i88 Reviews a self-sufficientcommunity, the repository of a cross-section of society towhich the traveller isexposed, and a site of storytelling and hospitality. The inn thus represents a diverse world within the text-world of the travelogue, a space intowhich characters are drawn forentertainment asmuch as forshelter. A highly accomplished comparatist, McMorran respects the specificities of the national traditions towhich theworks he discusses belong while teasing out the over arching European narrative on which his interpretation depends. There is a clear interest in translation, both literal and figurative, as the texts in question are trans formed in theirboundary-crossings between national cultures.McMorran presents a progressive accumulation of texts, with subsequent authors engaging indialogue with Cervantes to develop the role of the inn in their texts. In Scarron, for instance, any traces of chivalric hospitality give way to such exuberant recreation that the journey is eclipsed by the periods of rest that interrupt it.The ludic erasure of the journey itself is even more clear in the discussion of Fielding, where an absence of obstacles renders the road itselfalmost invisible: it is the immobility imposed on characters, fully integrated into themovement of the journey, that is themost productive inper mitting the development of narrative threads.McMorran comments on the 'innlike qualities' of Fielding's domestic spaces, and his study reveals a clear evolution in the narrative status of the inn, the digressive potential ofwhich has been diminished in Jacques lefataliste by seemingly constant and direct narratorial interventions. McMorran's narrative is, in part, that of prose seeking a form, negotiating the transition from romance tonovel. The inns and other anti-progressive spaces thathe analyses-'monuments to digression' (p. 257)-reveal the literal and figurative cen tralityof thejourney to theemergence of aEuropean novel tradition.The inn's role in these processes is an intermediary one, and Diderot's sublimation of the journey into the mind of thenarratormay be seen as part of amovement from thepublic to a private sphere inwhich thisearlier chronotope has little role toplay.McMorran's concluding reflection on the role of the railway station bar inCalvino suggests nevertheless a recent return to themodes of digression on which this study focuses, and the role of such 'non-places' inpostmodern narrative digression merits furtherexploration. UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL CHARLES FORSDICK Monomania: The Flightfrom Everyday Life inLiterature and Art. By MARINA VAN ZUYLEN. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2005. x+238 pp. $49.95 (pbk $I8.95). ISBN 978-0-80o4-4298-8 (pbk 978-o-80o4-8986-o). As Marina Van Zuylen's introduction reminds us, 'monomania' came fromPinel and Esquirol, his pupil, in theearly nineteenth century, and from thepsychiatrist Etienne JeanGeorget; itwas associated with the ideefixe, and itcould act as a synonym for melancholy. Van Zuylen traces the term through a number of nineteenth-century French writers-Charles Nodier, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Pierre Janet-through a chap ter on Middlemarch, and through a chapter each on Mann (Der Zauberberg) and Canetti (Die Blendung-i.e. Auto-da-Fe). The last two chapters are on theAlgerian writer Nina Bouraoui, inLa Voyeuse interdite,and on thewritings of Sophia Calle. A genial conclusion, discussing laziness through Paul Laforgue's Le Droit a la paresse, makes thepoint that thebook could also be seen as a study of obsession. Monomania here derives fromproblems of negotiating relationships with the out side world. There is no Foucault in this study to argue that illnesses were the con struction of themedical gaze, nor Freud togive the sexual basis of obsession (though there is use made of the psychoanalysis of Didier Anzieu, Andre Green, and Jean Guillaumin). The absence of Foucault diminishes thepolitics within thebook, makes MLR, I02.1, 2007 I89 monomania objective (talking of 'monomaniacs' as though theywere recognizable), and does not periodize monomania as a nineteenth-century way of representing cer tain typeswho have been isolated as such. The absence of Freud makes the chapter on Janet seem isolated and inconsequential, lacking context, and sometimes makes it hard to seewhat is at stake indiscussing monomania. The chapters on Bouraoui and Calle seem tobe part of a differentbook (not necessarily the same one), and while all the chapters have interest, thewriter does not often succeed inmaking monomania an...