Octave Mirbeau Research Articles

Kafka's Travels: Exoticism, Colonialism, and the Traffic of Writing by John Zilcosky (review)

TES,35, 2005 TES,35, 2005 347 347 such as this, and which, among some more pedestrian or too cryptic work, have been their best reward. UNIVERSITY OFHONGKONG JEREMY TAMBLING Kafka'sTravels: Exoticism, Colonialism, and the Trafficof Writing. By JOHNZILCOSKY. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2003. xvi + 289 pp. f40. ISBN:0-3I2-23281-0. Hard on the heels of Kafka at the cinema comes Kafka the traveller,with perhaps - who knows?- K the song-and-dance-manwaiting in the wings. But the difference between Hanns Zischler (KaJka GoesTo TheMovies,Schocken, 2002) andJohn Zilcosky is that, whereas Zischler 'normalizes' Kafka (despite the many strange detailsgiven unexpected prominence),Zilcoskyleaves him in the plight in which he found himself:chained to his writing-deskyet, even there, (in the words of a Beckett fragmentof 1937)'alwayselsewhere'. John Zilcosky'sbook has alreadybeen widely welcomed as a landmarkin Kafka studies, and it is not difficult to see why. Here is the man of Peter Mailloux's biography(AHesitation Before Birth,Associated University Presses, I989, and still too little known)in his calling, though it seems to have been more a fate than a calling, as writer:a complex, contradictory, self-cancelling creature, the dark obverse of his numerous, apparently effortless, performances as life and soul of the party. Zilcosky'sKafka is never 'performative'in this sense, though the word makes sense in a more restrictedway as we watch him propose a strategy, double-back on it before it is long under way, fold his arms in oddly placid resignation,become more franticallypurposeful,and ultimatelyyield to what lookslikean implacableoutcome imposed from without, in which the protagonist is mysteriously mired and implicated. Zilcoskybegins where K's travelseffectivelybegan (on a motorbikeridinground Triesch in I907!),moving on to the Bohemian Forest (I908), Italy (i909), the Swiss tripof 1911,and Paris(I909; I9IO;1911).In chapterone he gives a fullaccount of the 'criticallyneglected' (p. 23)Kafka/Max Brod co-authoredRichard andSamuel: A Short JourneyThrough Central European Regions, begun in I9II, 'aborted [in 1912] after one chapterwas published'(p.15). The double equation 'to travel=to write=to travel'is underpinnedby some excellent ground-breakingresearchinto Kafka'sfondnessfor the 'second home' promisedby Hermann Schaffstein'sLittleGreen Books for children (TheSugarBaronand suchlike),several of which are later (pp. 105-IIO)juxtaposed with the much more adult concoction/confection, Octave Mirbeau's LeJardindes Supplices (Torture Garden). Amerika (Der Verschollene) follows, under the apt subtitle 'Learning How To Get Lost'. Karl Rossmann, 'non-progressive'and 'amnesiac'(p.4I), is here shadowedby familiarwriterssuch as Goethe, Flaubert,and Hermann Hesse (albeitin their less familiarguise as travelwriters)and anotherpopularhero, PeterPirath,in a novel of 1917by NorbertJacques, a copy of which Kafkaowned. The emphasisinitiallyis on how Kafka used 'paradigms [...] in order to re-inscribethem' (p. 43), but by no means at the expense of some very expert close reading (pp. 49-70). By the end of chapter two Karl has become 'his own Other, his own premature corpse' (p. 70), and Kafka no longer needs to leave home. such as this, and which, among some more pedestrian or too cryptic work, have been their best reward. UNIVERSITY OFHONGKONG JEREMY TAMBLING Kafka'sTravels: Exoticism, Colonialism, and the Trafficof Writing. By JOHNZILCOSKY. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2003. xvi + 289 pp. f40. ISBN:0-3I2-23281-0. Hard on the heels of Kafka at the cinema comes Kafka the traveller,with perhaps - who knows?- K the song-and-dance-manwaiting in the wings. But the difference between Hanns Zischler (KaJka GoesTo TheMovies,Schocken, 2002) andJohn Zilcosky is that, whereas Zischler 'normalizes' Kafka (despite the many strange detailsgiven unexpected prominence),Zilcoskyleaves him in the plight in which he found himself:chained to his writing-deskyet, even there, (in the words of a Beckett fragmentof 1937)'alwayselsewhere'. John Zilcosky'sbook has alreadybeen widely welcomed as a landmarkin Kafka studies, and it is not difficult to see why. Here is the man of Peter Mailloux's biography(AHesitation Before Birth,Associated University Presses, I989, and still too little known)in his calling, though it seems to have been more a fate than a calling, as writer:a complex, contradictory, self-cancelling creature, the dark obverse of his numerous, apparently effortless, performances as life...

