study of the late nineteenth-century socialist critic Paul Lafargue and one on the socialist theater that developed in France between 1880 and World War I. Lafargue was very critical of the career of Victor Hugo, whom he viewed as a pseudosocialist . He found in that author’s writings an underlying advocacy of the capitalist system. In the socialist plays, the illegitimate child was frequently used as a symbol of the dispossessed proletariat. In the final essays, Fayolle looks at the blossoming of Francophone literature in France’s former colonies. As with literary history, he finds an inner conflict, in this case between the effort to capture and preserve in literature traditional native cultures and the use of the language of the colonizer. If works are written in French, they are thereby destined for an audience that knows the language, and they may never reach people who speak only their native language and may not know how to read. University of Denver (CO) James P. Gilroy HARROW, SUSAN, and TIMOTHY UNWIN, eds. Joie de vivre in French Literature and Culture: Essays in Honour of Michael Freeman. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009. ISBN 97890 -420-2579-0. Pp. 319. $86. The book examines the linguistic, literary, cultural, and historical dimensions of the concept of joie de vivre. It explores the complexity of its use and meaning in French literature and culture from the Middle Ages to our contemporary times. The topic pays homage to Michael Freeman, Professor of French at University of Leicester and Bristol (1990–2008); it epitomizes “Mike’s own joyous, energetic, and deeply committed approach to his profession” (13). From La chanson de Roland to Baudelaire, Harrow and Unwin examine in the introduction the tension between human drama and happiness through which “joy is often fleeting and fragile” (18). Significantly, the first attested use of joie de vivre as a substantive phrase occurs in Flaubert’s Éducation sentimentale and it portrays a feeling and emotion that will prove to be illusory. Precondition of happiness and joy of life, the expressions of humor, exuberance, enthusiasm, and/or playfulness are however very present in the works of French literature from Rabelais and Montaigne to Ponge’s renewal of language and Cixous’s “joy in the flesh of the text” (19). Based on canonical linguistic and anthropological research, Rodney Samson analyzes, in the first essay, the word “joy” from a broad range of lexical items in Romance languages that include the Latin “laetus” (emotional enrichment) and “gaudium” that conveys “the idea of inner joy” (37). Jane Taylor and John Parkin investigate the therapeutic function of joy in Bonaventure Des Périers through the process of recreation, from life’s misfortunes to playful parodic ploys in a Rabelaisian spirit. Exploring joie de vivre in the French Renaissance, Richard Cooper studies the impact of mock epic and comic interludes in Gérard d’Euphrate, and in a delightful reading of Montaigne eating melon and drinking wine, Stephan Bamforth explores a “joie de vivre associated with the volupté and sagesse of the Essais” (128). The three essays that follow by Richard Parish, Edward Forman, and Noël Peacock respectively, focus on joie de vivre as “the telos of the Christian soul” (136) in Saint François de Sales, “succour to the underdogs of society” (143), and through a “vaudeville hanté par la mort” (169) in Molière’s comédie-ballets. Underlining the fluctuating fate of happiness in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Haydn Mason considers the states of joie de vivre in the context of the 358 FRENCH REVIEW 85.2 French Enlightenment’s development, Patrick O’Donovan investigates Alfred de Vigny’s discourse of happiness in post-revolutionary France “through which we glimpse joys still accessible to us in a world which seemed at the outset ‘fatal, écrasant et glacé’” (210), and Bradley Stephens studies the joy of Victor Hugo’s love affair with Juliette Drouet. The two following essays shed light on the concept of joie de vivre in Symbolist poetics and aesthetics. Beyond the void of Mallarmé’s néant, Hélène Stafford explores in the poet’s work a form of joie de vivre experienced through the mysterious inventiveness of...
Search from 250 M+ research papersSearch from 250 M+ research papers
Apr 17, 2011
Thierry Nazzi + 4
Open Access