French Literary History Research Articles

Епістолярний роман в класиці літератури: прецедент «Португальських листів» Ґієраґа та «Листів перуанки» Ф. де Ґрафіньї

The dynamics of the text’s stay in the circle of literary classics becomes clear only over time: the experience of epistolary novels of the Enlightenment is very indicative of many aspects of literary production. “Portuguese Letters” by Guilleragues (second half of the XVIIth century) and “Letters from a Peruvian” by F. de Graffigny (middle of the XVIIIth century) offer material for understanding the mechanisms of the novel’s timeless success. These texts have experienced powerful recognition, oblivion, and rediscovery throughout history. From the history of creation, genre canon, literary process to the system of motives, rhetoric, figures, and metaphors – everything in these works is a kaleidoscope of the widest readership. The extra-literary factors and intra-textual mechanisms of the two novels by Guilleragues and F. de Graffigny together shed light on the secret of the power of the work in the context of the classics of literature. At the same time, they encourage us to check the essence of such categories as author’s mystification, fictionality, mimeticity in the communication arch of an artistic work. The article reveals these questions, which allows us to introduce the “Portuguese Letters” of Guilleragues and the “Letters from a Peruvian” by F. de Graffigny into the circle of current issues of modern literary studies to fill the gap in Ukrainian literary studies around the theme of the formation, flowering, and power of the epistolary genre in the history of French literature.

Le Jeune Homme by Annie Ernaux

Reviewed by: Le Jeune Homme by Annie Ernaux Edward Ousselin ANNIE ERNAUX Le Jeune Homme Paris. Gallimard. 2022. 48 pages. ANNIE ERNAUX'S latest book was published a few months before she was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature. At roughly forty pages, it is closer in length to a short story than to a novel. While Ernaux has regularly distanced herself from the still-fashionable genre of autofiction (and from just about any literary movement), almost all her fictional works have been autobiographical in nature and characterized by the frequent use of first-person narration. "The Young Man" is no exception. In fact, this short book seems to encapsulate many of the events and themes found in her previous novels. In Passion simple (1992), and again in more detail in Se perdre (2001), she recounted her affair with a married man. This time, her love affair is with a much younger man, a student who wanted to meet the already famous author. As the narrator points out: "He was almost thirty years younger than me." She also remarks that the young man's small apartment was across the street from the hospital where—many years earlier, when she was nearly his age—she had been taken after a painful and dangerous backstreet abortion (in France, abortions were illegal until 1975). This traumatic episode of Ernaux's life is the topic of L'Événement (2000). The narrator often compares the young student's impecunious lifestyle to her own small-town, working-class origins, a long-running thematic thread in many of Ernaux's books and interviews. She notices that while she had long felt relegated to a lower social status, including during most of her seventeen-year marriage, with the student she suddenly seemed to be a part of the upper class. As the older, richer partner in this unlikely couple, she could, for instance, go off with him on vacations he would not have been able to afford. The sort of power imbalance that is more common between an older man and a younger woman was now inverted: "I was in a dominant position." Perhaps fittingly, this relationship lasted approximately as long as Ernaux was working on another book. The conclusion of Le Jeune Homme is a moment for Ernaux to relect on a turning point in her life, when she realized that she was happy to be independent at the turn of the twenty-first century. Ernaux is now eighty-two years old. Whether or not she publishes anything else, her place in French literary history is secure. While she has often been criticized for her choice of an unadorned écriture plate (flat writing style), she has renewed the autobiographical genre by turning much of her life story into an extensive and fascinating fictional domain. Edward Ousselin Western Washington University Copyright © 2023 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

