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Abstract

190 Reviews three centuries, new challenges to the writers and readers ofthis kind of literature, and frequent, unnecessary reminders of the hybridity of the genre. However, the author is much more convincing when, in subsequent chapters, he eventually buckles down to an examination of specific texts?many of which are not, in fact, travel accounts. The geographical and cultural focus is Europe and the Americas?perceptions and experiences of the New World, and memories of and other connections with the old continent. The Caribbean is seen as the 'coordinating point between North and South' (p. 57) in the Americas. Whereas in the early part of this work some space is given to the writings of Columbus and Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, detailed assessment is reserved for Guillaume-Thomas Raynal's Histoire philosophique etpolitique des etablissements et du commerce des europeens dans les deux Indes (1770)?the involvement of Denis Diderot in this multi-volumed work figures prominently?and Alexander von Humboldt's voyage and substantial overland trek of 1799-1804. The account of this journey (the 'Personal Narrative' of almost 2,000 pages was published between 1808 and 1834), which took in parts of what we now call Venezuela, Colombia , and Ecuador, as well as Peru, Mexico, and the Caribbean, begins, according to Ette, 'the modern discourse about the New World' (p. 88). But he means a European discourse. Nevertheless, after a distracting chapter on Balzac's novella Sarrasine (presumably inspired by Barthes's examination of the work in S/Z), the author alights on Latin American concepts ofthe Americas. Pride ofplace is given to the Uruguayan Jose Enrique Rodo's Ariel (1900) and Motivos de Proteo (1909). Unfortunately, Rodo's vision of a supranational Latin American continent gets a little lost in the discussion of these texts. Subsequently, a chapter is focused on the Mexican essayist and poet Alfonso Reyes, a significant figure in modern Latin American thought and an individual who was prepared to accommodate Spanish and European cultural influences. His dramatic poem Ifigenia cruel (1924), accompanied by a prose commentary, is described here as 'a border text and maybe even more a border-crossingtext', with its 'two polesof Western and indigenous cultures'(p. 193). The contemporary period and the Caribbean are brought into play with a detailed study of the 1989 novel of the Guadeloupian writer Maryse Conde, Traversee de la mangrove. Set in Guadeloupe, an overseas department of France, and published in Paris, this work brings together colonial and postcolonial motifs, as well as European and Antillean perspectives. Finally, the Old World-New World link is further em? phasized with an examination of Arnold Stadler's Feuerland (1992), in which travels, memories, letters, and recent history connect twentieth-century Germany and Ar? gentina, specifically Patagonia?a Patagonia that is 'only good for being a surface on which the travel movements ofthe novel's figures are inscribed' (p. 304). This monograph provides a generally wide-ranging approach to what is very much an Atlantocentric view of movement, contacts, and culture. It reveals an occasional disjointedness, too many repetitions, too many long, lumbering sentences (it has not been carefully edited), and some not infrequent, self-conscious attempts at dazzling the reader with ideas and insights that have little more than surface charm. Yet the work's strength is that the author is often very penetrating with individual texts and this monograph contains many detailed, fascinating assessments of a wide variety of essays, works of fiction, and accounts of travels and discoveries. University College London David Henn La Cathedrale. Ed. by Joelle Prungnaud. (Collection UL3: Travaux et Recherches) Lille: Universite Charles-de-Gaulle. 2001. 304pp. ?23. ISBN 2-84467-034-2. Ichabod? Cathedrals east long shadows, and even if readers are occasionally left in the dark, this comparatist exercise in sciagraphy has much to offerin no fewer than MLR, ioo.i, 2005 191 twenty-five essays, with even the unwonted pleasure of some colour plates by way of illustration. Art history, and in particular stained glass, and music, though all too briefly,occupy the place to which they are fully entitled, enhancing a gratifyingsense of purposeful interdisciplinarity. The volume is a product of what must have been a...