravishment, seduction, marriage (forced
and voluntary), sodomy, wife-pandering, and the purely metaphorical
violence inflicted on a girl’s pride and modesty when she falls in love.
They draw on a wide range of material, from canonical literary texts
such as Pamela, Clarissa, and Tom Jones to relatively unfamiliar works,
including verse (much of it satirical), drama, familiar letters, and
periodical essays; the interplay between visual art, classical literature,
and early modern culture is also included in “The Horror of the Horns:
Pan’s Attempted Rape of Syrinx in Early Eighteenth-Century Visual
Art” by Melanie Cooper-Dobbin. Obviously, in a work which must be
heavily based on textual rather than physical evidence, the emphasis
lies not on interpreting sexual violence itself, but on reading allegations
of sexual violence, as well as the various methods of portraying it in
more creative forms of literature in the context of legal and cultural
history. There are also some interesting studies on its use in drama as
an example, or symbol, of tyranny and corruption. Jennifer L. Airey
shows how resourcefully dramatists could apply this versatile material
to the service of various political causes in “Staging Rape in the Age of
Walpole: Sexual Violence and the Politics of Dramatic Adaptation in
1730s Britain.”
An extremely useful feature, particularly for specialists in disciplines
other than law, is the attention paid to documents on legal matters.
Extracts from trial records, always fascinating and often harrowing,
feature prominently; the most original treatment is Misty Krueger’s
“The Rhetoric of Rape: William Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion
as Eighteenth-Century Rape Trial,” which shows how the lamentations
of the rape victim Oothoon correspond to “narratives of alleged rape
victims in England: the real-life Daughters of Albion,” such that “we
can even recognize our own presence in the readership of the text as
filling the role of jury” (155). Relevant statute law, however, is sparse in
this period. As Mary R. Block observes, in “‘For the Repressing of the
Most Wicked and Felonious Rapes and Ravishments of Women’: Rape
Law in England, 1660–1800,” the best way to overcome this handicap is
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to consult legal treatises, which are “not laws but explanations of them”;
they “reflected cultural sentiments about sex, violence, women and
women’s natures and they merged those sentiments rather seamlessly
into the law” (24). Other contributors also pursue this strategy.
Consequently, this book will provide guidance on cases, both real and
fictitious, which may have seemed almost as bewilderingly ambiguous
to eighteenth-century readers as they do to scholars in the present day.
A mark of a successful collection is the frequency with which topics
raised in one essay reverberate with others. For example, in “Researching
Sexual Violence, 1660–1800: A Critical Analysis,” Julie Gammon observes
that “the historiography of rape has yet to give serious consideration to
the men accused of rape” (22). Yet the consideration devoted to men
in this book suggests that help may be on the way. Anne Greenfield, in
“The Titillation of Dramatic Rape, 1660–1720,” argues that dramatists of
the period assumed that audiences would derive “erotic pleasure” from
rape scenes because “the desire to rape” was seen, not as “a warped urge
felt only by the perverse,” but “a natural impulse shared by most men”
(62). Robin Runia, in “‘What do you Take me for?’: Rape and Virtue in
The Female Quixote,” shows how Charlotte Lennox uses her heroine’s
inability to distinguish between predators and protectors to highlight
“the real danger of sexual violence against women” (107). Finally, Nichol
Weizenbeck provides a brilliant reading of an entire novel as an account
of masculine resistance (or possibly sensibility-induced impotence) in
the face of sexual temptation, with much implied condemnation of those
who choose to exploit the vulnerable women they encounter on their
travels, in “Bringing Sentimental Fiction to its (Anti-)Climax: Laurence
Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey.” One merit of this approach is that it
explains why the novel ends at the point where the narrator finds himself
lying in bed, holding the hand of a fille de chambre.
Sadly, lax copy editing has allowed too many errors in the use of
English to appear throughout the book. For example, an ill-chosen
adjective and faulty grammar undermine the authority of Greenfield’s
vitally important statement that “today’s blame-the-victim attitudes
towards female rape victims who are accused of ‘asking for it’ through
their promiscuous attire or behaviour harkens back to the connection
between rape and chastity seen so prominently during the eighteenth
century and before” (5). Clothes cannot be “promiscuous”; “harkens”
should be “harken” to agree with the plural “attitudes.” Weizenbeck’s
use of a misrelated participle inaugurates the following tangle: “While
attempting to pass the Marquesina di F—— in a doorway, they both
prevent the other from moving forward” (204). Elsewhere, she could
seem to be unwittingly implicating another scholar in her own inac
curate use of grammatical terminology: “Todd also notes, however, that
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after Sterne, the noun ‘sentimental’ was applied ‘to sensibility’” (203).
To set the record straight, Janet Todd wrote, “The adjective ‘sentimental’
is the cause of much of the confusion of terms. It does duty for all the
nouns so far mentioned” (Sensibility: An Introduction [New York:
Methuen, 1986], 9). A few factual errors have also escaped detection.
For example, take Greenfield’s assertion that there is an account of
“fantastical sodomy” (3) in the couplet,
The Poets say, the Silver Moon
Ravish’d the Boy, Endymion.
(The Rape of the Bride; or, Marriage and Hanging Go by Destiny [London:
J. Peele, 1723], canto 1, p. 9, lines 33–34)
Given the genders of the Moon and Endymion, sodomy was prob
ably not the first form of conjunction to enter a classically educated
eighteenth-century reader’s imagination. Cooper-Dobbin makes an
easily corrected slip when she says that in a picture of Pan and Syrinx
by Jean-François de Troy (1720), “a putto steadies his arrow, holding
his burning torch of love with determination towards the pair” (166).
He does not in that image, but in a picture by Pierre Mignard (1688–
90). These authors, like all the other contributors to this book, have
produced work of high quality that has much to say in academic and
more broadly social contexts: their ideas deserve the highest standard
of presentation.
Above all, this work demands respect and sympathy for victims of
sexual violence, past and present, who have always found it hard to
obtain redress. Katie Barclay, in “From Rape to Marriage: Questions
of Consent in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” says that women who did
not marry their seducers or rapists “found they must remain single
and become social outcasts, prostitutes or, in fiction, die tragically”
(44). By the end, one is inclined to agree with Gammon: “We should
perhaps be considering not why so few women pursued their assailants
through the courts in the long eighteenth century, but instead why
so many opted to prosecute given how greatly the odds were stacked
against their chances of success” (20).
Carolyn D. Williams is a retired senior lecturer from the English Depart
ment at the University of Reading; she is on the committee of the Londonbased Women’s Studies Group, 1558–1837.
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Transformations, Ideology, and the Real in Defoe’s “Robinson
Crusoe” and Other Narratives: Finding “The Thing Itself ”
by Maximillian E. Novak
Newark: University of Delaware Press; and Lanham: Rowman &
Littlefield, 2015.
x+240pp. US$75. ISBN 978-1-61149-485-3.
Review by Brian Cowan, McGill University
Maximillian Novak is very familiar to Defoe scholars. Over the last
fifty years he has authored several important monographs on Defoe,
beginning with two now classic works, Economics and the Fiction
of Daniel Defoe (1962) and Defoe and the Nature of Man (1963), and
continuing on through a series of important essays, some of which were
published in his Realism, Myth, and History in Defoe’s Fiction (1983).
Novak’s biography, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions (2001) ranks
among the best and most reliable works on this notoriously elusive
and mercurial writer. His latest book offers a collection of previously
published articles and book chapters related to Defoe’s fictional writing
and especially his best known work, The Life and Strange Surprizing
Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719). Of the book’s eleven chapters,
seven are directly concerned with Robinson Crusoe, and the novel figures
prominently in the other chapters as well. Novak uses his readings of
Defoe’s Crusoe not only to further explicate Defoe’s engagement with
the intellectual currents of his age—a task that has occupied the bulk
of Novak’s more than half-century–long career devoted to studying
Defoe—but also to develop an argument about the realism of Defoe’s
narrative method.
Novak sees Defoe’s fiction writing as part of a lifelong interest in
depicting reality through prose. For Novak, Defoe’s narrative realism
can be summed up by this book’s subtitle: it was an exercise in finding
the most accurate way to represent “the thing itself ” through the written
word. In an intriguing chapter on Defoe’s interest in painting and the
visual arts, Novak argues that Defoe was particularly concerned with,
and knowledgeable about, contemporary trends in northern European
painting. He sees Defoe’s narrative realism as a verbal parallel to the
visual realism of “Dutch” painting in its golden age. In Defoe’s prose
(and especially in his prose fiction), he finds an achievement in realism
that surpassed the achievements of Netherlandish artists working in
visual media. Defoe’s prose fiction, Novak argues, could be “even more
powerful, more vivid, than painting” (54).