Worldwide Women Writers in Paris: Francophone Metronomes by Alison Rice

Reviewed by: Worldwide Women Writers in Paris: Francophone Metronomes by Alison Rice Julia Praud Rice, Alison. Worldwide Women Writers in Paris: Francophone Metronomes. Oxford UP, 2021. ISBN 978-0-19-284577-1. Pp. xi + 307. With an unconventional, syncopated approach, clear prose, a musically thematic structure, and a broad theoretical base providing key references for researchers in the field, this polyphonic analysis of eighteen women writers (Evelyne Accad, Etel Adnan, Eva Almassy, Nathacha Appanah, Bessora, Hélène Cixous, Maryse Condé, Fatou Diome, Chahdortt Djavann, Eun-Ja Kang, Julia Kristeva, Anna Moï, Pia Petersen, Zahia Rahmani, Leïla Sebbar, Yumiko Seki, Shumona Sinha, Svit Brina) from around the world, will be useful to both seasoned and emerging scholars. These writers who hail from countries ranging from Algeria, Iran, Lebanon, and Japan to South Korea, Hungary, Bulgaria, Senegal, and Slovenia, have chosen to live in Paris and publish in French. Although not an exhaustive list, they are representative of the types of writers who "are contributing to a revolution in the Francophone literary landscape" (1). Drawing upon these remarkable interviews that "chronicle a particular time in French literary history" and "mark what might be considered a moment of transition toward greater acceptance of women writers from outside of France," Alison Rice composed this book with a foundation set in the theoretical works of Roland Barthes, Daniel Barenboim, Edward Said, Françoise Lionnet, Shu-mei Shih, Christopher Miller, and others (14). In Worldwide Women Writers, Rice anticipates questions, tackles contested terminology, defines key terms, and refrains from making assumptions about her readers' prior knowledge of these writers, or of the theoretical references she provides. For example, she addresses the debate surrounding the terms francophone and world literature, underlines multiple perspectives, and allows the writers to speak for themselves. Her exploration of the publishing world, and discussion of current practices in literary criticism, also open possibilities for new lines of inquiry. With thoughtful and thought-provoking explanations, the author's use of music as a "fil conducteur" provides the conceptual framework, terminology, and opportunities for categorization that make this project come to life. The juxtaposition of musical lexicon (rhythms, odes, overtures, suites, preludes, postludes, interludes, glissandos, acapella, chord progression, chorus, interpretation, riff) and literary analysis, organizes her study and allows her to forgo traditional categorization of these writers. Opting instead for what Françoise Lionnet termed a "transversal comparative approach," Rice encourages her readers to engage with this study as they choose, according to their own "passions and interests […] whether melodically, harmonically, or contrapuntally" (21). Finally, although Worldwide Women Writers can stand alone, readers will be delighted to know that "these women's voices are readily available online to confirm and complexify, corroborate, and elaborate" should they wish to listen to and engage directly with them (2). Indeed, access to all eighteen of Rice's archived interviews is available through her website, Francophone Metronomes website (www.francophonemetronomes.com). [End Page 285] Julia Praud United States Military Academy, West Point Copyright © 2023 American Association of Teachers of French

Shadows in the City of Light: Paris in Postwar French Jewish Writing ed. by Sara R. Horowitz, Amira Bojadzija-Dan and Julia Creet (review)

