Prose Poetry Research Articles

Towards the formalist dimension of war, or how Viktor Šklovskij used to be a soldier

Viktor Sklovskij, the famous Russian literary theorist, and the founder of Russian Formalist School, published his first books in 1914, when World War I had just started. One of them consisted of the futuristic essay, Resurrection of the Word, first presented in December, 1913, and devoted to the problem of the death and resurrection of literature through the use of transrational language (in Russian ZAUM, i. e. beyond, or trans-sense). Another book, entitled The Saturnine Fate, concerned archaic prose poetry devoted to the war that had just begun. Sklovskij borrows an official military rhetoric and changes its accents, turning it into an instrument of pacifism. It should be stressed that 1914 was the same year the new Formalist theory started growing, reaching a first intellectual peak in 1916 when the key Sklovskij essay, Art as Device, was published. At the same time, Sklovskij had been drafted into the army, and war became a fruitful background for this emerging theory. Sklovskij first served as an instructor in the armored car division; following the February 1917 bourgeois revolution he was actively involved in agitation for the Provisional Government as a commissar, first on the Western front, then later on the Southern front. After the Russian bourgeois revolution of 1917, as events grew out of control, the explosion of history required simultaneous reflection. Sklovskij began writing memoirs long before he reached old age, based on his own conception of the genre. A war depicted in a book with the intertextual title Sentimental Journey is reconstructed here as a mechanism paralleled principally with the automobile; a means of transport to be handled with care. In the first part of the book, the war is seen as having a specific order of things, as opposed to a revolution which follows more the path of chaos. However, throughout his journey, Sklovskij observes the logic of events and concludes that the processes of war and revolution do not stand opposed, but instead have a consequential relationship.

Gender and Jealousy in Gereint uab Erbin and Le Roman de Silence

The medieval Welsh prose version of the story of Gereint (Erec) and Enid differs from its cognates in French and German by attributing the motive of jealousy to Gereint as the reason why he decides to test his wife’s devotion. This theme of jealousy draws attention to an uneasiness in the text about Enid’s noble status and the concept of gender. The story of Gereint and Enid, in common with the French Roman de Silence , finds itself demonstrating that both gender and class are constructed through a social performance that must be continually enacted.

Muḍṭariban maǧnūnan: A Case of Phraseology and Evolving Motifs of Literary and Medical Love-Sickness in the Tale of Salāmān and Absāl

Abstract The Tale of Salāmān and Absāl presented as a translation from Greek, attributed in the text’s opening lines to Ḥunayn b. Isḥāq, is saturated with references from a wide-ranging variety of sources with an array of religious, cultural and textual orientations; these, as well as its generic affiliations, ideological leanings, location on the spiritual-metaphysical spectrum and Vorlagen have been studied by many. In this paper, I focus on the wording and literary forms of the text, some of which have been glossed over in the rendition of Henry Corbin, by which this text is often known. My point of departure is a collocation which draws on motifs and phraseology from popular sources, the canons of poetry and poetry in prose (including belles lettres elements in the Qurʾān), as well as terminology in medical literature in Arabic and Greek traditions. Through an analysis of phrasing drawing on philological methods of Blachère, Von Grunebaum, Arazi and others, a contextualization of this Tale (which is not covered in research on “profane love theory” e.g. by Lois Giffen) may lead to a reading of this Hermetic text within a repertoire of “romantic” commonplaces and innovations of expression.

“[S]ur les ailes de l'imagination”

In his Confessions (1782, 1789) Jean‐Jacques Rousseau asserts the central importance of memory in his life, because it is only through memory that he can be fully present to himself. His most complete celebration of the present through the medium of memory is in the Fifth Walk of his Rêveries (1782), where he recollects his short stay on the island of Saint‐Pierre (1765) by way of his ecstatic experience of “le sentiment de l'existence.” The unhappy celebrity writer near the end of his life turns to imaginatively enhanced recollections to supplement his actual experiences on the island by way of a Romantic mnemotherapy as a compensatory mode of remembrance. Rousseau's differing autobiographical accounts (in his Confessions and Rêveries) of his time as a happy recluse on the island are a poeticized version of the biographical facts, and it is only in his final and unfinished work that Rousseau realized most fully the therapeutic strategy of a healing recherche du temps perdu in the prose poetry of the Fifth Walk that constitutes a central document of European Romanticism.

Gauvain and Gringalet: Comic Masculinities in Paien de Maisières

Two short romances about Gauvain, La Mule Sans Frein and Le Chevalier à l’Épée represent the hero as a comic figure. Reading between these texts and Chrétien’s Conte du Graal reveals the degree to which the figure of the knight is queered by his relationship to horses and other animals.