On this topic, Novak agrees with Ian Watt with regard to the
uniqueness of Defoe’s realism. Both have claimed that “Defoe’s wide
grasp of social, political, and economic problems, as well as his way
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of working them into the novel, created a new kind of realism and a
new kind of fiction” (180n47). It is hard to argue with this. Defoe’s
prose is replete with thick descriptions of people, places, and things,
and he was prolix in his efforts to explain them all in detail. But it
is also difficult to know just what to make of Defoe’s realism, both
within the contours of Defoe’s own writing as well as for Novak’s
critical enterprise. Unlike Watt, Novak does not link Defoe’s realism
to broader social and cultural developments, such as the rise of a
middle-class reading public. Instead, it seems that Novak sees Defoe
as a writer of immense curiosity and broad reading who delighted in
explaining the world to his readers. Defoe’s realism in this account is
more practical than ideological.
The great problem for all realist artists is that some things are not
easily represented true to life. Realism always has its limits. Novak
claims that Defoe’s preferred sobriquet for the object of realist repre
sentation is “the thing itself ” and that the faithful reproduction of that
thing in prose is the ultimate goal of the realist writer. It is interesting,
however, that the only instance in which he can cite this phrase in
Defoe’s writings appears in the Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe
(1719) when Crusoe attempts to compare an attack upon a native village
to Cromwell’s famous sack of Drogheda. Cromwell’s Irish atrocity is
invoked as so horrible that it cannot be described satisfactorily. Crusoe
tells his readers: “I never had an Idea of the Thing itself [that is, the
Drogheda massacre] before, nor is it possible to describe it, or the
Horror which was upon our Minds at hearing it” (54). It is telling that
this sole cited instance of Defoe’s use of the phrase “the thing itself ”
occurs when Defoe runs up against the problem of ineffability. Even
the great founding father of English realist prose writing had his limits.
If there are other instances where Defoe uses the phrase “the thing
itself,” Novak does not cite them directly in this work. Here the origins
of the book in a series of independently conceived and written essays
perhaps militates against a sense of uniformity of purpose. The chapters
are all loosely devoted to exploring aspects of Defoe’s realist prose
fiction, especially with relation to the writing of Robinson Crusoe and
its subsequent elaboration into a new genre of “Robinsonade” writings.
But they do not cohere to make a uniform statement.
The miscellaneous nature of these essays is reflected in the variety
of citations to many editions of Defoe’s works. The citations have not
been made consistent throughout the volume, and a careful reader will
find that even a text as central to the work as Robinson Crusoe is cited
in the editions of George Aitken (for J.M. Dent), J. Donald Crowley (for
Oxford University Press), the Shakespeare Head edition of the 1920s,
and Michael Shinagel (for Norton), as well as the original publications
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of 1719–20 (for the Serious Reflections). The Pickering and Chatto
edition of Defoe’s works is rarely cited, and never for his novels. Given
the complex publication histories of Defoe’s writings, and especially
given the often intense debates over attribution of certain anonymously
published works to Defoe, some regularity in matters of citation would
have been welcome.
Novak has established Defoe as a major intellectual, and his many
writings convincingly show that Defoe grappled with the key problems
of his day, both practical and theoretical, but much remains to be
done to explain Defoe’s peculiar place within the intellectual world
of post-revolutionary Britain. Questions of attribution will remain for
an author who preferred to write anonymously or pseudonymously,
but there also remains the task of explaining the nature of Defoe’s
realist project. Watt and Novak have made the case for reading Defoe
as a realist writer. But the purpose and significance of that realism
remain opaque. If Watt’s claim that the invention of narrative realism
had something to do with the rise of a middle-class reading public no
longer convinces, then we are still left with the problem of why writers
such as Defoe took to writing realistically in the early eighteenth
century. The “thing itself ” is yet to be found.
Brian Cowan teaches in the Department of History and Classical Studies
at McGill University. He has recently edited The State Trial of Doctor
Henry Sacheverell (2012) and has published an article on Daniel Defoe’s
Review (1704–13) for the Huntington Library Quarterly (2014).
Written Maternal Authority and Eighteenth-Century Education
in Britain: Educating by the Book by Rebecca Davies
Surrey: Ashgate Publishing, 2014.
171pp. US$109.95. ISBN 978-1-4094-5168-6.
Review by Mark K. Fulk, SUNY Buffalo State
In her new book, Rebecca Davies successfully offers “an alternative
perspective that locates women as gatekeepers of national knowledge
and morality,” finding a means through this perspective to suggest
that, even though women’s lives had become more situated within the
private sphere during the latter eighteenth century, women still retained
an authority “that is both defined by and detached from the authors’
biological femininity” (150). Through her study, Davies articulates the
ways in which the written text (often authored by women, sometimes
by men) grants textual and, more indirectly, social authority through
instructions about the raising of children to be ethical citizens.
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Davies’s readings build on deconstructive paradigms without ex
pressly stating them in her analysis. She recognizes the power of
texts by mothers to self-style agency above and beyond what women
actually possessed. Through the authors she chooses—including Samuel
Richardson, Sarah Fielding, Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth,
Ann Martin Taylor, and Jane Austen—Davies offers close, detailed con
siderations of many familiar and unfamiliar texts (even when working
within the canon of familiar authors) and how they elucidate the textual
and social power that purportedly private women could exercise.
Although Davies covers a limited number of authors, she does so in a
manner that creates paradigms for reading authors not included but
who could easily be figured in this manner, most notably Charlotte
Smith and Mary Hays.
Some of Davies’s most enlightening readings refer to texts of canon
ical authors that have been ignored or misjudged. Her reading of the
continuation of Richardson’s Pamela (referred to as Pamela II) moves
this sequel novel from its usual place as a disparaged text to that of
an important text containing fissures that can be utilized to figure
the separation between ideal wifehood and written motherhood. By
examining Pamela B’s acts of maternity, which include writing and
also mothering a motherless child of Mr B’s, Davies argues that Pamela
becomes “more physically and emotionally realistic” in this sequel,
offering a different kind of success in this text than the completed, veri
similar novel-text celebrated by Ian Watt and other theorists of the
beginnings of British novel. Although Davies contends that Pamela II
is “lacking” a “radical feminist” edge, it nonetheless “ends up in a con
fused position which attempts ... to follow the models for women: the
maternal educator displaying rationality and self-awareness, and a
biologically determined woman as mother and sexualized wife” (21).
Thus Pamela II’s power is its ability to elucidate the contradictions that
are emerging in mid-eighteenth-century society as women become
more associated with the private realm at the same time that they
are considered the moral and spiritual centre of their household and
charged with the rearing of obedient and moral members of British
society.
Mary Wollstonecraft is central to Davies’s argument, but not pri
marily through her standardly read feminist icon, A Vindication of the
Rights of Woman (1792). While acknowledging the feminist critique
that Wollstonecraft does indeed locate women’s power in the domestic
sphere, Davies demonstrates that Wollstonecraft’s “arguments for sexual
equality ... are largely based on women’s position as maternal educators
of future citizens of the country” (67). Davies offers convincing read
ings of the earlier radicalism of Wollstonecraft’s thought in her Some
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Thoughts Concerning the Education of Daughters (1787) and Original
Stories from Real Life (1788), finding in these works elements that
are “increasingly problematic” to be read, as they standardly are, as
“relatively conservative and established representations of maternal
educators” (66) for their times and in light of the later, more conserva
tive formulations of motherhood in the famous Vindication.
When Davies turns to Maria Edgeworth’s novels and her education
al tracts, she manages to walk an important and complex line between
the views that erroneously ascribe to Edgeworth Jacobin sympathies
or those that see her in her educational writings as a mere scribe to
her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth. Davies demarcates a middle
ground for Maria Edgeworth, noting that her writing is “involved in
literary and aesthetic debates about the system of patronage, the nature
of genius and ancient versus moderns”; through these pursuits, she is
“actively staking her position as an author. In spite of her development
of an educational method that was removed from the type of Classical
learning that excluded women, Edgeworth adhered to her commit
ment to the cultural inheritance of the ancients” (91). Davies presents
a subtle and compelling reading of Maria Edgeworth’s The Parent’s
Assistant (1796) as an example of a complex mediation between tra
ditional maternity and progressive textual mothering, which per
chance could be linked to a notion of the rise of progressive individu
alism in the Romantic era. In addition, there is groundwork through
Davies’s analysis for a more penetrating analysis of Maria Edgeworth
and her father’s relationship than heretofore has occurred, perhaps
through the use of psychoanalytic theory (Kristeva, et al.), as
Edgeworth herself mediates between a rather patriarchal tradition in
education and her own unique vision.
I am least convinced, in Davies’s analysis, of her work with Ann
Martin Taylor, which connects Taylor with dissenting traditions of
motherhood. There does not seem to be enough of a distinction in
Taylor’s religious dissent to place it on par with the other authors who
are shaping the discourses around written maternal authority. Although
Davies does an admirable job keeping the tension between the genres
of conduct book and the novel without allowing them to collapse into
one another, particularly in her reading of Taylor, the various forms
of dissent and how they differently and uniquely impact written
motherhood, plus the relevance of theological questions and exempla
in the treatment of textual motherhood in dissenting traditions, could
probably use a book to itself rather than a suggestive but ultimately
inconclusive chapter.