Reviewed by: Shadows in the City of Light: Paris in Postwar French Jewish Writing ed. by Sara R. Horowitz, Amira Bojadzija-Dan and Julia Creet Gayle Zachmann Sara R. Horowitz, Amira Bojadzija-Dan, and Julia Creet, eds., Shadows in the City of Light: Paris in Postwar French Jewish Writing, SUNY Series in Contemporary Jewish Literature and Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2021. 278 pp. 32 illus. Hardcover $95.00. Paperback $32.95. ISBN: 9781438481739, 9781438481746 Shadows in the City of Light: Paris in Postwar French Jewish Writing, edited by Sara R. Horowitz, Amira Bojadzija-Dan, and Julia Creet, presents an English-language collection of fourteen essays that explore literary memory and the ways that the city of Paris may depict absence in select postwar works of Jewish writers. Beautifully crafted, the introduction offers a useful historical survey of the context for Jews in France before, during, and after the war. It establishes the volume’s spatial approach to the palimpsest of Paris history and memorial culture, specifying too that “[t]he Jews of Paris in the books that we study in this volume are mostly from elsewhere, [ . . . ] from Poland, from Germany, from North Africa, contributing to the character of ‘the wandering Jew’ and a ‘uniquely Jewish anxiety’” (4–5). Idealized in literature and painting throughout the nineteenth century, the City of Light was for many Jews of Europe and North Africa a beacon of hope and the land of Jewish emancipation. A magnet for artists and writers in the early decades of the twentieth century, Paris in the interwar years became a refuge for Jews fleeing the rise of fascism. As it did for Thomas Muritz in Vercor’s La Marche à l’étoile (Guiding Star), for the families of these writers, the dream of emigration to France brutally ended with the fall of the Third Republic and the rise of Vichy France during World War II. Taking up important questions of commemoration, history, and living memory, Shadows in the City of Light tracks the tensions that arise when postwar Paris sites meant to laud an emancipatory land of the French Revolution instead become haunted by absences and the Shoah. Focused primarily on Patrick Modiano and George Perec, the volume also offers important pieces on Sarah Kofman, Henri Raczymow, Irene Nemirovsky, and five lesser-known writers. It engages Holocaust memory and trauma studies, examining how [End Page 268] postwar writers explore the relations between the physical, the past, and the present. Organized into five fluid thematic sections—“Topography,” “Familiar Strangers,” “Ambivalences,” “Absence,” and “Past Perfect”—the articles build on each other, elucidating immigrant, 1.5, and second-generation writers’ experiences of Paris spaces. They target maps, addresses, streets, and monuments; hope, disillusionment, memory, and mourning, with each taking on different facets of the works in question. In “Topography,” Julia Creet provides a psycho-geography of Dora Bruder, while Gary D. Mole’s excellent piece on Parisian cartography in Sarah Kofman sets the stage for Annelies Schulte Nordholt’s discussion of phantoms that circulate in Perec’s and Raczymow’s streets. Nadia Malinovich’s rich study of disillusionment and dreams in lesser-known immigrant writers fortuitously frames Henri Raczymow’s reading of Sara Kofman and his own experience in “Familiar Strangers.” Homing in on Modiano and Perec, the essays in “Ambivalences,” and “Absence” feature pieces on mourning and memory, exploring how writers reconcile the City of Light with its dark years during the war. As Thomas Nolden notes, “The act of remembering the victims disrupts the evocations of quintessential Paris tropes. Put differently, writing about Paris’s antisemitic past constitutes a break in French literary history” (165). Closing the volume, “Past Perfect” moves from “Perec’s Ghost City” by Nelly Wolf to Sara R. Horowitz’s “Street Walking Paris,” a consideration of how writers “negotiate memory through spacial practices” (208), as well as how Jewish walkers may “redefine official space to give it personal meaning” (215). Finally, Susan Suleiman traces the shadow of the Holocaust and its impact on the legacy of Nemirovsky’s unfinished wartime manuscript in “The Afterlife of Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française.” Exploring different genres, Shadows in the City of Light features...

Les Soirées de Médan, the Franco-Prussian War and Naturalist Group Identity

The Franco-Prussian War was not only a watershed in the history of Europe, it also inspired a watershed moment in French literary history: the publication of Les Soirées de Médan in 1880. The short story collection was a central text in framing a Naturalist group identity, but each of its six stories is also a scathing attack on the Franco-Prussian War and on the catastrophic French defeat. It has been argued that the myth surrounding the volume quickly eclipsed the stories themselves, but the volume's publication history shows that some of the contributors wrote their stories before a collective volume was proposed, suggesting that the critique of the war was initially as important as forming literary allegiances. This article examines the book from both angles, as a literary-historical event and as an anti-war tract. The uncomfortable relationship between the two is underscored by the many paratextual and textual absences in Les Soirées de Médan, which simultaneously conceal and draw attention to the war. It will show that the critique of the war of 1870–1871 is a necessary aspect of the public fashioning of Naturalist group identity, but that this public position-taking complicates our understanding of Naturalism as a cohesive literary movement.

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

The History of French Literature on Film. By Kate Griffiths and Andrew Watts

<i>The History of French Literature on Film.</i> By Kate Griffiths and Andrew Watts

La traducción del pantún al francés o el vuelo impreso de la mariposa

El pantún es una forma fija poética proveniente de Malasia que se incorpora a la poesía francesa de una manera peculiar en el siglo XIX. La estructura comienza a difundirse en Francia mediante una traducción en una nota al final de Les Orientales de Victor Hugo, en la que aparece acompañada de otras traducciones árabes y persas proporcionadas por un reconocido orientalista de la época, Ernest Fouinet. En conjunto, esta serie de traducciones participan en la justificación de la estética romántica. Tras esta primera aparición, el pantún será objeto de exploración de sensibilidades poéticas diversas a lo largo del siglo XIX: algunas de sus imágenes son evocadas con insistencia en diversos textos de algunos poetas, y su forma incita a explorar en los efectos de la repetición alternada y organizada de los versos. Con el paso del tiempo, “Harmonie du soir” de Baudelaire se convertirá en el modelo de referencia más inmediato de esta estructura poética. El pantún que se desarrolla en Francia plantea un mecanismo singular de repetición de versos (el segundo y cuarto verso de cada estrofa son retomados en el primero y tercer verso de la siguiente) y crea una analogía que distingue de forma precisa naturaleza y experiencia. Además de observar las características y condiciones de esta primera inserción en la nota al final de la obra mencionada de Victor Hugo, el propósito de este artículo es reflexionar sobre las funciones que cumple una forma fija importada de otra cultura, y las circunstancias que permiten su asimilación en la historia literaria francesa.