Maria Teresa Horta e Leonor de Almeida Portugal: do grão de luz ao bago da romã

MARIA TERESA HORTA AND LEONOR DE ALMEIDA PORTUGAL: FROM THE GRAIN OF LIGHT TO THE GRAIN OF POMEGRANATE…
 The art of fitting stories into other stories is as old as human creativity itself. A seductive technique as it allows the reader to jump from one chess literary piece to another, without losing the thread. Maria Teresa Horta assembles in The lights of Leonor (2011) a mosaic of real/imaginary situations, leading the reader into the most secret existential labyrinths of Marquise of Alorna, her grandmother, a melting pot of poetic prose and integral poetry, in which each sentence is a verse and each paragraph is a strophe.

Izabrane Pesme by Vasa Mihailovi

Dunya Mikhail The Iraqi Nights Kareem James Abu-Zeid, tr. New Directions Dunya Mikhail reprises the role of Scheherazade in her collection of poems that thread together ancient history and current events. Her poetry seeks to confront death through stories of grief and love and look beyond to a brighter future despite the presence of destruction. Kat Meads 2:12 a.m. Stephen F. Austin State University Press In this humorous collection of personal essays, Kat Meads takes readers on a series of adventures hosted by her own insomnia. Guests experience journeys ranging from the swamps of North Carolina to the Atomic Testing Museum. An accomplice in travel and thought, 2:12 a.m. accompanies us on what would otherwise be a solitary journey through thought, time, and space (see WLT, Nov. 2013, 55–56). Nota Bene arranged in three sections: Metaphysics , The Politics of Resistance, and The Future Looms. The complexity of her thoughts and subtle mood changes make her poems a pleasure to read. They are not without humor—as in the poem “Time Sits Heavily,” which opens, “In the middle of the night, it becomes apparent / that your brain is leaking. This is a symptom, surely / but not the first.” The poems have a delightful sense of wondering what is real—if what we see is truly reliable—and questions the durability of relationships and the parts we are assigned. She is at home with the constellations and the classical gods. Time is echoed again and again in her work: the brevity of our lives, the mysterious appearances time marks in our spans, the importance of the sun, moon, dawn, and dusk—as rivers run, wheels turn. Lerman’s search for unity, meaning , becoming, and order is breathtaking in its reach. We are invited to join her in this universal quest and rejoice when there are closures or glimpses of understanding in our modern life. The poet uses the pronouns “you,” “she,” and “we” to the exclusion of “I”; her poems remind one of the definition of poetry by Octavio Paz: “Poetry is not what words say but what is said between them, that which appears fleetingly in pauses and silences.” Lerman, recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, shows us that the common often grants glimpses of the mystery of living—illusory truths, the universal aspects just beyond our human ability and understanding. Her poems beg multiple readings. Carol Smallwood Mt. Pleasant, Michigan Vasa Mihailović. Izabrane Pesme. Belgrade. Tanesi. 2013. isbn 9788681567708 With 131 mostly prose poems in six named sections, we get a clear picture of the Serbian American poet Vasa Mihailović (now eighty-eight years of age), who emigrated to the United States after being a prisoner of war in Italy and Germany during World War II. He taught Slavic literature at UNC Chapel Hill for many years before he retired. He has published eleven books of prose poetry, two of haiku poetry, four collections of short stories , translations of ex-Yugoslavian authors, several anthologies, a memoir , and numerous reviews for World Literature Today. The first section, “Frescoes Written by Life,” is filled with observations about Serbian monasteries , as in “Ravanica,” where children abandoned by their parents are taken care of by nuns, or in “Bogorodica Ljeviška,” where the visitors “take off a piece of its wall because they believe in its healing for women who November–December 2014 • 67 reviews cannot get pregnant.” The second section, “Ave Patria,” returns to Serbian history and events from the perspective of an emigrant who dreams of returning to his idealized homeland but, when he does, cannot find anyone to communicate with and returns to the US disappointed. In the section “From Spring into Winter,” he observes nature and different seasons, followed with a section of love poems for an unidentified love, presumably his deceased wife, whom he misses. He recalls Mozart’s “Eine kleine Nachtmusik,” which they listened to when they first met. In the section “Memories ,” he returns to childhood, his old house, his father playing a melody for him on a violin, and the passing of his mother. The final, longest section, “Images and...

Le Eroidi glossate del ms. Gaddiano reliqui 71: dalla tradizione ovidiana francese alla novella italiana

The analysis of the glosses accompanying the fourteenth-century Italian translation of the Heroides preserved in the MS Gaddiano reliqui 71 of the Biblioteca Laurenziana in Florence sheds new light on the literary amalgamation between matiere de Troie and Ovidian works, a phenomenon that goes back to some of the prose versions of the Roman de Troie, direct source for the Italian text. Given their distinctive nature and probable chronological decalage, the commentaries found in the MS Gaddiano reveal the existence of what appear to be diverse layers of glosses, since it is possible to recognize here moralizing notes characteristic of clerical commentaries next to lyrical quotations such as those frequently found in transalpine romances a farcitura, in addition to some mythological glosses whose unusual narrative development betrays remarkable affinities with several sections of the Ovide moralise and the French vernacular versions of the Ars Amatoria. By means of merging materials derived from their transalpine precedents with classical apologues, some of these glosses function as brief narrative units of their own that depart from these French models in their degree of stylistic re-elaboration, paving the way for the first examples of the Italian novella that will end by converging and culminating in the compilation known as the Novellino.