Davies offers incisive readings of Jane Austen’s novels Northanger
Abbey and Emma as the culmination of her study. While much that
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she has to say about Emma covers the usual ground that scholars have
explored since Claudia Johnson’s 1990 and 1995 studies of Austen
(Emma’s motherlessness, her strange relationship to her former
governess, her needing to acknowledge her own “arrogance” so she
can grow [138], etc.), Davies offers an important reading of Catherine
Morland and Henry Tilney as readers of gothic fiction, and of how their
reading shapes the choices they make and the lessons they must learn
to successfully navigate heterosexual marriage. Finally, Davies is correct
to suggest that much of what she calls Austen’s “narrative authority”
(we might even call it “maternal authority,” though Austen herself was
never a mother) comes in her narrator’s clever insights. She argues that
Austen’s narrators encourage again and again an “internalization of
judgment” for her (female) readers and that this act is perhaps “the true,
possibly feminist lesson of Austen’s fiction” (144).
Clever, insightful, and relevant, Davies’s Written Maternal Education
is an important book for our rethinking of what the public/private split
means, for how to read fiction in tandem with children’s and maternal
instruction books, and how to shape empowering readings of lesserknown texts of already canonical authors.
Mark K. Fulk is an associate professor of English and Women and Gender
Studies at SUNY Buffalo State, specializing in the British novel of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He has published essays on various
writers of the long eighteenth century and is currently writing a book on
American novelist and essayist Susan Sontag.
La Lettre et la mère: Roman familial et écriture de la passion chez
Suzanne Necker et Germaine de Staël by Catherine Dubeau
Quebec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval; and Paris: Éditions
Hermann, 2013.
x+451pp. €45. ISBN 978-2-7056-8748-9.
Review by Sonja Boon, Memorial University
The tensions that marked Suzanne Curchod Necker’s relationship
with her only daughter, Germaine de Staël, are well known. Many
biographical and literary treatments of Germaine de Staël take for
granted the maternal and filial ambivalence and hostility of their
relationship. So too has scholarly work about Necker referenced the
question of the maternal. Scholars have pointed to a deep animosity
shaped, on the one hand, by Necker’s commitment to Calvinist prin
ciples of piety, duty, and moderation and, on the other, by de Staël’s
life of passion and the imagination. But there has not been, until now,
any sustained reading of this maternal and filial antipathy and, more
specifically, of the impact of this relationship. Catherine Dubeau’s work,
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based on her doctoral dissertation, is the first to consider closely how
maternal and filial motivations shaped both of these women’s lives,
thinking, and writing. Her main thesis is that this impassioned, conflictridden relationship was the “dynamique fondatrice des poétiques de
Suzanne Necker et Germaine de Staël” (8). Dubeau moves well beyond
the observations of earlier de Staël scholars, revealing a relationship that
was highly complex, shaped not only by the distinctive personalities
of each woman, but also by their histories and the social and political
contexts in which they lived. In the process, Dubeau’s analysis reveals
as much about these women as individuals as it does about the tensions
between the two different eras that their world views represent.
To make her case, Dubeau draws on the extensive corpus of writings
left by these women, pulling from both published and unpublished
sources and fiction, as well as from essays and treatises. These materials
include previously unexamined, unpublished manuscript materials
from the Coppet archives of the Haussonville family (Dubeau includes
some of these materials transcribed in her appendices, making them
available to a broad public for the first time), as well as more familiar
published works such as de Staël’s Corinne (1807). It is a challenge to
bring this range of writings together, and to do a comparative reading
justice. But this generic diversity is one of the strengths of the work,
as it enables Dubeau to trace the various trajectories of these writers’
thinking and to acknowledge the different histories and politics that
shaped their literary ambitions and ultimately their choices. At a prac
tical level, it is also the only way to juxtapose Necker and de Staël, given
that their writing was so strongly shaped by the social and cultural
expectations of their respective eras, and, it must be said, by those of
Necker’s husband (and de Staël’s father), Jacques Necker.
Unlike earlier literary and scholarly studies, Dubeau consciously
puts Necker and de Staël on equal footing, even as their posthumous
legacies would give clear precedence to de Staël. She also chooses not
to distinguish hierarchically between the different genres in which
these women wrote. Thus, intimate writing never intended for a
public audience is juxtaposed directly with published works, and both
are analyzed with the same depth of critical engagement. This is a
real strength of this book because it allows both authors to shine as
individuals while also enabling an analysis in which one author is read
in and through the work and thinking of the other. This approach is
deftly handled in the book’s tripartite structure: Dubeau opens with a
section that considers the factors that shaped Necker’s maternal world
view, then moves into a direct juxtaposition of Necker and de Staël, and
finally, explores de Staël’s reflections on maternal/filial relations as they
emerge in writings produced after Necker’s death. Throughout, Dubeau
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situates her analysis firmly within the broad context of late eighteenthand early nineteenth-century social, cultural, political, philosophical,
and scientific thought, positioning these writings—and their authors—
as exemplars of their respective eras.
Dubeau observes that both women struggled with the same fun
damental problem: Necker and de Staël each received a remarkable
education and both struggled to manage their literary ambitions in social
and cultural spheres that did not necessarily value the contributions
of intellectual women. While Necker ultimately gave up her ambitions
for the sake of her husband and family, de Staël took a different route,
choosing to compromise some of the duties of motherhood (such as
breastfeeding) for the sake of her intellectual community. Nevertheless,
this shared struggle for a literary voice was fundamental to their under
standings of themselves as mothers and daughters, even as they chose
markedly different options to try and resolve it.
One quibble: Dubeau indicates that she has consciously chosen to
leave Jacques Necker out of the equation, and she does not reference
his writing; however, his absent presence is palpable throughout this
work. Both Necker and de Staël understood themselves through
Jacques Necker’s gaze: not only did Suzanne Necker give up her literary
ambitions for her husband, but her posthumous literary reputation
was actively managed by her husband, who edited and enabled the
emergence of the popular Mélanges and Nouveaux mélanges, as well as
the Réflexions sur le divorce. In the process, he assured a specific pos
terity for his wife, and for the family as a whole. So too was de Staël
profoundly influenced by her father, who was the subject of two of her
published essays. That said, this is a small point, and I can, as a reader,
fully understand and appreciate Dubeau’s choices.
Dubeau writes clearly, thoughtfully, and with an incredible gener
osity. She is deeply committed to the writing of these two women,
and to understanding the motivations that shaped it. This is an
intellectually rich and passionately written book. La Lettre et la mère
offers a nuanced reading that brings significant insight to the com
plexities of the mother-daughter relationship as it played itself out
between Necker and de Staël, and to the seismic shifts that marked
France’s transition from the Enlightenment through the Revolution
and into the early Romantic period.
Sonja Boon is associate professor of Gender Studies at Memorial
University. She has recently completed a book on the medical consultation
letters addressed to Samuel-Auguste Tissot.
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Lenglet-Dufresnoy: Écrits inédits sur le roman, éd. Jan Herman et
Jacques Cormier
Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2014.
xii+308pp. £65 ;€80;$110. ISBN 978-0-7294-1139-4.
Critique littéraire par Claudine Poulouin, Université de Rouen
Dans ce volume de 314 pages, Jan Herman et Jacques Cormier
présentent la première édition intégrale, avec variantes et notes, de
deux manuscrits autographes de Lenglet-Dufresnoy acquis en 2005
par le Centre de recherche sur le roman du xviiie siècle de Leuven. Le
premier, De l’utilité des romans, seconde partie, est un texte suivi dont les
chapitres, numérotés de VIII à XVII constituent vraisemblablement la
suite inédite de De l’usage des romans publié sous le nom de Gordon de
Percel et dont le titre primitif était sans doute De l’utilité des romans. Le
second porte le titre Observations critique de M. le C. Gordon de Percel
sur son livre ‘De l’usage des romans’, à Soleure, MDCCXXXIV. Ce second
ensemble, visiblement destiné à la publication, est introduit par un Avis
du Libraire suivi de dix courts propos dont les deux premiers montrent
que Lenglet-Dufresnoy avait envisagé de répondre lui-même, dans ce
troisième volet où il reprend son pseudonyme, à la polémique qu’il
avait engagée en publiant De l’usage des romans (1734) qui se présente
comme une défense du roman, puis, sous son propre nom, L’Histoire
justifiée contre les romans (1735). La date de 1734, sur la page de titre
manuscrite, suggère en outre que Lenglet-Dufresnoy alias Gordon de
Percel travaillait à cette réfutation dès avant L’Histoire justifiée. Ajoutons
que le chapitre 9 du premier manuscrit, évoquant Mlle de La Force
morte en 1724 comme encore vivante, révèle que l’ensemble du texte
sur l’utilité du roman, écrit dès 1724—l’ouvrage fut donc commencé à
la Bastille, sans documentation—s’est trouvé remanié en 1734. L’édition,
rigoureuse et soigneuse, de ces deux ensembles est précédée d’une
introduction de 188 pages qui s’attache à éclairer les choix de LengletDufresnoy en les situant au sein des débats théoriques engagés dès le
xviie siècle sur la légitimité des romans dans le cadre d’une République
des Lettres alors soumise à la pression, de plus en plus forte, d’un public
avide de romans élargi aux femmes et aux jeunes gens.