Une révolution vue d'en bas: L'épopée ordinaire du Tableau de Paris (1871)

Published under the pseudonym of Marius from 17 to 24 May 1871 by the communard paper Le Tribun du Peuple, the Tableau de Paris has long been a controversial issue in the history of French literature. In 1953 it was first attributed to Villiers de L'Isle-Adam. Three decades later, the editors of Villiers' OEuvres complètes in the "Bibliothèque de la Pléiade" reproduced the article even though they seriously queried the attribution. Finally, in 2008 marxist publisher Sao Maï deconstructed their arguments by showing how fully supportive of the Commune Villiers was. Whoever its true author, the Tableau de Paris is in search of an epic manner based on the sense of grandeur. The epic is not centered on the battles against the troupes versaillaises. While the utopia of the Commune is coming to an end, it appears the grandeur lies in the everyday life and values of the Parisian people. (In French)

MOTIFS TRANSFORMATION OF M. DESBORDES-VALMORE LYRICS IN THE WORKS OF MARINA TSVETAEVA

The influence of French culture on the poetry of M. Tsvetaeva was noted by her contemporaries (B. Pasternak, S. Bobrov), and also became the subject of scientific research (for example, N. Strelnikova). However, the relationship of her poetry with the French writer work of the romanticism era, M. Desbordes-Valmore (1786-1859), which is almost forgotten in our days, is analyzed for the first time, which seems relevant in light of the growing interest in the role of women in European culture. The article uses a biographical method, with the involvement of the poetics of the rhythm of H. Meshonnik. The article examines the mentions of M. Desbordes-Valmore in M. Tsvetaeva’s poetry and in correspondence with B. Pasternak, provides a brief comparison of biographies in terms of their influence on the formation of a poetic voice. Their tragic fates have a lot in common: both survived revolutions, as a consequence the ruin of the family nest, extreme poverty, the loss of loved ones. The main similarity between M. Tsvetaeva and M. Desbordes-Valmore lies in the auditory imagination, in intonational rhythmic expressiveness and in vivid metaphor. Both M. Desbordes-Valmore and M. Tsvetaeva left evidence of a moment preceding the moment of writing, “music” preceding verbal expression. They often rely on the song as a precedent text (O. Revzina), a precedent rhythm. The autobiographical nature of the lyrics and the musicality bring together so dissimilar authors at first glance. M. Tsvetaeva read M. Desbordes-Valmore in the original, probably having become acquainted with her work at the summer courses in the history of French literature at the Sorbonne. The analysis of the transformations of M. Desbordes-Valmore’s poems motifs in M. Tsvetaeva’s lyrics clearly show not only a deep knowledge and understanding of the French romantic tradition, but also the innovation of her own poetic language.

Tradução como (i)migração: Adrien Delpech, um dos primeiros tradutores de Machado de Assis

O objetivo principal desse artigo é mostrar e dar visibilidade aos agentes intermediários da circulação das obras literárias, e, particularmente, a um tradutor esquecido pela história literária francesa e brasileira, Adrien Delpech. Pretendo, de um lado, teorizar sobre a problemática da tradução enquanto (i)migração, já que é sob o prisma e a partir dessa imagem e visão de mundo que Machado de Assis foi inicialmente traduzido em francês. De outro lado, faço um breve histórico sincrônico e diacrônico das primeiras traduções dos contos e romances do Machado no mundo para todas as línguas e culturas. E, finalmente, analiso o perfil de Adrien Delpech, um dos primeiros tradutores de Machado, responsável pela divulgação do autor não somente no sistema literário francês, mas também nos outros sistemas culturais-literários.