Dissecting the Gash

Dissecting the Gash

Du ‘géant remueur de terre’ à ‘Monsieur jardine’: valorisation et dévalorisation des images de la terre à la Belle Époque

Images of the Earth in Belle Époque fiction are frequently called upon to express an author's view of what defines an individual's relationship to self, history, and society. This article focuses on two examples whose significance is highlighted by the fact that the authors have radically opposed ideologies. In Diary of a Chambermaid (1900), Octave Mirbeau uses the provincial backyard garden satirically, as a site where society's repressed, sadistic and anal impulses are let loose. By contrast, René Bazin's highly conservative Donatienne (1903) illustrates the author's Catholic belief in the biblical sanctity of the relationship between a man and his native place. How uniquely relevant to the representation of the fictional Subject these images are is further demonstrated by the fact that women are unapologetically excluded from them. As it happens, these novels' female protagonists are both domestic servants, whose defining relationship is not to the Earth where they were born, but—second in the order of Creation—to the home where they live.

Beyond Reasonable Doubt: Aesthetic Violence and Motiveless Murder in French Decadent Fiction

Abstract This article explores the concept of murder as an art form, discussed by the English writer Thomas De Quincey in the 1820s and reappearing later in a group of texts not previously analysed from this perspective: French Decadent fiction. Close readings of texts by Octave Mirbeau and Rachilde delineate the structures and thematic characteristics of this conceit. Drawing insights from ethical and psychoanalytic criticism (Levinas, Jessica Benjamin, Žižek, Lacan), the article argues that attempts by Decadent writers to imagine the perfect murder mask a historical—cultural anxiety related to the alienating processes of social modernization in France. Such textual murder is read as a simultaneous attempt to wreak further destruction on meaning by killing the other and, paradoxically, to reify meaning by exalting the figure of the murdering sovereign subject. Thus, the apparently asocial trope of aesthetic murder is re-inscribed as a fantasy with a significant social component and with wide-ranging ethical implications ignored by earlier commentators. The article closes by proposing that the murders found in Decadent fiction are significant prototypes for the kinds of killings found in post-Second World War fiction (by, for example, Gide and Genet) that have recently been the subject of ethical criticism. Art lets you get away with murder. (Pablo Picasso [attributed])

