MLR, I03. I, 2008 I59 Physician's Tale and its sources points out how tradition itself, regarded as an en gagement with the auctores,may be a formof profitable collaboration. Another essay investigating themedieval period is by art historian Miriam Gill, who focuses on church murals inmedieval England. She takes the term 'collaboration' to encompass theworking together of different media, from thewritten text to images, 'preaching and liturgy, informal speech and memory' (p. 20). Emily Eells finds an instance of intergenerational collaboration when analysing the continuity of ideals, of purpose, and of intent in thework of Simone de Beauvoir, inspired by George Eliot's Mill on theFloss, whereas Sara Soncini's piece dwells on theparticular case of collaboration which arose when a postmodern author, Elizabeth Kuti, rewrote and completed an eighteenth-century text leftunfinished by Frances Sheridan. Two essays are devoted to a famous case of 'experiment incollaboration' (Conrad's own words) between Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford, who worked together on the composition of the novels The Inheritors, Romance, and other works. Max Saunders comments intriguinglyon theirco-operative writing, which produces a dis ruption of identities, including 'ideas and anxieties about sexuality', since 'anynotion of two bodies becoming one is likely to have a psychosexual dimension' (p. IoI). Interesting contributions explore other facets of 'collaboration', as in the perceptive piece by Silvia Bigliazzi onWilde's Salome, inwhich collaboration is shown to act as a complex intratextualmechanism and an interacting of differentcodes. The most illuminating of the essays, Richard Littlejohns's 'Collaboration as Ideo logy', goes beyond isolated instances of collaborative co-working. He identifiesawhole historical area of culture, German Romanticism, where collaboration, far frombeing the fruitof private predilections, ormerely a practical partnership forthepurposes of literaryproduction, was 'programmatic, and underpinned by a body of theory' (p. 53). Against egocentricity and self-expression, thenew idealwould be Geselligkeit (p. 52), a 'sociability' which would favour collective thought and creation and accommodate, for instance (as in the case of Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, and Schleiermacher in the Athendum), fragmentswritten collectively. Surprisingly, no mention ismade in this essay or in thevolume of the communal work praised by Thomas Carlyle, an author who-significantly-was heavily influenced by German Romanticism; nor,more to the point, of JohnRuskin, who, mindful of the glorious associative and anonymous work thatwent on inmedieval cathedrals, as of the co-operative work that flourished in an artist's bottega in Florence, would passionately advocate the joint enterprise, the collective effort,dreaming-in opposition to the selfish and alienated society spawned by the Industrial Revolution-of what a German sociologist, Ferdinand Tonnies, would later describe as Gemeinschaft, an organic community. Another field of research which goes unexplored in this collection is the histori cal avant-garde, where radical experimentation in the arts theorized and opened up new spaces of collaboration and creative interactions, between different disciplines and between authors and readers/spectators. But thevitality and phenomenology of themodernist adventure is so rich and diversified that no less than another,wholly dedicated volume would be required to cover itadequately. UNIVERSITA STATALEDIMILANO GIOVANNI CIANCI Metamorphoses d'Arachne: l'artiste en araignee dans la litterature occidentale. By SYLVIE BALLESTRA-PUECH. Geneva: Droz. 2oo6. 460 pp. E77.6o. ISBN 978 2-600-O0o6I-O. Sylvie Ballestra-Puech's book trulymimics its subject-matter in so far as it is an intricatelywoven web of knowledge. Her purpose is to outline the fortune, inter pretations, and rewritings of themyth of Arachne as it appears mainly inOvid's i6o Reviews Metamorphoses throughout thehistory of Western literature. She succeeds inher task in amost convincing way, providing the readerwith awealth of erudition typical of thegrand tradition of French comparative and intertextual studies.Without omitting theearly appearances of the spider inclassical literature, inHeraclitus, Hesiod, Pliny, and Plutarch, for instance, the author begins by demonstrating how theunfortunate weaver's fatenot only exemplifies theological and political issues but is also endowed with ametatextual meaning: Arachne is a symbol for the poet challenging the gods and theauthority they represent through theweaving of his text. In thisearly cultural context, the arachnid is still admired for its technical skill and the perfection of its instinct.However, the Judaeo-Christian tradition based upon thebiblical perception of the spider...