Philippe Hurault de Cheverny (1528–99) and the Making of Memoirs in Early Modern France

Abstract Memoirs occupy a privileged position in the history of French literature. Historians of French memoirs consider the Memoires d’Estat of Chancellor Philippe Hurault de Cheverny to be a stepping stone in the history of self-writing because they seem to mark a transition from self-narratives focusing on the author’s public persona to a self-writing that emphasizes the author’s private life, that is, to something more akin to modern autobiography. Unlike most autobiographical works printed at the time, Cheverny’s memoirs integrate details about the author’s private life and family affairs into the more common first-person chronicle of his public career. A closer examination reveals, however, that multiple practices of self-writing are at work in Cheverny’s book, and that its apparent originality in the history of memoirs and their relation to autobiography more generally are an effect of editorial changes made after the author’s death. The article argues that practices of collective writing and editing of personal documents were common in the early modern age.

Les métamorphoses de la critique littéraire : le cas des Grands Rhétoriqueurs

L’analyse de l’attitude des critiques à l’égard de la poésie des Grands Rhétoriqueurs permet d’observer les changements intervenus au sein de l’histoire littéraire. Longtemps méprisés et pratiquement exclus de la liste des poètes importants, les Rhétoriqueurs ont enfin su gagner la bienveillance des chercheurs et retrouver, dans la seconde moitié du XXe siècle, leur place dans l’histoire de la littérature française. Ce changement notoire stimulé de nouvelles recherches dans des champs de la littérature complètement oubliés jusqu’alors.

Missing Modernism (Gide)

Through an examination of the paradoxical case of André Gide—who is at once a towering intellectual figure and, for scholars ranging from Paul de Man and Roland Barthes to Emily Apter and Michael Lucey, a “missing” writer—this article proposes a broad reflection on French modernism as a “missing” aesthetic-political concept. Specifically, it shows how different conceptions of Gide’s relation to modernism and postmodernism inform subsequent and competing definitions of the French literary contemporary. Gide thus comes to represent less an exemplary writer of the modernist literary aesthetic than an exemplary figure for how we now miss modernism, not only in the forms it took in Gide’s work but also more broadly as an idea of a vital cultural politics, of a negativity or an authentic resistant space. Thinking about how that kind of modernism is missing or missed offers another way of thinking about our current relationship to French literary history.

K. Chekalov. Of popular literature in a popular manner. Gaston Leroux and mass literature in France during the Belle Époque

The review covers K. Chekalov’s monograph on the problems of mass literature and the literary legacy of Gaston Leroux. The author chose one of the pivotal moments in the history of French literature: a transition period, which, according to Bakhtin’s law on borderlines and transitions, combines adherence to traditions as well as revision of the existing systems. This topic has so far remained unexplored by Russian scholars, just like the works of Leroux, whose role in establishing the genre of detective fiction is enormous. No research has been dedicated to his oeuvre in Russia. Only a meager share of his works has been translated into the Russian language. The choice of such a topic implies the relevance and novelty of the research. The purpose of the book is to create a solid basis for further exploration of this complex phenomenon, which determined the book’s structure, comprising six chapters and a closing summary.

Phantom Time: Literary History at the Edge of the Nation

Phantom Time: Literary History at the Edge of the Nation

The French Literature of 19th century and the Public

1789년의 프랑스 대혁명 이후 19세기 프랑스의 역사는 대중을 중심으로 하여 힘들지만 꾸준하게 새로운 체제를 잡아가는 부침과 파란의 역사였다. 이 글에서는 19세기의 작가들 가운데 대중과 관련하여 시대적 사명감과 사상성이 두드러진 작가들을 중심으로 살펴보았다. 대중이란 사회계급과는 무관하게 모든 사회 집단을 통틀어 이르는 말이다. 대중문학에는 사회 현상에 따라 두 가지로 구분할 수 있는데, 부르주아 문화 체계의 일부를 이루면서 부르주아가 아닌 계급들을 기존 질서 속에 통합함으로써 고급 문학으로 흡수하는 대중문학과, 서민과 프롤레타리아의 일부를 이루면서 하층 계급의 해방을 목적으로 삼고 계급이 없는 미래의 민주주의적 문명을 상정하는 대중(민중)문학이 있다. 이 글에서 다룬 작가는 외젠 쉬, 조르주 상드, 라마르틴, 빅토르 위고, 에르크만-샤트리앙이다. 이들은 농민과 노동자 계급, 하층민의 삶을 그리며 계급 간 갈등을 해소하고 그들의 경제적 권리를 확보하면서 정치적, 문화적 의식을 고양하려고 노력했다. 특히 외젠 쉬는 대중이 현재와 미래의 요구에 직접 부응할 수 있도록 만들기 위해 대중 고유의 역사를 대중이 의식할 수 있게 만들고자 했으며, 조르주 상드는 노동자 계급의 경제적, 사회적 평등을 주장했다. 결론적으로 19세기의 프랑스 문학사는 역사가 증명하듯이 대중의 역할과 위치가 반영된 방식으로 대폭 수정되어야 하며, 19세기 프랑스 문학에 대한 새로운 해석과 정립이 필요하다.This article examines the relationship between 19th century French literature and the public, focusing on the writers who wrote for the rights of the people. The authors who are treated in this article are Eug&egrave;ne Sue, George Sand, Alphonse de Lamartine, Victor Hugo and Erkmann-Chatrian. They sought to elevate the political and cultural consciousness of the people, to resolve class conflicts and to assert their economic rights by describing the lives of the peasants, the working class and the lower class in their novels. In conclusion, the history of French literature in the 19th century must be radically modified to reflect the role of the public.