Naturalism as Paranoia in Octave Mirbeau

When Emile Zola embraces the therapeutic aims outlined by Claude Bernard in his Introduction a la medecine experimentale, when he adopts the methodological rigor and medical idiom of the literary diagnostician, he acknowledges the inadequacy of existing art an epistemological system. In his pretension the role of moralist and healer Zola implicitly admits the failure of fictional narrative a method of explanation. Because its theoretical foundations are set in science, Naturalism exhibits the paranoia which Cyndy Hendershot claims was typical of fin-de-siecle European intellectuals. This kind of paranoia is characteristic of much late-nineteenth-century thinking and is connected, Hendershot argues, to the increasing prevalence of scientific discourse throughout all social discourse and the sense of inferiority experienced by non-scientists saturated with scientific terminology (I9). As hereditary flaws take the place of original sin and an unhealthy environment is cited explain deviant behaviors once attributed satanic influence, evil is pathologized and the psychologist replaces the directeur de conscience. The result, Pierre Citti writes, is that [l]e role tenu par le peche dans [le] roman [...] du XVIIIe siecle, la maladie et l'anomalie le tiennent chez les Naturalistes (27). In his analysis of the case of Judge Schreber, Freud describes paranoia involving a process of double displacement whereby a subject denies feelings of guilt (inspired, Freud says, in Schreber's case by latent homosexuality) and projects them hostility directed from outside. (1) In literature a similar process of double displacement occurs the directionlessness and disorder of life are denied and projected the teleological structure and successful resolution provided by fiction. In Naturalism, Edward Jayne points out, denial is carried out as the exploration of failure prove valid a deterministic sociology (I34). When medicine supersedes morality, and the paranoiac can no longer project guilt a malevolent external force, sin is re-situated in a system which, because of its defectiveness, cannot correct the abnormality of a disturbed patient. Zola's utopianism may therefore come from displacing an earlier generation's religious faith onto a belief in technological advancement-from trusting in knowledge-producing (Hendershot 17) that deny individual flaws and project them the future perfectibility of the species. Rejecting complexity and randomness, Naturalism moves from the explanatory completeness of an earlier theological model a totalizing system of scientific proofs. By identifying with Doctor Pascal, Zola invokes the medical expertise of his character in order cure his own ignorance a novelist. Haunted by the paranoid denial of deviance and difference, Naturalist discourse generates the neuroses it needs objects of diagnosis. Production of neurasthenia and hysteria becomes a business that fills the story, the sanitarium, and the Salpetriere. With his delusional claims of diagnostic infallibility the psychiatrist joins the ranks of his insane patients. According Doctor Triceps, one of the deranged doctors showcased in Octave Mirbeau's satirical novel, Les vingt et un jours d'un neurasthenique (1901), Naturalism itself is a neurosis. With his claims of creative and salvatory divinity, Zola belongs in une maison de fous (292) along with his characters. Remarquez bien, says Triceps his audience of spa patrons, ce que je dis de Zola, je le dis egalement d'Homere, de Shakespeare, de Moliere, de Pascal, de Tolstoi (292). Illustrating the spread of paranoid discourse from medicine the associated fields of politics, law, commerce, and metaphysics, Mirbeau shows that the only obstacle the triumph of totalizing systems of explanation is his own plotless novel. In Mirbeau's story the narrator characterizes genocide, colonialism, perversions of justice, the institutionalization of the poor articulations of a paranoid system that seeks classify what is exceptional. …

(Anti-)Semitism 1890s/1990s: Octave Mirbeau and E. M. Cioran

Octave Mirbeau was thirty-seven when his first book, Lettres de ma chaumiere (Lettersfrom My Cottage) appeared in 1885. This event was preceded by an impressive journalistic career and contributions to influential newspapers that appealed to readers ofdivergent political interests. His participation in these news- papers earned him the reputation ofa controversial journalist. In order to protect his identity he often resorted to using pseudonyms. He espoused divergent causes, so to speak, and made more credible the saying, Ujournaliste se venda qui Upaie (die journalist sells himself to whoever pays him; Michel and Nivet 91).' He first wrote for the Bonapartist newspaper L'Ordre de Paris (1872), and later for the provincial paper L'Ariegeois during the period of the Moral Order (May 1 6, 1878), and finally for Arthur Meyer who enlisted his sharp pen at Le Gaulois.

(Anti-)Semitism 1890s/1990s: Octave Mirbeau and E.M. Cioran

(Anti-)Semitism 1890s/1990s: Octave Mirbeau and E.M. Cioran

Interpreting Primitivism, Mass Culture and Modernism: The Making of Wilhelm Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy

When the French painter, Paul Gauguin, left for Tahiti in 1891, he helped create one of the enduring myths of twentieth-century modernism. He became the prototype of the modem artist as Primitive.1 Such a man, wrote the critic Octave Mirbeau just before Gauguin's departure from Paris, flees civilization, in order to discover a place outside of Europe nature is more in keeping with his dreams.2 Though few actually followed in Gauguin's footsteps,3 the motif of the Primitive caught on, becoming inseparably linked to avant-garde art and practice during the decade before World War I. Some artists chose to act out the role of the Primitive at artists' colonies, where they bathed in the nude with their models and learned to play with bows and arrows in imitation

