Middlebrow Matters: Women’s Reading and the Literary Canon in France since the Belle Époque by Diana Holmes

Abstract

MLR, .,   (Paris: P.O.L., ), noting how creation is linked to destruction. e second section is entitled ‘La quête de l’autre’. In fact, Liman-Tnani shows how in Le Marin, Duras continues the denunciation of colonialism undertaken in Un barrage contre le Pacifique (Paris: Gallimard, ), resolutely turning her back on the pro-colonialist, propagandist L’Empire français that she had co-written with Philippe Roques in  (Paris: Gallimard). Covering known ground, André Not shows the various forms, including different literary models, that the quest for the ‘sailor’ takes. e next section, ‘La langue du Marin et l’idiolecte durassien’, is the most interesting and original. Sandrine Vaudrey-Luigi demonstrates how Le Marin constituted a space for experiments. In particular, she juxtaposes in an illuminating way two passages, one from Le Marin and one from L’Amant (Paris: Minuit, ), to show that the ‘débordements phrastiques surlignés syntaxiquement’ (p. ), normally thought to have been discovered in the later text, actually date back to the first. She also studies the length and segmentation of sentences, corroborating Duras’s view that for her the choice of words themselves was paramount. In another similarly fascinating article, July examines the locution ‘quand même’ in several of Duras’s novels and in Le Marin, where it is abundant and has replaced the more literary ‘tout de même’, thus underlining the orality of Duras’s style, but also the ambiguity and self-questioning that are at the heart of this novel. e last section, ‘Lecture de l’image et en images’, contains an article by Jean Arrouye which analyses how e Annunciation by Fra Angelico is a generating element of Le Marin. is section also contains short readings by Arrouye of six photographs by Françoise Nuñez, reproduced in the volume and formerly part of an art exhibition inspired by Le Marin. Arrouye establishes connections between the photographs and Le Marin, which he justifies by affirming that Nuñez’s photographs are ‘des matrices narratives ou allégoriques’ (p. ). While some articles go over ideas pointed out by Alazet or other critics such as Cécile Hanania or Julia Waters, this volume is still a worthwhile addition to the small body of research on this intriguing novel. S U C R Middlebrow Matters: Women’s Reading and the Literary Canon in France since the Belle Époque. By D H. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. .£.  pp. ISBN ––––. Middlebrow Matters is a timely exploration of the intertwining of canonization, social class, and gender in recent French literary-cultural history. Diana Holmes’s book takes as its focus middlebrow literature—literature that sits somewhere between popular and ‘high’ culture—and her approach combines literary-cultural history with detailed literary analysis. Holmes observes twentieth-century trends in France—particularly modernist suspicion of mimesis and immersive narratives— through the lens of gender and, to a lesser extent, that of social class, drawing notably upon Pierre Bourdieu’s theories on culture and social structures (La Distinction , Paris: Minuit, ). She demonstrates how the valuing of complexity and  Reviews (assumed) universality and the concurrent devaluing of popular, easily interpreted narratives that engaged with, for example, the domestic lives of protagonists set in recognizable milieux, underpinned a hierarchization of literary texts that devalorized novels most popular with the (majority female) reading public and acclaimed those that, as Holmes suggests, required a certain type or degree of education to interpret. As Holmes notes early in Middlebrow Matters, there is no direct equivalent of the English term ‘middlebrow’ in French, and recent efforts to revive and reprint middlebrow women authors in Britain have not been matched in France. As well as exploring the possible cultural and structural reasons behind this discrepancy, Middlebrow Matters also performs such revivals through the evocation and close reading of significant—though in many cases underexplored—French middlebrow authors throughout the book. In Chapter  Holmes situates Daniel Lesueur (Jeanne Loiseau) and Marcelle Tinayre as important middlebrow novelists, offering detailed readings of their novels and demonstrating their significance in the literary fabric of the time. Other more critically recognized French women writers who successfully bridged the gap between literary recognition and...