Les arrière-boutiques de la littérature: auteurs et imprimeurslibraires aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles ed. by Edwige Keller-Rahbé

Abstract

of her work was wrongly credited as author of her poetry. Dominique Rabaté adds a broad-brushed overview repeating literary history as hagiography and its desacralization by subversive writers while Christine Baron, recalling the Barthes-Picard debates as symptomatic of the Ancients-Moderns confrontation, looks at cross-cultural writings representative of the stance toward a history not belonging to the writers sensing themselves trapped by it. Likewise, four essays compose the division on critical fictions. Mathilde Bombart focuses on Furetière’s case for allegory as social commentary, Larry Norman on how the English imported and varied the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns in Swift’s Battle of the Books, Marielle Macé on Sartre’s arguments against the social existence of literature , and Claude Coste on how Chevillard’s novel L’œuvre posthume de Thomas Pilaster reminds us of Nabokov’s Pale Fire, Borges, and Henry James. The essays that most convincingly articulate the arguments of this book appear in the chapter entitled “Microfictions.” Mélanie Leroy-Terquem introduces the case of Octave Uzanne and “bibliophile fiction.” This category in the margins of literature contains plagiarism, false texts, and assorted hoaxes then exposed by Martine Lavaud for their potential as subversive writing. In fine form Jeannelle explicates Georges Perec’s Le voyage d’hiver wherein Hugo Vernier exemplifies the prototype of “une allégorie critique” (189) in a pastiche that can “garantir l’authenticité de faux” (174) with Vernier as a plagiarist whose works have a date of publication indicating his own writing as originating plagiarism by others. Perec’s example of the literary mise-en-abyme sets up the model for a desynchronized literary space that Aude Préta-De Beaufort separately reveals in Pascal Quignard’s Albucius. Four other contributions make up a chapter on variations within literary genres. Stéphane Zékian shows how theater during the Parnasse revolts against the drama from the Thermidor while Sylvie Triaire has fun with Flaubert’s characters Bouvard and Pécuchet, Suzanne Lafont clearly shows the complex undermining of the anti-Semitism by Céline and Brasillach in Patrick Modiano’s La place de l’Étoile, and Denis Labouret explicates the pastiche by Jean-Louis Curtis in La Chine m’inquiète. A single definition of literary history would have been helpful as a common point of reference. In this collection, literary history refers alternately to a manual, a fiction, Lanson, and too many other meanings for the term to be a helpful common denominator for the reader. Nevertheless, we do have Michel Murat’s final essay showing how fiction, especially the novel, modifies and adapts the tradition that comes before it. If the reader looks at this essay first, then the other contributions give us variations on the subversion that the writing of literary fiction can accomplish. Trinity University (TX) Roland A. Champagne KELLER-RAHBÉ, EDWIGE, éd. Les arrière-boutiques de la littérature: auteurs et imprimeurslibraires aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles. Toulouse: PU du Mirail, 2010. ISBN 978-2-81070118 -6. Pp. 262. 24 a. Research on the material book and the printer who produced it is no longer the purview of historians alone. Edwige Keller-Rahbé has edited a welcome and cohesive collection of essays exploring the relationships between sixteenth- and 952 FRENCH REVIEW 85.5 seventeenth-century printers and authors from a literary perspective. In her informative introduction, she contends that a focus on these multi-faceted relationships contributes significantly to our understanding of French literary history during the ancien régime. Keller-Rahbé uses primarily seventeenth-century examples in her introduction, deliberately compensating for a dearth in studies on seventeenth -century printers. The essays also include four valuable analyses of sixteenth-century authors and “printer-booksellers” (“imprimeurs-libraires”). Not all eleven European contributors are familiar names on this side of the Atlantic, but the consistently thoughtful and well-researched essays provide an excellent introduction to these scholars. The contributors propose compelling hypotheses about the interdependence of printers and authors, relying on patterns of publications , conventional and often fictionalized paratext, and typographical characteristics . The thematic organization of the collection divides the essays into four complementary, and equally intriguing, sections. In the first...