Modeling, Mothering, and the Postpartum Belly in Zola's L'Œuvre

OF THE TITLES THAT ZOLA IMAGINED for his novel of the artist's life, L'ÂŒuvre (1886), several recall the birthing process, including Faire un Enfant, ProcrA©er, Engrosser la Nature, Enfantement, Accouchement, Parturition, Conception, Enfanter and Les Couches saignantes (IV, 1338).2 Many readings of L'ÂŒuvre have focused on Claude Lantier's failed attempt at sustaining a new movement in art. Although some of these readings cite the painter's indictment of the model's body as a factor in this failure, my own reading positions that failure of the female body at center stage.31 will propose that L'ÂŒuvre inscribes the deformations of gestation onto the female belly and then presents the ventre, poses it, before the artist (and reader) as unrepresentable, even as the very sign of unrepresentability. Indeed, one way that Zola works through the problem of the nude is to ask the question Can the postpartum model pose?—this in a novel that repeatedly, even compulsively, stages the pre- and post-partum belly as problem for the artist and metaphor of artistic production. This essay reads naturalism's posers in terms of the relationship between modeling and motherhood and, to a lesser extent, modeling and aging, for both motherhood and aging mark the body of the model in such a way that her posing potential becomes questionable. After the model's youth in Balzac's Le Chef-d'Âœuvre inconnu (1832), she reaches motherhood and middle age in L'ÂŒuvre and the Goncourts' Manette Salomon (1867); her death is then staged in Guy de Maupassant's Fort comme la mort (1889). The evolution of realist literature in France follows this life span of the model (i.e., of her body) from youth to maternity, to decline and death.4 As the terms artist, woman, mother and model took on new meaning in the nineteenth century, the pregnant and postpartum model emerged as the worrisome site of conflicts posed by the intersection of the body, art and gender. It is useful, therefore, to first inquire of these terms. Then, after a brief reading of Octave Mirbeau's tale of the aged model, L'OctogA©naire, and references to Zola's Le Ventre de Paris (1873) and the Goncourts' Manette Salomon, the strategies centering on the postpartum belly in L'ÂŒuvre can be untangled. I will argue that in L'ÂŒuvre the female ventre inhibits the successful passage from the problem of the model (the real woman) to the problem of the nude

Octave Mirbeau and the Changing Nature of Right-Wing Political Culture: France, 1870–1914

Octave Mirbeau was a committed supporter of right-wing politics in the 1870s, and a committed opponent of the right wing during the Dreyfus Affair. This paper examines the reasons for his political change of heart, and discusses his changing analyses of right-wing political culture. Mirbeau's ideas are compared with those of some of his contemporaries, such as Blum, Peguy and Sorel.

Mirbeau's Ultraviolence

SET IN A MYTHICAL CHINA, Octave Mirbeau's 1899 novel Jardin des supplices is a sustained narrative in which scenes of bloody torture are set against a story of a decadent love affair between the narrator and the female protagonist, Clara. The novel is divided into three sections, of which the first is a frontispiece, consisting in the main of reworked material from Divagations sur le meurtre (1896) and loi du meurtre (1892). The frontispiece is a somewhat sardonic and ironic defense of murder reminiscent of the preand post-coital philosophical treatises in Sade's novels. The second section, En Mission, the first part of the novel per se, is told in flashback and is a disquisition on the petty and tawdry politics of Europe. In the middle of this section, the narrator first meets Clara. They go to the Indies and then head toward the China of hallucinatory scenarios, of fantastic justice, of torture, eroticism, and death. The third and longest part, entitled Le Jardin des Supplices, is a tour of the Chinese torture garden that gives its name to the book; it is a series of tableaux serving as fantasized image of Chinese justice and punishment. The dimensions of the love affair resemble many of those masterfully described by Mario Praz in his classic work, La Carne, la morte e il diavolo. More singular, however, is the discussion of politics. Through its construction, which opposes a satire about European politics and institutions to the depiction of the scenes of torture, Jardin des supplices has often been seen as an indication of the author's disgust with the Western world's hypocritical smugness about democracy and freedom.1 For Mirbeau, modern Western societies parade their violence as virtuous justice, their abuses as economic and moral strengths, their chicanery as a fair political system (Ziegler 162-65). Mirbeau rails against the inhuman, depersonalized world of the West for which Kafka will provide the most poignant literary version in works like The Castle and of which Hannah Arendt will eventually say, Today we ought to add the latest and perhaps most formidable form of such domination [of man over man]: bureaucracy or the rule of an intricate system of bureaus in which no men, neither one nor the best,

