Enlightenment and Narrative: Essays in Honour of Richard A. Francis by Colleagues and Friends ed. by Philip Robinson

Abstract

story “which did not find a large audience” (30) at the time with selected pages from Loti’s successful Madame Chrysanthème, Reed reveals Loti’s use of clichés, his misunderstandings, as well as his self-indulgent treatment of Japan. In the second part of the book, Reed provides an excellent translation of Émile Guimet’s Promenades japonaises (1880) and mentions the two different encounters between Régamey and Kiosaï, a famous Japanese painter: “Guimet in Promenades japonaises pits Régamey in a man-to-man contest against a Japanese artist who is very much his equal” (125). Reed also adds that “Guimet’s description of the Japanese artist Kyosai (Kiosaï) constantly offering examples of his accomplished and provocative work” (125) might shed some light on the question often asked by art historians regarding the origin of the famous exchange of paintings between Van Gogh, Émile Bernard, and Paul Gauguin. According to Reed, Van Gogh discovered that Japanese artists exchanged works among themselves , and this is why he wanted artists to live “in some sort of fraternal community ” (126), as did Japanese artists. University of Pittsburgh, Johnstown Barbara Petrosky ROBINSON, PHILIP, ed. Enlightenment and Narrative: Essays in Honour of Richard A. Francis by Colleagues and Friends. Nottingham: UP of Nottingham, 2009. ISBN 9780 -8535-8262-5. Pp. 152. £30. We have become accustomed to the Festschrift, a fixture of modern-day academic publishing. Contributors to such a volume do not necessarily share specific areas of interest, adhering instead to geographical and/or temporal boundaries. Published as volume 48.3 of Nottingham French Studies, this Festschrift is perhaps unobjectionable in its potluck nature, as one would naturally expect a journal issue to include a combination of articles lacking thematic cohesion. Following their own research interests, thirteen contributors celebrate the contribution to scholarship made by Francis, the author of studies dealing with eighteenthcentury canonical writers (most notably Prévost, Voltaire, and Beaumarchais), and beyond the Enlightenment, Romain Rolland. The period covered in this Festschrift stretches from Shaftesbury and Montesquieu to the First Empire. Ursula Haskins Gonthier reassesses a claim originally made by Alessandro Crisafulli, that the philosophical theories of the Earl of Shaftesbury contain distinct parallels with Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes, reviewing it in light of recent studies on the role played by the periodical press in transmitting ideas across linguistic and geographical frontiers. Drawing on the reviews of Shaftesbury’s work that appeared in French Huguenot literary journals to which Montesquieu subscribed, she evaluates their connection to the novel, while highlighting a potentially rich and largely unexplored area of research, the intellectual exchanges between England and France in the first decades of the eighteenth century. In an elegantly written commentary, Jonathan Mallinson characterizes the unpublished epistolary satire Paméla (Lettres de M. de Voltaire à Mme Denis de Berlin) as “a masterpiece of enlightenment narrative” (51), authored by a disillusioned Voltaire at the Prussian court. It is not only the novelty of the text that justifies the critic’s interest in it but also its literary refinement and satirical gloss, which veil the portrait of Frederick as a “petty, vindictive and dangerous despot” (51). In a thought-provoking meditation that subjects to adequate scrutiny the use of a 564 FRENCH REVIEW 85.3 generic term, conte philosophique, to classify a subset of Voltaire’s short fictions, Nicholas Cronk signals the creation of an “arbitrary” and “misleading” (73) category that distracts and restricts. In the closing piece, equally interesting, Malcolm Cook sheds light on the genesis of L’amazone, assessing its place in Bernardin’s writing. The other articles completing the volume cannot be covered in more detail within the frame of this review: Jenny Mander explores the collision between fiction and social philosophy in Marivaux’s Le paysan parvenu through the lenses of conjectural history, developed by Adam Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment; Jean Sgard details Prévost’s preoccupation with the ethically monstrous; Judith Still looks at adoption in Prévost’s Histoire d’une Grecque moderne; James Fowler interrogates the meaning of prude in eighteenth-century France and England, searching for answers in Crébillon fils, Richardson, and Laclos; by using L’aveugle as an example, Katherine Astbury looks...