Fashioned Texts and Painted Books: Nineteenth-Century French Fan Poetry by Erin Edgington

Abstract

Reviewed by: Fashioned Texts and Painted Books: Nineteenth-Century French Fan Poetry by Erin Edgington Jill Owen Erin Edgington. Fashioned Texts and Painted Books: Nineteenth-Century French Fan Poetry. U of North Carolina P, 2017. 212 pages. ISBN-13: 978-1469635774. In recent years, the study of material culture in the nineteenth century has become quite popular among scholars who seek to understand daily life for authors, writers, and readers of this time period. Erin Edgington's Fashioned Texts and Painted Books delves into a particular aspect of popular and material culture—the fan—in an effort to emphasize both its literary and plastic value in fashion texts, paintings, and the poetic works of Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Claudel. Edgington indeed offers up a study of the fan that "considers not only its social dimensions, but also its aesthetic contributions" (16) to literature, specifically the sub-genre of fan poetry. Her book undoubtedly contributes profound insight to the conversation surrounding nineteenth-century aesthetics in ways that might be applied to other objects of the time; yet, more than this, her analyses attending to both the plastic and literary aspects of the fan redeem the object from its "popular" status and elevate the [End Page 1128] fan to an item of key importance within late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century poetics. The book is divided into three main parts, each with subsequent chapters elaborating on each major theme. Part 1, "The Fan in Fin-de-Siècle France," focuses on the popular culture aspect of the fan in society, Octave Uzanne's attention to the object in his volume L'Éventail, and the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist treatment of the fan. Chapter 1, "Fan History," initially provides the reader with a brief history lesson on the folding fan in Europe, from its Eastern origins, sparsely researched until now, to its role in high-society France. Not merely a fashion accessory, the fan soon influenced authors like Uzanne who not only analyzed the object's quotidian importance to society, but also its historical and even mythological implications. Thus, notes Edging-ton, "L'Éventail serves as a rich source text for authors eager to commemorate this universally popular, charmingly mysterious fixture of modern life" (48). Chapter 2, "The Fan Format in the Visual Arts," expounds on the aesthetic value of the fan for the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. Edgington teases out the difference between "fans that are merely fans (the effets de réel) and fans that seek to communicate something other than purely sociological information" (53) as she examines a broad sample of painted fans found in the works of various artists such as Ingres, Manet, Cassatt, Degas, Morisot, and Gaugin. Chapter 3, "The Commemorative Functions of Fans," presents the communicative value of fans as they were used by women to send coded messages in high society, as well as their commemorative value at the moment when autograph fans became collectible objects. At the turn of the century, fans began to be regarded as novelty objects that were used as advertising media and their function evolved from one of practical or communicative use into one of pure ornament as the kitschy, collectible souvenirs we know today. By first underscoring Uzanne's attention to the "textual significance of the fan" (37) as well as its aesthetic value in the visual arts and in popular culture, Edgington neatly transitions to her subsequent parts where she "seeks to rehabilitate the forgotten fan" (18) through literary and visual poetic analyses. Part 2, "Mallarmé," and part 3, "Claudel," build on this base of socio-cultural and art-historical knowledge of the fan as Edgington continues to problematize its literary and material value in the fan poetry of these authors. Edgington challenges the "idée reçue that the éventails are somehow works of lesser importance within [Mallarmé's] body of work" (95) by providing examples of the importance of the fan to Mallarmé, not only as a fashion object, which he wrote about in La Dernière Mode, but also as an art object. Mallarmé demonstrates the status of the fan as art object by composing his poetry on its leaves, elevating it to the ultimate...