Peripheries of Nineteenth-Century French Studies: Views from the Edge by Timothy Raser (review)

Abstract

994 Reviews Peripheries of Nineteenth-Century French Studies: Views from the Edge. Ed. by Timothy Raser. Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press; London: Asso? ciated University Presses. 2002. 322 pp. $55. ISBN 0-87413-765-9. As Timothy Raser explains in his opening statement, the theme which links the articles in this varied collection is that of closure. '[I]s the study of literature or art', he wonders, 'reducible to that of its context?' (p. 16). The volume sets its response between the defining thoughts of Fredric Jameson and Francoise Gaillard, and is divided into three parts. The argument which underpins the firstsection ('Within the Peripheries') is that works of art and literature derive their meaning from historical context. In an essay that answers its title with a resounding negative ('Is Tola Dorian totally boring?'), Melanie Hawthorne outlines the career of the Russian immigrant, whose journal La Revue d'aujourd'hui stands as a more important record of 1890 than its sometimes trivial content would suggest. There follow two articles concerned with geographical boundaries. Taking as his subject the writer and socialist Pierre Leroux, Bruno Viard describes how this neglected figure sought to introduce French readers to the Orient. Less exotic but no less engaging is Grant Crichfield's discussion ofthe Journal de I'expedition des Portes de Fer, which recorded the military campaign led by the Due d'Orleans to Algeria in 1839. Approaching the same country froman entirely differentperspective, Sarah Davies Cordova compares the representation of Algerian women in the paintingsof Eugene Delacroix and the novels ofa contemporary female writer, Assia Djebar. Part 1 concludes with Martin Guiney's lucid study of French education in the 1880s. Part 11('Beyond the Peripheries') endows the volume with a sense of critical balance. A work of art or literature, it is argued, can indeed be separated from its context to uncover meanings that are both universal and enduring. Jennifer Forrest draws on the example of the circus to consider the stereotyping of the female acrobat. Rosemary Lloyd analyses Zola's Au bonheur des dames, a novel in which the theme of consumerism can be stripped away to reveal a more subtle treatment of the relationship between the sexes. The rest of this section is given to two essays which position works fromthe nineteenth century alongside twentieth-century cinema. John Anzalone examines the role ofpainting in Jean Renoir's La Chienne, and in an article that is as scholarly as it is entertaining, Illinca Zarifopol-Johnston reflects on the intertextual parallels between Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris and Tim Burton's 1989 filmBatman. The third and finalpart of the book is devoted to Balzac, in relation to whom the question of context is shown to present unique difficulties.Marie-Pierre Le Hir builds a strong argument around the concepts of race and national identity in Les Chouans, while Mary Jane Cowles studies the same novel through the emblem of the compass. Further articles (Michael Tilby and Dorothy Kelly) deal with matters of language and interpretation before Owen Heathcote's insightful analysis of the themes of cross-dressing and castration in Sarrasine and Neil Jordan's 1992 film The Crying Game. The contributors have all relished the opportunity to extend their own academic peripheries. If I have one complaint, it is that the translation of quotations into English makes the text rather cumbersome, and can disrupt the intellectual stimulation that is to be gained from an otherwise excellent book. University of Bristol Andrew Watts Balzac, la duchesse et l'idole:poetique du corps aristocratique. By Mireille LabouretGrare . Paris: Champion. 2002. 495 pp. ISBN 2-7453-0452-6. Expanding upon Mireille Labouret-Grare's doctoral thesis, this work analyses the 'double' role of the aristocrate in the novels of Honore de Balzac; not only is she a social 'type', she also has a 'dimension poetique' (p. 8). The firstsection ofthe book ...