Reveries of Community: French Epic in the Age of Henri IV, 1572–1616 by Katherine S Maynard

Reviewed by: Reveries of Community: French Epic in the Age of Henri IV, 1572–1616 by Katherine S Maynard Kathleen Wine Maynard, Katherine S. Reveries of Community: French Epic in the Age of Henri IV, 1572–1616. Northwestern UP, 2018. ISBN 978-0-8101-3583-3. Pp. x + 183. If literary history has failed to consecrate a canonical French epic, critics increasingly contest the commonplace that epic practice in Renaissance France must therefore have been lacking in literary and cultural seriousness. Katherine Maynard takes this trend a step further by arguing that the Wars of Religion spurred poets' engagement with epic. Each of her chapters treats one poet's epic production as a direct response to the current political situation, highlighting the communities that poets imagine in response to the conflict. Maynard frames her study with Ronsard's attempt in the Franciade to imagine French community under Charles IX: in so doing, she argues, the poet erases the Protestant side of the current conflict, substituting imperial fantasies for the vital role played by memory in the Aeneid. The heart of the book concerns three poetic advocates of Henri IV. In his long poems, the Protestant Guillaume Salluste Du Bartas links his own various identities to differing visions of community, from his creation of a regional Protestant refuge in La Judit to the emergence in the Seconde sepmaine of an imperial Henri IV who resolves internal tensions the better to focus on external enemies. The installments of Sébastien Garnier's Henriade offer conflicting visions of community: in the first, a warrior Henri rallies his countrymen against Spaniards the poet depicts in opposition to a French national identity, whereas in the second, the king's soon-to-be legendary clemency recreates a shared sense of unity. In his Heptaméron de la Navarride (1602), Pierre-Victor Palma Cayet, a poet who converted along with Henri, deploys the Virgilian theme of a renewed golden age which, although it offers no space for Protestants, does at least remember the religious conflict. Maynard's concluding chapter on Les tragiques serves as a bookend to the Franciade, since Agrippa d'Aubigné founds the Protestant [End Page 206] community of the future on the cultivation of the very memories Ronsard had erased. As in her previous readings, Maynard grounds the Protestant epic in the contemporary situation. Reading the poem in light of d'Aubigné's decision to publish in 1616, she argues that the work's move toward a divine outcome does not preclude engagement with the political present. This deceptively slim volume offers a rich and coherent account of how Virgilian tradition enabled poets of differing religious and political persuasions to address a common set of problems. At the same time, Maynard's readings, contextualized by well-chosen literary, historical and artistic materials, and in constant dialogue with prior scholarship, take a strikingly individual approach to each poet and poem, offering fresh insights on a wide variety of topics, from Du Bartas's dedicatees, to Palma-Cayet's depiction of Henri IV's marriages, or the role of d'Aubigné's poet in mediating the celestial ekphrases in book five of Les tragiques. This book will inspire a renewed appreciation both for the vitality of an often-ignored chapter in French literary history and for the intrinsic capacities of epic, "the ideal genre with which to address the disunity and seemingly impossible reconciliation of warring Frenchmen" (128). Kathleen Wine Dartmouth College (NH) Copyright © 2019 American Association of Teachers of French

Linguistic and Material Counterculturalism in the French Renaissance: Claude Fauchet’s Recueil de l’origine de la langue et poesie françoise (1581)

Our current paradigm of sixteenth-century French vernacular discourse can be epitomized on the one hand by the classically inspired poetics of translatio propounded by the Pléiade, and on the other, by the scholarly efforts to establish a noble genealogy for the French language by writers such as the printer and Hellenist Henri Estienne. This picture, however, merely constitutes one of several sixteenth-century narratives regarding the French vernacular. Claude Fauchet’s Recueil de l’origine de la langue et poesie françoise (1581) provides evidence of a lively and appreciative interest in medieval French poetry among a group of Parisian jurist-humanists whose valorization of medieval French textual and material culture was developed in direct opposition to the dominant tenor of contemporary vernacular discourse which sought to break away from France’s medieval past. Fauchet in particular is notable for his seminal contribution to French literary history, his keen awareness of the role of vernaculars in history, and his sensitivity towards the material aspects of France’s native past.