Une fin de siècle neurasthénique : le cas Mirbeau

Writing and sickness are, at the end of 19th century, closely blended. Writers have become aware of being the very embodiment of the "fin-de siècle " exhaustion and there are scars of sickness among their own writing whereas an ambiguous rivalry match them against the scientist named physician. A new complaint called "Neurasthenia" gives its name to this "mal du siecle" and Octave Mirbeau has been one of its most famous cases. In a book entitled Les vingt et un jours d'un neurasthenique, he uses writing as a way to pour out and throw a light upon the roots of his neurosis, the germ of wich being found in his boyhood. But neurasthenia and introspection have killed the novel and this points a turn in Mirbeau 's writings who, henceforth, will never write novels any more. Being as well the fashion as a social disease, neurasthenia spreads among the decadent writers who were its dedicated prey : they ail evince the common anxiety of the writers, and especially of the poet, against the most invading science which leaves no room for them. Trough the poet's death, the end of century is shown as a decay of civilization, in so far as language is threatened.

The Landscape of Death in Octave Mirbeau

The Landscape of Death in Octave Mirbeau Robert Ziegler F ILLED WITH the degenerate wreckage of victims of dermatosis, dyspepsia, and pharyngitis, the spa emerged as a favorite Decadent topos in 19th-century literature. Promiscuously sequestered in the hotel/sanitorium with its Casino, mineral springs, insipid cuisine, and ersatz luxury, stooped guests wracked by coughs and disfigured by eczema also displayed symptoms of a moral infirmity that was exacer­ bated by their boredom. It was to such a resort that playwright/novelist Octave Mirbeau repaired in 1897 in an attempt “ to rid himself of a troublesome catarrh.” 1There at Bagnères-de-Luchon the mature writer found confirmation of his longstanding views on the unhealthiness of upper middle-class French society. Published in 1901, Les Vingt et un jours d ’un neurasthénique pro­ vides an episodic fictional account of Mirbeau’s sojourn in the moun­ tains.2A gallery of teratologic specimens, the novel reiterates Mirbeau’s revulsion for anti-dreyfusism, militarism, and colonialism in a set of dis­ parate vignettes picturing genocidal officers, suave cambrioleurs, jaded American billionaires, and ex-convict anti-Semites. Beginning with Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, Mirbeau’s fic­ tions had begun to lose their center, becoming, as Martin Schwarz affirms, a disconnected “ suite de portraits et d’anecdotes” whose “ manque de composition [...] est voulu.” 3 Remarkable for their “ un­ conventional blending of fact and fiction,” 4Mirbeau’s later writings are part autobiography, part travelogue, and part personal reminiscence, and as hybrids, belong to no identifiable genre. Indeed, the desultoriness of these narratives may be structurally imaged by Mirbeau’s own sense of metaphysical disorder and impending cultural collapse. While his dizzy­ ing panegyric to the automobile, La 628-E8 (1907),5celebrates irrespon­ sibility, change, and speed, Les Vingt et un jours provides a more sober meditation on the Decadents’ conception of death as thermal depletion, inertia, and petrifaction. Mirbeau’s feeling of imprisonment in the granite jaws of cloud-obliterated summits, his dismay at the horizon’s disappearance, his horror of snow and stone convey a belief that life was movement, heat, and energy, while lethargy, cold, and immobility could only presage the end of the world. Vol. XXXV, No. 4 71 L ’E sprit C réateur In this study of Flaubert and Romanticism, the late Eugenio Donato remarked that “ the hasty extrapolation of the second law of thermo­ dynamics, according to which the solar system will die a frozen death, [was] an idea that the nineteenth-century imagination found striking.” 6 Contributing to the prevalent fin-de-siècle belief in racial exhaustion7 was a vision of planetary extinction and entropy that must have im­ pressed the volatile Mirbeau with his temperamental impetuosity and fire. Yet, as this essay argues, the proliferation in Les Vingt et unjours of Decadent images of hereditary impoverishment and artistic stagnation is offset by the automotive fugues, by the careening recklessness of a nar­ rative which, in La 628-E8, constitute an escape, a denial, and a cure for the cosmic ills that Mirbeau had previously diagnosed. Mirbeau’s pessimistic image of the end of the world may be best reflected by his impressions of Amsterdam, a network of canals and mir­ rored landscapes of sun and color, a city which, above water, is alive with barge traffic and trade, a place where each house is architecturally unique, from its gables to its windows. Beauty and vitality are suggested by movement and difference: “rien n’est plus divers, et plus bougeant qu’Amsterdam” (La 628-E8 260). Yet beneath the surface, a 300-yearold deposit of raw sewage relentlessly accumulates, contaminating the water and turning it into a destructive miasma that carries the germ of cholera, fever, and plague, triggering an apocalyptic vision of civiliza­ tion’s ruin: “ c’est toute l’Europe empoisonnée [...] c’est la mort sur le monde!” (261). Recalling Flaubert’s image of a doomed humanity “ dancing on the floorboard of a latrine,” 8Donato notes that, in supplanting a Newtonian worldview, thermodynamics portrays an image of temporality as seep­ age and sedimentation, “ a notion of history based on metaphors of decay, decadence, corruption,” which culminates in excremental undif­ ferentiation (Donato...