Dans les années 1734–35, Lenglet-Dufresnoy, dont on connaît la
liberté critique et les audaces, participe activement et de façon originale
à la polémique qui s’est élevée autour du roman (encore que, d’une
façon générale, on ne parlât que des romans, le genre n’étant encore
qu’implicitement reconnu). Le débat est alors d’autant plus sensible
que les rédacteurs des Mémoires de Trévoux, inquiets du succès d’un
genre qui favorise la réflexion personnelle et la jouissance privée, mais
soucieux de garder leur audience, sont amenés à nuancer leur mode de
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combat. Les jésuites sont, dans ce contexte, les adversaires privilégiés
de Lenglet-Dufresnoy qui entend éviter les critiques inutiles et toucher
un publique capable de percevoir les véritables enjeux d’un propos
sous ce que les éditeurs du volume décrivent très justement comme un
« discours oblique ».
Audacieuse, dynamique et se reconfigurant sans cesse, la pensée de
Lenglet-Dufresnoy ne saurait être saisie que dans l’interaction de ses
travaux d’historien, de critique, de romancier et d’éditeur avec des écrits tels
que le Traité sur l’origine des romans de P.-D. Huet, De l’usage de l’Histoire
de Saint-Réal, mais aussi la Bibliothèque française et De la connaissance
des bons livres de Sorel dont Lenglet-Dufresnoy ne dit mot mais dont sa
typologie des romans atteste qu’il les a lus de près. Huet avait tenté de
doter le roman d’une poétique inscriptible dans le cadre aristotélicien et
dans le système des Belles-Lettres; Lenglet-Dufresnoy, influencé par sa
lecture de Saint-Réal, oriente le débat sur la tension entre roman et histoire
en mettant en place une subtile stratégie énonciative que les éditeurs
du volume ont su mettre à jour à travers une véritable reconstruction
génétique de la pensée de Lenglet-Dufresnoy. Il s’agit en effet de montrer
que Lenglet-Dufresnoy ne se contredit pas, que L’Histoire justifiée n’est
pas une réfutation, encore moins une rétractation du premier ouvrage,
mais une façon de défendre les romans en les opposant à l’Histoire, sous
deux voix et de deux façons différentes, à un moment où l’incertitude de
sa pensée exige le travail de typologie qui lui permettra de dégager, par
exclusion, ce qu’il considère comme le « bon roman ». Ce sera pour lui le
« roman historique » tel que l’illustre le Dom Carlos de Saint-Réal qui pose
entre fiction et histoire une alliance inédite, incompatible avec le système
des genres élaboré par Aristote et transforme en profondeur les notions de
vérité et de vraisemblance. Curieusement, il échappe à Lenglet-Dufresnoy
que les « romans-mémoires », élaborés dans les années 1720–1730 par
Prévost et Marivaux qui font de la narration une structure interrogative et
polémique, correspondraient encore mieux au roman qu’il appelle de ses
vœux, et c’est seulement en 1735 qu’il en fait mention. Ce point aveugle
reconnu, la démarche de Lenglet-Dufresnoy n’en est pas moins cohérente,
l’essentiel étant pour lui de convaincre le public de la nécessité du roman
en faisant valoir que, chacun étant réglé par un pacte particulier, il n’y a
pas conflit entre l’Histoire et le roman mais complémentarité, le roman
remplissant un espace vide dans le champ discursif de l’époque. Ainsi
Lenglet-Dufresnoy parvient-il à définir le roman comme ce que ses deux
éditeurs appellent une « poétique de l’observation ». C’est cette poétique
que la réédition de De l’usage des romans, intégrant les chapitres écrits à
la Bastille et un troisième volet polémique entre Gordon de Percel et luimême, aurait permis de préciser.
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L’espace manque pour rendre compte de la solidité des analyses, de
l’exemplarité de la bibliographie et de l’appareil de notes proposés dans
cet ouvrage dont ceux qui s’intéressent aux transformations du roman
entre 1660 et 1750 feront le plus grand cas. On ne peut cependant
résister à la tentation de signaler une coquille (23) qui attribue à Huet
un Traité de l’origine du roman (la note donne le bon titre) lorsqu’on
vient de souligner la rareté du singulier avant 1741. Mais plutôt qu’une
coquille, c’est peut-être la volonté des éditeurs de Lenglet-Dufresnoy de
tester l’attention du lecteur.
Claudine Poulouin est professeur de littérature française à l’Université
de Rouen.
Gothic Fiction and the Invention of Terrorism: The Politics and
Aesthetics of Fear in the Age of the Reign of Terror by Joseph
Crawford
New York: Bloomsbury, 2013.
xiv+218pp. US$95. ISBN 978-1-4725-0528-6.
Review by Joel T. Terranova, University of Louisiana at Lafayette
It is no secret that the eighteenth-century gothic novel has become a
popular subject with academics in the last few decades. Several special
ist journals for the gothic now exist, and numerous books focusing on
the topic are published annually. This proliferation of gothic scholarship
resulting in a voluminous body of criticism has enabled the study of
this genre to prosper in once unthinkable ways. While a scholar might
feel some reluctance to pursue yet another study on the gothic given
the already sizable quantity of literature available, it would be unwise
to ignore Gothic Fiction and the Invention of Terrorism: The Politics and
Aesthetics of Fear in the Age of the Reign of Terror. Presenting a detailed
revaluation of late eighteenth-century gothic, Joseph Crawford’s
study examines the gothic’s development with the sudden emergence
of terrorism as a political concept. Crawford demonstrates that the
“[French] Revolution created gothic, transforming a marginal form of
historical fiction chiefly concerned with aristocratic legitimacy into a
major cultural discourse devoted to the exploration of violence and
fear” (x). The correlation between the French Revolution and gothic
fiction is more complicated than what previous critics have asserted,
for over the course of his study Crawford notes the establishment of
both terror as rhetoric and written political conspiracy theory, which
he views as directly connected to the gothic. These genres, all of which
Crawford argues are connected to each other, arose out of a need to
express mutual concern over the extremities of human malevolence, an
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expression he rightfully notes as previously unseen in the eighteenth
century, but which has remained since the 1790s in various forms, such
as the twenty-first-century American War on Terror.
Gothic Fiction and the Invention of Terrorism consists of an intro
duction, five chapters, and an epilogue. After a brief introduction, which
is prefaced with two quotes, “La Terreur est à l’ordre du jour” from the
Declaration of the National Convention in 1793 and “Our war on terror
begins with Al Qaeda, but it does not end there” from US President
George W. Bush in 2001 (vii), Crawford’s study starts with its first chapter,
“Terror Before Terrorism,” on the early gothic novelists, including Horace
Walpole and Clara Reeve, and other influential figures such as Edmund
Burke and William Collins. This chapter focuses on the manner in which
eighteenth-century writers, such as Joseph Addison and Daniel Defoe,
wrote about fear and violence before the establishment of the gothic, as
well as the factors that resulted in the gothic’s development as a literary
genre. Crawford observes that “when we now read The Castle of Otranto,
or Vathek, or The Old English Baron, our readings of them are inevitably
coloured by our knowledge of what happened later, and our awareness
that they stand at the fountainhead of a genre which would go on to have
major significance for Western culture as a whole” (30). Crawford argues
that as late as 1789 the gothic genre was nothing more than a product
derived from a mid-century interest in the Middle Ages. Gothic fiction
would likely have disappeared had it not been for “a series of cataclysmic
historical events [that] brought horror, violence, fear, and the unnatural
squarely back into the centre of every reader’s concerns” (30). These
events, which transformed and gave permanence to gothic fiction, were
the direct result of the French Revolution, the major focus of this study’s
second chapter.
Crawford begins chapter 2, “The Reign of Terror,” by discussing the
jubilant sentiments expressed by much of the British public at the out
break of the Revolution, when it was still hoped that France would move
from an absolute to a constitutional monarchy. This chapter is primarily
concerned with the connection between the gothic’s popularity during
the 1790s and the prevalent perception of the French Revolution.
Crawford provides a detailed analysis that focuses first on the gothic
fiction in this decade before the outbreak of the Terror. His study then
turns to the rhetoric and use of terror by the Jacobins, which transitions
into an analysis of how the events of the French Revolution were report
ed by the British press by echoing the language and scenes of the gothic.
Crawford asserts that his aim is “to demonstrate the interdependence
of these two bodies of writing; the ways in which rhetorical tropes slid
back and forth between them as they helped to create one another over
the course of the 1790s” (39). Crawford engages numerous gothic texts
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and episodes of the French Revolution in relation to his focus on the
development of a rhetoric of terror.