Eventide by Therese Bohman

Therese Bohman Eventide Trans. Marlaine Delargy. New York. Other Press. 2018. 240 pages. Amid a midlife crisis, Karolina Andersson knows her “pathetic” life must change so she can face the end of the day—eventide. A tenured art history professor at the University of Stockholm, she lives in “a noisy two-room apartment full of books and loneliness,” having recently left her partner of eleven years, Karl Johan. Childless, she mulls over love versus career. Karolina no longer derives pleasure from her addictions to alcohol and sex, working to hold onto her area of scholarly research: women depicted in turn-of-thecentury art. Up pops Anton Strömberg, a young male doctoral student who tells her he’s discovered groundbreaking letters from an overlooked female artist smackdab in the center of Karolina’s bailiwick. From this scenario, Swedish author Therese Bohman produces an absorbing feminist novel of psychological suspense as she explores her protagonist’s inner life. Bohman gives us the whole woman. Karolina contemplates mannerism, Swedish art, and German symbolism. It bugs her when students treat theories as truths. She reflects on Finland’s nuclear waste, hedgehogs, Svalbard’s seed bank, refugees, Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov’s human-ape hybrid, and architectural columns. She watches pornography in her office, has an affair with a married Anders, considers one with childhood friend Robban , suggests one to colleague Peter, is repulsed by the thought of one with fellow professor Lennart, but hmmmm . . . what about Anton? She realizes: Must. Stop. Falling. For. Everyone. Doubting herself as she wonders how to recognize happiness , she’s vulnerable. Bohman’s previous two novels, also translated by Marlaine Delargy, placed other female protagonists against different male-dominated backdrops, illustrating the societal issues women face. Each central character has had greater self-esteem than her predecessor, with a larger supporting cast. Drowned (2012) perambulated literary life, and The Other Woman (2016) trekked hospital hierarchy, exploring emotional and sexual abuse, class differences, power, male ego, and professional success. Now, in Eventide, Bohman expands these themes in a new setting—the university : “a place where learning is generated .” Her details about ivory-tower life are spot-on; she nails turf wars in academia with subtle wit. Karolina Andersson is the strongest of Bohman’s three protagonists, and Eventide the most ambitious of her books. In many ways, it’s the most winning —a wild-woman archetype tale à la Pauls Bankovskis 18 Trans. Ieva Lešinska Vagabond Voices This novel, translated from Latvian and set against an important moment in Latvian history, sees a family trying to unravel the mystery of a digital camera buried in their grandfather’s coat as well as a Latvian soldier’s desertion and travels a century earlier. The stories examine questions of time, growth, and freedom, and the writing is approachable and vivid. Évelyne Bloch-Dano Paper Gardens: A Stroll through French Literature Trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan University of Virginia Press The author of several award-winning French-language biographies, Évelyne Bloch-Dano now turns her talents to an overview and analysis of the roles of the garden in French literature. This charmingly detailed account includes a history of types and styles of gardens, both literary and literal, before examining the various places gardens appear in French literary history, “from Proust to Duras.” Nota Bene WORLDLIT.ORG 69 Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés. The novel ends in an elegant twist awash in schadenfreude. Eventide is ink well spent. Lanie Tankard Austin, Texas Dolores Redondo All This I Will Give to You Trans. Michael Meigs. Seattle. Amazon Crossing. 2018. 478 pages. One expects a thick novel to be expansive in theme or epically cover a great deal of time and territory, but lately several mysteries, especially in translation, have been showing up with all the heft of One Hundred Years of Solitude or The Brothers Karamazov. At 478 pages, All This I Will Give to You is by Spanish novelist Dolores Redondo, whose Baztán Trilogy (set in the Basque country) has sold a million and a half copies in Spanish and been translated into thirty-five languages. Her books have been nominated for several major awards, including the Crime...