Food and Decadent Culture: J.-K Huysmans and Octave Mirbeau

When asked by an interviewer why his characters invariably proved to be grotesque caricatures, Octave Mirbeau retorted, 'Caricature? ... peut-on jamais representer l'humanite aussi bouffonne qu' elle est!' 1 Critics who present Mirbeau as an earnest man of the left, as an ingenuous ideologue and virulent pamphleteer, ignore some of the more vital sources of his creative energy. The narrator of Les 21 Jours d'un neurasthenique (1901) details some of the real enthusiasms of this gentleman anarchist:

Food and Decadent Culture: J.-K Huysmans and Octave Mirbeau

Food and Decadent Culture: J.-K Huysmans and Octave Mirbeau

Emile Zola and Octave Mirbeau, with Extracts from Their Unpublished Letters

Emile Zola and Octave Mirbeau, with Extracts from Their Unpublished Letters

On Maeterlinck Reading Shakespeare

The notion of linking Maeterlinck with Shakespeare is hardly a new one. It might even be said that this idea was an integral part of Maeterlinck's earliest reception as a dramatist. Reviewing a copy of his first play, La Princesse Maleine (1889), Octave Mirbeau, after proclaiming the work a masterpiece and the author immortal, concluded his panegyric with the following lines: "In short, M. Maurice Maeterlinck has given us the work of this age most full of genius, the most extraordinary and most simple as well, comparable and — shall I dare say it? — superior in beauty to what is most beautiful in Shakespeare ... On the other hand, when Maeterlinck's friend Gerard Harry submitted his English translation of the play to Heinemann's, the reader for that publishing house described the playas the most appalling plagiarism of Shakespeare he had ever seen (Halls, p. 26). In response to Mirbeau's extravagant praise, and no doubt in order to defend himself against further accusations of plagiarism, Maeterlinck quickly began referring to the playas a mere "Shakespitrerie," thus admitting his use of Shakespeare and a desire to put this association behind him.

Sources of Cubism and Futurism

With the publication of Giovanni Lista's introduction to the new edition of Marinetti's Le Futurisme, the Symbolist roots of the movement have been further clarified. Lista shows us once again how the Symbolist generation of Emile Verhaeren, Gustave Kahn, Paul Adam, Octave Mirbeau, and others were primary influences on Marinetti.We see by this that the sources of Marinetti's Futurism were virtually identical to the sources for Cubism. But the conclusions we should draw from the situation are complicated by the fact that historians of Cubist painting have been reluctant to accept—as Lista is not—the possibility that a movement in the visual arts can arise from literary conceptions. Lista is admirably candid here: he states that the Futurist ideas of polyphony and dynamism originated in literature.