The remaining chapters of Crawford’s study all prove equally as
enlightening as the previous two. Chapter 3, “The Secret Masters Walk
among Us,” is especially thoughtful in its examination of the impact
of German literature on gothic fiction, with the creation of a subgenre
of conspiracy theory works, often characterized by the presence of an
Illuminati-like organization, which resulted from the political paranoia
that the Revolution was spreading across Europe. The next chapter,
“Popular Gothic,” touches on gothic’s influence on the lower classes
that satisfied their gothic urges through melodramas and chapbooks.
“The Gothic Legacy,” the final chapter, looks towards gothic’s impact
on the nineteenth century through the normalization of gothic
rhetoric. The epilogue, “The Wars on Terror,” is a sound assessment of
the continued presence of this rhetoric within the literature, art, and
politics of Western culture.
Overall, Gothic Fiction and the Invention of Terrorism is an important
scholarly work that accurately re-evaluates the relationship between
gothic fiction and the French Revolution through the rhetoric of terror
that they both share. Those interested in gothic fiction and the legacy
of the French Revolution are encouraged to read this impressive work.
Crawford has put considerable research into this comprehensible and
enlightening project. Gothic Fiction and the Invention of Terrorism might
be another of the many critical works already published on the gothic, but
it is of the highest quality and will likely prove to be a seminal text in the
study of the gothic for many years to come.
Joel T. Terranova recently received his doctorate from the University
of Louisiana at Lafayette, where he is currently teaching as an adjunct
professor.
Representing the National Landscape in Irish Romanticism by
Julia M. Wright
Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2014.
xxxii+331pp. US$50. ISBN 97808156-33532.
Review by Christina Morin, University of Limerick
A highly engaging, richly researched study of the longstanding
association between land, national identity, and Irish literary pro
duction, Representing the National Landscape in Irish Romanticism
begins with traditional, Herderian-driven ideas of cultural nationalism
only to overturn them. Against readings of the Irish nation as defined
by way of the affective connection between the people and rural Irish
geography, Julia M. Wright highlights the manner in which RomanticECF 28, no. 2 © 2016 McMaster University
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era Irish literature consistently moves beyond the “insular” and
“affective” to emphasize instead Ireland’s “relationship to other nations”
and its fundamentally international nature in a period of increasing
movement of people and goods through trade, tourism, migration,
emigration, and exile (x). The resulting study presents a fresh and
invigorating exploration of the varied uses of topography, both domestic
and foreign, in a diverse selection of often overlooked Irish Romantic
poetry and prose. In this, Wright’s study perfectly complements, while
also expanding upon, recent considerations of the representation of
land in Irish Romantic literature by Claire Connolly, Seamus Deane,
Luke Gibbons, and Glenn Hooper.
Wright’s six chapters each trace divergent facets of what Connolly
has perceptively called the “cartographic consciousness” of Irish
Romantic writers (Connolly, A Cultural History of the Irish Novel,
1790–1829 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012], 48).
Chapter 1, for instance, investigates the depiction of Killarney in late
eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century texts, with particular atten
tion paid to John Leslie’s Killarney (1772) and Robert Torrens’s The
Victim of Intolerance (1814). Wright develops previous discussions of
Romantic-era representations of Killarney, arguing, in particular, that
Leslie’s topographical poem “uses classical and historical referencing
to position Ireland within an imperial cartography and narrative” (6).
More than that, Wright maintains, Killarney is “a key forerunner of
the national tale in its representation of Irish reconciliation to English
rule through a marriage plot,” though the national tale, in “its focus
on plot and a resolution that is entrenched in the domestic,” ultimately
“disables the cartographic potential of Leslie’s romantic interlude” (6,
45–46). Torrens’s later novel also provides an instructive comparison to
the national tale, moving from conventional, if gothicized, depictions
of Killarney in its first three volumes to “realist and even gothic
transformations” of the national tale’s allegorical marriage trope in
its often suppressed fourth volume (37). Shutting down both national
reconciliation and Irish participation in international politics through
its narrative of sexual violence, dispossession, and the hero’s final
feminization, The Victim of Intolerance responds to the national tale
with a brutal challenge.
Wright’s fertile linking of Leslie’s Killarney and Torrens’s The Victim
of Intolerance to the national tale in this chapter reveals fascinating,
if hitherto little recognized, interconnections. Throughout the study,
Wright ably traces the relationships between genres and forms that have
tended to be assessed primarily in comparison to British Romanticism,
as noted in her introduction: “Irish topographical verse, for instance, is
grasped in relation to British topographical models; the Irish national
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tale is discussed in the context of the romantic-era novel, largely
in Britain and especially through the example of Sir Walter Scott’s
historical novels” (xxvi). As far as Wright is concerned, this solidifies
the common perception that Irish Romantic writing interacted only
with a more richly realized British tradition while it also occludes the
wider, more varied, often transatlantic and transnational “influences
on, and ... influence of, Irish writing in this period” (xxvi). Her primary
aim in the study then is to explore this more expansive, cross-generic,
and internationally focused Irish literary tradition through the lens of
“nonaffective understandings of the land” (xxvii).
Given the revisionary nature of Wright’s interests, it is entirely unsur
prising that her study is especially strong in its probing consideration
of long accepted understandings of categories of Irish writing that have
tended to dominate scholarship of nineteenth-century Irish literature. The
national tale, in particular, provides a frequent point of return. Chapter
1, as I have already noted, delivers an enlightening account of overlooked
sources of and responses to the national tale, while chapter 5 productively
complicates the traditional understanding of the national tale through
its focus on what Wright calls the “outsider national tale” (171). In this
way, Wright contests a too-simple understanding of the national tale by
way of an exploration of “its varied manifestations in the period” (173).
Ultimately, she convincingly maintains, the national tale is best defined
“as a narrative form that addresses the irreducibility of history to national
myth” (173).
Wright’s arguments about Irish gothic literary production are equally
incisive. In chapter 2, for instance, Wright locates William Drennan’s
1807 poem “Glendalloch” as “a crucial early instance of Irish gothic”
(49). In chapter 3, she explores the use of gothic subplots and themes
in texts concerned with questions of exile and the problem of citizen
ship in early nineteenth-century Ireland. And, in chapter 4, she seeks
to add to the more familiar categories of Protestant and Catholic Irish
gothic a third category, “Irish gothic (by writers of various faiths) that
is, to a significant degree, not about Ireland” (130). In thus emphasizing
the centrality of the gothic to nineteenth-century Irish literature,
Wright usefully, if implicitly, underlines the continued production of
gothic literature by Irish authors in a period in which it is generally
seen to have fallen out of fashion, replaced by the national, regional,
and historical modes popularized by Maria Edgeworth (1764–1849),
Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan (ca. 1783–1859), and Walter Scott
(1771–1832). She also challenges several key assumptions shaping criti
cism of Irish gothic literature, arguing against the traditional under
standing of it as both a minor offshoot of an English gothic tradition
and a form of literature particularly “grounded in Ireland’s colonial
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context and national space” (130). Wright’s consideration of the English
settings of works like Edgeworth’s “Limerick Gloves” (1804) and the
Banim brothers’ “The Church-Yard Watch” (1832) is particularly
perceptive, highlighting the manner in which the “Irish gothic writes
back not only to the colonial dispensation, but also to English gothic
literature as such” (130).
While Wright’s nuanced assessment of the use of English settings
in Irish gothic fiction is shrewd and convincing, her arguments about
its distinctiveness are less so. For Wright, Irish gothic’s use of English
settings helps define its uniqueness in the first half of the nineteenth
century, particularly in relation to the English gothic tradition. This is
so, Wright argues, because, with the exception of Caleb Williams (1794)
and other political gothics, “most of the leading English examples of
the gothic novel ... use foreign settings” (131). In a work so interested in
expanding the conceptualization of Irish Romantic literature through
the consideration of many works that sit aslant of our usual under
standings, this argument appears unnecessarily reductive, precisely
because it confines the English gothic to a handful of major works: The
Castle of Otranto (1764), The Monk (1796), Frankenstein (1818), and
the novels of Ann Radcliffe. As it does so, it overlooks the decidedly
local settings of less well-known but arguably no less significant texts,
such as Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron (1777), Sophia Lee’s The
Recess (1783–85), and even Radcliffe’s own The Castles of Athlin and
Dunbayne: A Highland Story (1789).
This is a minor point, and Wright’s study as a whole is an immense
ly valuable addition to existing scholarship on Irish Romantic literary
production. In its smart analysis of the varying depictions of land in
a rich selection of Irish prose and poetry, Representing the National
Landscape in Irish Romanticism compellingly lays open traditional assess
ments of Irish Romantic literature and points to new avenues of research
that promise further to broaden and deepen scholarly comprehension
of Irish Romanticism. Wright’s book will thus undoubtedly prove an
indispensable resource for students of Romantic Ireland.