Review. Anarchism in France: The case of Octave Mirbeau. Carr, Reg

Journal Article REVIEWS Get access Anarchism in France: The case of Octave Mirbeau. By REG CARR. Manchester: University Press. 1977. xvii + 190 pp. £7.95. JOHN FLOWER JOHN FLOWER EXETER Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar French Studies, Volume XXXIII, Issue 4, October 1979, Pages 470–471, https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/XXXIII.4.470 Published: 01 October 1979

Reviews

LUITPOLD WALLACH. Diplomatic Studies in Latin and Greek Documents from the Carolingian Age. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press 1977. Pp. 396. Reviewed by Leslie W. Barnard ANGUS MACKAY. Spain in the Middle Ages: From Frontier to Empire, 1000–1500. London: The Macmillan Press 1977. Pp. xii, 245. Reviewed by P.E. Russell G.R. ELTON. Reform and Reformation: England, 1509–1558. New History of England, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1977. Pp. 423. Reviewed by D.L. Potter A.R. DISNEY. Twilight of the Pepper Empire: Portuguese Trade in Southwest India in the Early Seventeenth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1978. Harvard Historical Series XCV. Pp. X, 220. Reviewed by C.R. De Silva W.A. SPECK. Stability and Strife: England 1714–60. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press 1977. Pp. 311. Reviewed by R.M. Hatton DAVID GILLARD. The Struggle for Asia 1828–1914: A Study in British and Russian Imperialism. London: Methuen & Co. 1977. Pp. 214. Reviewed by Rose Louise Greaves D.C.M. PLATT, ed. Business Imperialism, 1840–1930: An Inquiry Based on British Experience in Latin America. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1977. Pp. x, 449. Reviewed by Richard Graham WARREN I. COHEN. The Chinese Connection: Roger S. Greene, Thomas W. Lamont, George E. Sokolsky and American-East Asian Relations. New York: Columbia University Press 1978. Pp. x, 322. Reviewed by Akira Iriye CALVIN D. DAVIS. The United States and the Second Hague Peace Conference: American Diplomacy and International Organization, 1899–1914. Durham, NC: Duke University Press 1976. Pp. ix, 398. Reviewed by Warren F. Kuehl SOLOMON WANK, ed. Doves and Diplomats: Foreign Offices and Peace Movements in Europe and America in the Twentieth Century. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press 1978. Pp. xii, 303; CHARLES DE BENEDETTI, Origins of the Modern American Peace Movement: 1915–1929. Millwood, NY: KTO Press 1978. Pp. xvi, 281. Reviewed by Robert H. Ferrell GERALD J. BENDER. Angola under the Portuguese: The Myth and the Reality. Berkeley: University of California Press/London: Heinemann 1978. Pp. xxviii, 287. Reviewed by Douglas L. Wheeler ESMONDE M. ROBERTSON. Mussolini as Empire-Builder: Europe and Africa 1932–36. London: Macmillan 1977. Pp. 246. Reviewed by Alan Cassels CHARLES w. SYDNOR, JR. Soldiers of Destruction: The SS Death's Head Division, 1933–1945. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1977. Pp. xvi, 346. Reviewed by Robert Koehl RICHARD K. BETTS. Soldiers, Statesmen, and Cold War Crises. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1977. Pp. 292. Reviewed by Robert Vogel REG CARR. Anarchism in France: The Case of Octave Mirbeau. Montreal and London: McGill-Queen's University Press 1977. Pp. xii, 190. Reviewed by John C. Cairns ANNE ORDE. Great Britain and International Secuiity, 1920–26. London: Royal Historical Society 1978. Pp. viii, 244. Reviewed by Sally Marks GABRIEL GORODETSKY. The Precarious Truce: Anglo-Soviet Relations, 1924–27. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press 1977. Pp. xiii, 289. Reviewed by Richard K. Debo