Christina Morin, Lecturer of English at the University of Limerick, is
the author of Charles Robert Maturin and the Haunting of Irish Romantic
Fiction (2011) and co-editor (with Niall Gillespie) of Irish Gothics: Genres,
Forms, Modes, and Traditions, 1760–1890 (2014).
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La Destruction des genres: Jane Austen et Madame d’Epinay
par Jérémie Grangé
Paris: Honoré Champion, 2014.
336pp. €60. ISBN 978-2-7453-2654-6.
Critique littéraire par Guyonne Leduc, Université Charles de Gaulle–Lille 3
Issu d’une thèse de doctorat soutenue, en 2008, à l’université de
Lorraine, alliant érudition et habileté, cet ouvrage de littérature
comparée établit un rapprochement intéressant et fécond entre—pour
suivre l’ordre achronologique surprenant du titre—Jane Austen (1775–
1817) et Louise d’Epinay (1726–1778), c’est-à-dire entre les huit romans
de la première, parus à partir de 1811, d’un côté, et l’ « autofiction »
(33) épistolaire romancée (« mélange des genres » [33], donc), Histoire
de Madame de Montbrillant (non publié du vivant de l’écrivaine), de
l’autre. L’épistolarité unit, on le sait, ces deux autrices, puisque « Elinor
and Marianne » (1795) fut l’Ur-text épistolaire de Sense and Sensibility
(1811) et « First Impressions » (1797), celui de Pride and Prejudice
(1813). En outre, maints textes de jeunesse de Jane Austen, rassemblés
sous le titre Juvenilia (dont nulle référence n’est indiquée ici dans la
bibliographie sélective) consistaient en des pastiches épistolaires.
Divisée en trois parties, chacune elle-même composée de trois
chapitres, selon la méthode des thèses françaises qui n’est pas ici
artificielle, cette étude suit une démarche méthodique et logique, allant
de l’examen critique de l’existant (Partie 1: « Au-delà des genres: Jane
Austen, Madame d’Epinay et la critique du roman sentimental [“novel
of sensibility”] » [19–67]) à l’écriture de soi (Partie 2: « Prémisses à
l’expression de soi » [65–178]) pour finir par une question (Partie 3: «
L’Indépassable Insatisfaction ? » (181–309]).
Un point d’interrogation, qui laisse la démonstration ouverte, aurait
peut-être été bienvenu dans le titre-même de l’ouvrage, La Destruction
des genres (genres littéraires, bien sûr), plutôt que d’afficher une
affirmation bien péremptoire qui, au demeurant, ne correspond pas tout
à fait aux conclusions tirées par l’auteur. D’ailleurs, le sous-titre originel
de la thèse était éclairant et pertinent: « L’Échec de la transgression ».
En effet, Jérémie Grangé qualifie Jane Austen et Louise d’Epinay
d’« héritières et exploratrices, garantes d’une certaine tradition en même
temps que prudentes contestataires » (31). Prises dans une double
contrainte (« refus définitif à [sic] l’adhésion » et « impossibilité à [sic]
s’affranchir de cette source encombrante » [7]), elles auraient emprunté
une troisième voie, une voie médiane, « the golden mean » typique du
xviiie siècle britannique au moins, qui serait un « courant inabouti,
avorté, en tous cas en marge des canons institutionnalisés » (31).
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Ce que ni Jane Austen ni Louise d’Epinay, qui, au passage, ne s’adressent
pas à un lectorat similaire (il importerait de le souligner dès la page
10), n’auraient pas réussi à accomplir, selon l’auteur—« l’on n’y discerne
ni benoîte adhésion, ni franche mise en marge de la communauté
générique » (32)—Mary Wollstonecraft, serait, semble-t-il, parvenue
à l’exprimer par une « écriture de la révolte » (297), qui « [figure] les
impasses du discours féminin » (65). L’autrice de la Vindication of the
Rights of Woman (1792), il ne faut pas l’oublier, critique, sans stratégie
fictionnelle ou ironique d’indirection, la situation des femmes issues
des couches moyennes (« woman » et non « lady »).
Comme en attestent les titres des Parties, chapitres et sous-rubriques,
l’auteur évite le piège de l’étude de Jane Austen, puis de celle de Mme
d’Epinay, de l’examen de chacun des romans de manière juxtaposée.
Des allers-retours entre autrices, entre des romans de l’une et l’œuvre
de l’autre, des analyses de points communs, de rapprochements et de
différences nourrissent cet ouvrage qui combine, dans la meilleure
tradition universitaire, microlectures minutieuses (« close reading ») et
synthèses éclairantes.
Le propos est servi par un style clair, précis, non jargonnant. Des
formules heureuses surgissent dans certains titres de la table des
matières, telles que « Les Fluctuations du gynécée », « La Stratégie de la
dérobade », « La Technique de la bigarrure » et « Le Risque de la rature ».
Le texte lui-même en recèle aussi, par exemple: « l’écriture féminine
au bord de l’expiration » (65), « Ces romans de la déception » (297),
« cette esthétique des coulisses » (314). Une expression orale (« enfonce
le clou » [45]), un anglicisme (« alternative » [42, 311] est ici employé
dans son sens anglais), une inexactitude (« soi-disant » utilisé au lieu de
« prétendus » [14]), une erreur typographiques (« John Hopkins UP »
[11n3]) ne sont qu’erreurs vénielles mais n’en ressortent que davantage.
L’ouvrage se clôt par une bibliographie fort complète où sources
primaires (il y manque le nom de l’« editor » de chaque roman
austenien, dont le travail est, pourtant, souvent très précieux) et secon
daires sont heureusement différenciées, puis par un index qui, on peut
le regretter, fusionne index nominum et index rerum; en outre, les
patronymes de personnes sont privés de leurs prénoms respectifs tandis
que les personnages de Jane Austen n’y sont désignés, eux, que par leur
prénom. Cela n’ôte rien à l’intérêt de cette riche étude.
Guyonne Leduc, ancienne élève de l’École Normale Supérieure (Sèvres),
agrégée d’anglais, est professeur d’études anglaises des xviie et xviiie
siècles à l’Université Charles de Gaulle–Lille 3 (France).
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Diversité des Lumières dans la pensée grecque: Idées et innovation
(xviiie–xixe siècles) par Roxane D. Argyropoulos
Paris: Honoré Champion, 2014.
208pp. €40. ISBN 978-2-7453-2623-2.
Critique littéraire par Henri Tonnet, Université Paris–Sorbonne
Les 16 articles qui constituent cette étude de Roxane D.
Argyropoulos ont été publiés entre 1974 et 2005. Mais l’ouvrage
ne donne aucune impression de dispersion en raison de son unité
thématique et méthodologique. Le domaine est celui des Lumières
(surtout françaises) dans les écrits théoriques grecs du xviiie siècle au
lendemain de l’Indépendance de la Grèce (1830). Le corpus est large
mais tourne essentiellement autour d’Adamance Coray et des adeptes
des Lumières françaises (Rhigas Vélestinlis, Dimitrios Catargi, Daniel
Philippidis, Benjamin de Lesbos, Nicolas Piccolos et d’autres moins
connus). Et la méthode est l’approche historique, philosophique et
plus largement idéologique de l’école de Constantin Th. Dimaras. La
très riche bibliographie des notes de bas de page renvoie abondamment
aux études des disciples de Dimaras: Emmanuel Frankiskos,
Catherine Koumarianou, Paschalis Kitromilidis, Anna Tabaki. Mais
la bibliographie étrangère, française, anglaise et allemande n’est pas
moins abondante. Il est manifeste que l’auteur maîtrise entièrement
l’important sujet des Lumières en Grèce.
Et l’on peut prendre une idée panoramique des sujets abordés et
de la thèse soutenue en lisant l’introduction (7–13) qui pourrait aussi
bien servir de résumé de l’ouvrage. Certains sujets sont abordés de
façon strictement historique comme la très complète étude sur les
« académies »—en fait des universités—de langue grecque. D’autres
proposent une synthèse sur la pensée d’un auteur, comme celle
qui concerne les conceptions de Coray sur la justice ou les idées
pédagogiques de Daniel Philippidis.
L’apport majeur de cette étude concerne, bien sûr, la spécificité de
l’approche grecque des Lumières. Un premier point doit être souligné: il
s’agit essentiellement des Lumières françaises. Cela s’explique, en partie,
par le fait que certains des penseurs grecs de ce temps ont longuement
séjourné à Paris, comme Daniel Philippidis qui y fit des études
scientifiques, ou même y étaient installés définitivement, comme Nicolas
Piccolos et Adamance Coray. Dans cet apport français, les « maîtres à
pensée de la Nation » (dhaskali tou yenous) grecque font un choix. Ils
préfèrent Voltaire à Rousseau, parce qu’ils croient à la civilisation et à
la perfectibilité de l’être humain et se méfient de l’« état de nature ».
Très souvent ecclésiastiques, excellents connaisseurs de l’Antiquité et
s’exprimant fréquemment en grec ancien les « philosophes » grecs ne
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critiques de livres
choisissent pas entre les Anciens et les Modernes. Ils veulent concilier
la foi et la raison, la philologie classique et la révolution et sont souvent
adeptes d’un aristotélisme renouvelé, comme celui que l’on enseignait à
l’université de Padoue.
Henri Tonnet a été le Directeur de l’Institut Néo-hellénique à la Sorbonne;
il est professeur émérite à l’Université de Paris–Sorbonne.
Matiéres incandescentes: Problématiques matérialistes des
Lumières françaises par Pierre Berthiaume
Montréal: Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2014.
330pp. CAN$39.95;€36. ISBN 978-2-7606-3340-7.
Critique littéraire par Colas Duflo, Université de Paris Ouest Nanterre
Dans cet ouvrage, Pierre Berthiaume, professeur émérite de
l’Université d’Ottawa et spécialiste du xviiie siècle, dresse un parcours
général et synthétique du matérialisme français du xviiie siècle,
abordant aussi bien son versant critique et sa lutte contre l’idéologie
et l’institution catholique que les éléments par lesquels il construit une
philosophie nouvelle dans ses différents aspects. La critique des dogmes
religieux et au premier chef de l’idée de Dieu est le point de départ de
ce travail parce qu’elle représente pour Berthiaume le socle fondamental
sur lequel se construit l’entreprise matérialiste. Convoquant de nom
breuses références, et au premier chef d’Holbach et Meslier, tout en
soulignant ce qu’ils doivent à Spinoza ou à Hobbes, Berthiaume rappelle
d’abord dans quels termes se fait la critique de la Révélation et des
« fables impertinentes et ridicules » dont est remplie la Bible. Ce n’est
qu’un premier pas, qui mène à la remise en question de l’idée même de
Dieu, dont les preuves sont systématiquement attaquées, et qui finit par
symboliser la déraison et la faiblesse de l’homme. À partir de là, il est
possible de dénoncer pleinement l’institution religieuse, qui profite de
la peur des hommes et entretient l’ignorance pour assoir son pouvoir.
D’Holbach, Meslier ou Dumarsais scrutent l’histoire du christianisme
pour y déchiffrer une série d’impostures et y lire la genèse d’une morale
de fanatiques ennemis de la nature humaine.
Il ne s’agit pas seulement, pour les matérialistes, de démolir les
anciennes idoles, mais bien aussi de construire une philosophie
nouvelle, qui doit passer par une redéfinition de la matière, afin de
pouvoir remplacer le dualisme par le monisme. Il était nécessaire au
premier chef de sortir de l’idée d’une matière purement passive, de lui
conférer le mouvement de manière essentielle et propre, comme le font
John Toland, et après lui Diderot et d’Holbach, mais aussi une forme
de capacité d’auto-organisation, qui donne naissance à la nature telle
que nous la connaissons—et il convient alors d’admettre la relativité
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de l’ordre et du désordre: tout ce qui est dans un ordre quelconque—
dans laquelle tout est lié et où la vie se produit de manière spontanée
et progressive, les espèces évoluant, comme le laissent penser, sous des
formes diverses, Benoît de Maillet, Buffon, Maupertuis ou Diderot (bien
qu’il soit peut-être aventuré, si l’on en croit la mise en garde de Jacques
Roger, de parler de transformisme). Mais c’est évidemment l’humain
qui intéresse les matérialistes avant toute chose. Le monisme s’articule
à un renouvellement même de la compréhension du corps, par lequel
les médecins et les philosophes du dix-huitième siècle s’éloignent du
mécanisme cartésien. Boerhaave, Hoffmann, La Mettrie, Maupertuis,
Buffon, Haller ou les médecins vitalistes de Montpellier comme
Ménuret de Chambaud réinventent une compréhension de la vie et de
la sensibilité qui fait de l’organisme un tout sensible et vivant par luimême. Si bien que l’âme, si par là on entend quelque chose de différent du
corps, devient superflue à la compréhension du vivant, et en particulier
de l’homme. Les matérialistes retrouvent par là les convictions de
leurs devanciers de l’antiquité, qui croyaient l’âme matérielle, mais les
réinventent à la lumière tant de la médecine moderne que de la nouvelle
manière de philosopher proposée par Locke. Bordeu, La Mettrie et
Diderot pensent la continuité de la matière à la pensée, et prolongent
l’aventure philosophique jusqu’aux conjectures les plus renversantes.
Pierre Berthiaume retrace ce parcours avec maîtrise et clarté mais aussi,
ce qui ne gâche rien, avec une évidente sympathie pour son objet.
Colas Duflo est professeur à l’Université de Paris Ouest Nanterre. Ses
travaux récents portent en particulier sur Diderot, Bernardin de SaintPierre et les rapports entre roman et philosophie au xviiie siècle.
Le Nègre Comme Il y a peu de Blancs par Joseph Lavallée,
éd. Carminella Biondi et Roger Little
Paris: Harmattan, 2014.
xlii+297pp. €34. ISBN 978-2-343-03184-2.
Critique littéraire par Kristiina Taivalkoski-Shilov, Université de Helsinki
Le roman antiesclavagiste Le Nègre Comme Il y a peu de Blancs
paraît dans la collection « Autrement mêmes » conçue et dirigée par
Roger Little. L’objectif de cette collection est de rendre disponibles des
textes anciens discutant les questions raciales qui ont longtemps été
introuvables pour les non-initiés. Plus de cent ouvrages en quatorze
ans ont paru dans cette collection importante et une trentaine est en
perspective (291–97). Carminella Biondi, qui a réédité ce roman avec
la collaboration de Roger Little, a antérieurement préparé Le More-Lack
(1789) de Lecointe-Marsillac pour la même collection en 2010.
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critiques de livres
Joseph Lavallée (1747–1816) est un personnage énigmatique. En
effet, toutes sortes de rumeurs ont circulé à son sujet. On prétend par
exemple qu’il a été mis à la Bastille pour homosexualité et libéré par la
foule du quatorze juillet. Biondi met toutefois en évidence que « lors de
la prise, la Bastille ne contenait, comme on le sait, que sept prisonniers
et Joseph Lavallée, ou le marquis de Bois-Robert, n’était pas du nombre »
(ix). L’introduction soigneusement documentée de Biondi (vii–xxxv)
offre des faits inédits sur l’écrivain, qui s’est essayé à plusieurs genres.
Il s’avère, par exemple, qu’il a eu des postes politiques importants après
la Révolution, mais aussi dans l’administration napoléonienne. « Doiton en conclure que Lavallée a été un caméléon ? » se demande Biondi
(xvii). Ce qui semble évident sur la base des recherches faites par
Biondi est que l’appartenance à la franc-maçonnerie a beaucoup aidé le
« polygraphe à la plume facile » (vii) tout au long de sa carrière. Selon
Biondi, le Voyage dans les départements de la France (1792–1802) mérite
une attention particulière dans la production de Lavallée et serait utile
aux historiens des mœurs et de la Révolution (xxiii–xxiv).
Le Nègre comme il y a peu de Blancs (1789) est un roman anti
esclavagiste qui porte l’empreinte de son temps; l’auteur y emploie une
rhétorique sentimentaliste pour convaincre son lecteur des torts de
l’esclavage et pour condamner « l’avarice » des Européens. L’intrigue
du roman, narré rétrospectivement par le protagoniste Itanoko, est
fort complexe. Les événements se déroulent d’abord en Afrique, sur les
bords du fleuve Sénégal, puis à Saint-Domingue et en France. Itanoko,
issu de la famille royale de son pays et éduqué par un Français qui a
omis de mentionner l’esclavage à son protégé, embarque lui-même à
bord d’un navire négrier dans l’espoir de regagner son pays, suite à sa
détention en tant que prisonnier de guerre. Le capitaine négrier, Urban,
loin d’écouter le bel homme, l’emporte en esclave à Saint-Domingue. Au
cours de la traversée de l’Atlantique, Itanoko se lie d’amitié avec le fils
d’Urban, Gernance. Sur l’île de Saint-Domingue, Itanoko, ainsi que ses
amis africains Otourou at Amélie qui sont partis le rechercher, seront
mis à rude épreuve. Itanoko et Otourou seront injustement accusés du
meurtre d’Urban, condamnés à mort et sauvés au dernier moment.
La bien-aimée d’Itanoko, Amélie, sera enlevée par un homme pervers
et menacée de viol. Le dénouement est pourtant heureux et la vertu,
intacte, récompensée. Itanoko, qui était devenu propriétaire d’une
exploitation agricole à Saint-Domingue et qui avait libéré ses esclaves,
finit par vendre sa propriété et amener ses « Nègres » en Afrique. Il
vieillira entouré de ses enfants, de son épouse Amélie et de ses amis,
dont Gernance et sa femme Honorine.
L’histoire d’Itanoko a joui d’un certain succès de sa parution. Deux
rééditions en ont été faites en 1791 et en 1795. Le roman a été adapté
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pour le théâtre et porté sur la scène dès sa publication, en août 1789,
ainsi qu’en 1791. En outre, il a été traduit deux fois en anglais en 1790,
puis en italien (1805), en espagnol (1835) et en portugais (1845) (xxx).
Biondi constate que malgré le pathos et d’autres caractéristiques que
les lecteurs modernes tolèrent mal « il s’agit d’un très noble et très
efficace plaidoyer contre la traite et l’esclavage et d’un éloge passionné
du peuple africain, ainsi que le laisse entendre le titre, qui fut jugé
courageux à l’époque » (xxxi). Effectivement, le roman mérite d’être
republié comme un document historique sur le débat entre esclavagistes
et abolitionnistes. Personnellement, nous avons particulièrement
apprécié les notes de bas de page, rédigées (probablement) par
l’auteur lui-même. Elles contiennent des références intéressantes
à d’autres textes discutant les questions raciales et présentent des
anecdotes parfois choquantes. Ici, l’auteur emploie par moments une
rhétorique violente pour souligner ses propos: « Un de mes amis était
au Cap Français depuis deux jours, et déjà le tableau de l’infortune
des Nègres l’avait affecté vivement. Un matin il entend du bruit dans
la rue, se met à la fenêtre. Que voit-il? Une femme blanche, jeune,
grande, belle, superbe, le modèle des grâces, Vénus enfin il le crut; en
la voyant l’univers l’aurait cru. Erreur! c’était Tisiphone; elle s’élance
hors de sa maison, l’œil en feu, les cheveux épars, un tison ardent dans
les mains; elle court, que veut-elle? C’est une Négresse qu’elle atteint.
La malheureuse était nue jusqu’à mi-corps. La joindre, la renverser,
l’accabler d’outrages, l’assommer de coups, lui déchirer le sein en vingt
endroits avec l’infernal brandon; telles furent les fureurs de cette
femme. Quel contraste! les flambeaux des Furies agités par le bras
d’Euphrosyne! Elle fut longue cette scène. Une femme barbare se lasse
moins qu’un homme aux actes de méchanceté. La déplorable Négresse
ne fit pas un geste d’humeur; elle n’ouvrit pas la bouche; l’injustice ne
lui arracha pas un murmure, la douleur ne lui coûta pas une plainte.
De quoi s’agissait-il? Est-ce Médée qui venge sur Creüse l’infidélité de
Jason? est-ce Hécube qui rend à Polimnestor les tourments qu’il fit
éprouver à son fils? Non. C’est le déjeuner d’un chat angora oublié par
cette Négresse » (63–64). Le roman de Lavallée est un excellent ajout
à la collection « Autrement mêmes ».
Kristiina Taivalkoski-Shilov est maître de conférences en traductologie
à l’Université de Helsinki (voir http://tuhat.halvi.helsinki.fi/portal/en/
person/taivalko). Ses publications portent sur la traduction littéraire et
notamment sur le concept de la voix en traduction.
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Rousseau, le Chemin de Ronde par Jean-François Perrin
Paris: Hermann, 2014.
469pp. €26. ISBN 978-2705688554.
Review by Christopher Kelly, Boston College
The major goal of this exceptional book is to show the importance
of the faculty of memory in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s most important
works. Jean-François Perrin argues that Rousseau’s engagement with
traditional mnemonic techniques—an engagement in which he both
relied on and transformed traditional understandings—is central to his
literary enterprise and his systematic thought. Other scholars such as
Matthew Maguire (The Conversion of Imagination: From Pascal through
Rousseau to Tocqueville [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006])
have argued that what is distinctive in Rousseau is reduction of the
importance of memory as it is found in, for example, Saint Augustine.
Rousseau expands the importance of imagination to the point of
infinity, relegating memory to a derivative status. Perrin’s treatment
does not overturn this alternative, but it does show that attention to the
theme of memory can yield extremely fruitful results.
One point at which Perrin succeeds completely is to show the extraor
dinary care with which Rousseau wrote, giving extreme attention to
both clarity and rhythm in his choice of words. Perrin demonstrates
convincingly that “Rousseau travaille en effet sa prose à la syllabe près”
(31). He deserves to be ranked with Flaubert as a writer who laboured
over his manuscripts with a view to making prose the equal of poetry.
Rousseau’s attention to this consideration was exceeded only by his
willingness to wrestle with the limits of the French language in order
to express his new ideas clearly. This required him to develop new
uses for established words. He was so successful at doing this that it is
extremely difficult for readers to notice because they themselves have
learned to think in the idiom given them by Rousseau. Perrin excels at
uncovering instances of what he calls “coup[s] de force contre le bon
usage” (80) that have now become common usages. For example, he
shows how Rousseau takes the term “force expansive,” previously used
only in chemistry, and makes it into the basis of his understanding of
the human soul. Similarly, he sheds important new light on a subject
that has been treated extensively by other scholars, namely Rousseau’s
discussions of pity. Perrin focuses on the issue of identification be
tween the observer and the sufferer (65–79). When Rousseau used
them, certain terms, so familiar to the modern reader, had either
never appeared in a dictionary (identification) or been used mainly
in theological discussions (s’identifier). Numerous other examples of
Perrin’s ingenious use of dictionaries could be given. In short, Rousseau
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made both thinkable and speakable what had previously been neither
(63). At a time when it is popular to show the ways in which a text
escapes the author’s intention, Perrin offers valuable insight into
Rousseau’s control over what he wants to say and how he wants to say it.
Another important aspect of Perrin’s treatment resides in his
recognition that Rousseau was “sans conteste le plus politique des
penseurs de sa generation” (88). As Rousseau himself says, “J’avois
vu que tout tenoit radicalement à la politique” (Confessions [Paris:
Gallimard. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1959], tome 1, p. 404). He has
more in common with Aristotle or Montesquieu than he does with
his immediate contemporaries such as Diderot or even Voltaire,
as well as religious thinkers. Scholars who focus on literary works
do not always acknowledge that Rousseau’s treatments of moral,
linguistic, and artistic issues are always pre-eminently political
treatments. While Perrin does not write much about Rousseau’s
most overtly political works, he is always attentive to the political
dimension of works such as the Lettre à d’Alembert, Julie, and Émile.
Perrin devotes several chapters to examining both Rousseau’s
literary techniques and substantive issues in Julie. He shows that
behind the passion for which Rousseau has always been renowned
lies a calculating art that resembles that of a composer who “calcule de
loin, par example, la résolution d’une dissonance” (131). He also gives
a convincing account of the strengths and weaknesses of Wolmar’s
attempt to “cure” Julie and her lover of their love. This subtle account
is made possible by the fact that Perrin is able to avoid identifying
Rousseau with any of his characters. When he turns his attention to
Émile, on the other hand, he stresses the way in which the character
of the Savoyard Vicar completes the account of the conscience that
is introduced without development earlier in the book. Even after
Perrin’s thoughtful treatment, it remains possible to wonder whether
the Vicar’s completion would be the one favoured by Rousseau himself
in every respect. Finally, Perrin offers a painstaking examination of
Rousseau’s different accounts of his famous “illumination on the road
to Vincennes.”
While Perrin’s comparisons between Rousseau and traditional
mnemonic devices such as the memory palace or spiritual exercises
of ancient philosophic sects are always interesting and sometimes
very productive of insights, it would be possible to reach many of his
conclusions using only the care Perrin devotes to analyzing Rousseau’s
texts. There is one issue in which his characteristic precision slips.
Perrin refers numerous times to Rousseau’s account of “la nature pure”
in the Second Discourse (70, 100, 186, 211, 363). In this he follows
Jacques Derrida and some other scholars who attribute this notion to
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critiques de livres
Rousseau. Nevertheless, while Rousseau refers a few times to “le pur
état de nature,” unlike Voltaire and Christian writers discussing the
condition of Adam before original sin, he never uses the term “nature
pure.” The issue is significant because it is an important point on which
Rousseau distinctly breaks from the Christian account rather than
simply bending it to his own purposes. Rousseau’s account of nature
is far less romantic or Christian than the term “nature pure” might
lead one to believe. Aside from this, the book contains two minor
factual errors: Rousseau’s friend Venture de Villeneuve is referred to
by Rousseau’s pseudonym “Vaussore de Villeneuve” (59n86), and his
other friend Dupin de Francueil is referred to as Mme Dupin’s son
rather than as her stepson (217).
In an earlier book, Politique du renonçant: Le Dernier Rousseau:
Des Dialogues aux Rêveries (Paris: Kimé, 2011), Perrin’s research in
eighteenth-century legal language allowed him to develop the most
compelling interpretation of Rousseau’s Dialogues to date. This new
book similarly displays his combination of erudition, imagination, and
intelligence.
Christopher Kelly, Boston College, is the author of two books on
Rousseau and the co-editor of the thirteen-volume Collected Writings
of Rousseau.

Book Reviews/ - Eighteenth-Century Fiction

Transcription

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