Las «Cortes de Casto amor» de Hurtado de Toledo y la prosificación de la «Octava rima» de Boscán. Hacia el neoplatonismo amoroso en la literatura española

In this article, we show that the Cortes de Casto Amor (Toledo: Juan Ferrer, 1557), published under the name of Luis Hurtado de Toledo, include a prose version of some sections of Juan Boscán’s Octava rima, a poem in which, as it is well known, fragments of Pietro Bembo’s Stanze are translated and imitated. Apart from the task of transforming in prose some lines of the Octava rima, Luis Hurtado de Toledo in his Cortes modifies the ending of Boscan’s poem and proposes an articulation of the conflict of love in the author-protagonist pointing to an intellectual love and, in the end, the love of God.

‘Nothing is simply one thing’: Woolf, Deleuze and Difference

This paper explores some key texts of Virginia Woolf in the context of Deleuzian concepts. Using a close reading style, it shows how the prose poetry in Mrs Dalloway engages a complex interplay of repetition and difference, resulting in a remarkably similar model of the three syntheses of time as Deleuze understands them. It subsequently explores Woolf's technical processes in a key passage from To the Lighthouse, showing how the prose-poetic technique systematically undoes the structures of logical fact and rationality inscribed in both language and everyday speech to an extremely precise level.

Images of Needlework: The Category of Memory in Aurora Levins Morales’s Remedios

The present paper is devoted to the exploration of Puerto Rican female identity through individual and collective memory in Aurora Levins Morales’s prose poetry cycle Remedios: Stories of Earth and Iron from the History of Puertorriqueñas. To preserve the past against oblivion and restore justice the author intertwines personal accounts and historical records, combines archive documents and oral narratives, highlights verbal and non-verbal texts. The stories of the lost ancestors passed through such acts of creation as weaving, knitting, embroidering and sewing are of special interest in the present paper. These acts of non-verbal creation described in Remedios are associated with social, philosophical and other issues and as a result become memorial representations of women in history and culture. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2013.v4n9p69

Una riscrittura di Pietro Aretino: la Vita di Maria Vergine di Lucrezia Marinella e le sue fonti

In the context of the considerable production and dissemination of devotional literature in post-Tridentine Italy, in 1602 the Venetian writer Lucrezia Marinella published for the first time her Vita di Maria Vergine, in two versions, one in prose and one in ottava rima. In this essay I will consider the prose version of Marinella’s Vita, analysing its paratext and the different editions, examining the actual and declared sources, and demonstrating that the main model used by Marinella is Pietro Aretino’s Vita di Maria Vergine (1539). Together with a detailed analysis of the ways in which Marinella used Aretino’s work, rewriting it, almost risking plagiarism, I will discuss the possible reasons of the choice of such a controversial model during the Counter-Reformation.

Cartographic and Literary Intersections: Digital Literary Cartographies, Digital Humanities, and Libraries and Archives

Digital literary cartography projects can provide dynamic interactive experiences with prose narrative, poetry, and other literary forms. Recently, literary studies have begun to incorporate maps to reveal the geographic imagination at play in literature. As metaphor, maps furnish a conceptual model to understand literary texts through characters’ proximity to each other and events and relationships between “fictional” and “real” places. The transition to digital historical maps and digital literary cartography projects continues to inform the intersection of cartographic and literary studies in that such maps and projects incorporate labels and layers to identify social and cultural contexts. Finally, these maps and projects involve users’ imaginations to read maps as narratives through the map as metaphor. Cognitive mapping, implicit in this relationship, connects cartography and literature to inform spatial and perceptual conceptions. Libraries and archives contribute to digital humanities and digital literary cartographies through digitization, preservation, and metadata of digital historical maps. Scholars, librarians, and archivists can collaborate to contribute metadata for cartographic and literary materials to create digital literary cartographies within online public access catalogs (OPACs) and digital object management systems.

From Zagreb with Anomie

From Zagreb with Anomie Steven Wingate (bio) Our Man in Iraq. Robert Perišić; Will Firth, trans. Black Balloon Press. www.blackballoonpublishing.com. 202 pages; paper; $14.00. Three quarters of the way through Robert Perišić’s Our Man in Iraq, when its ersatz journalist protagonist Toni is getting into petty (though vicious) fights with seemingly everyone he knows in Zagreb, Croatia, I wanted to get into fights, too. With my wife, with my mother, with the jerk who parked so close to my driver’s side door that I had crawl in from the passenger side, with the punk kid at my oldest son’s hockey practice who kept ringing unnecessary slapshots off the glass. Everybody crowded my space. Everybody challenged my right to existence, and I got so surly that I had to sequester myself and finish the book just to regain some sense of personal peace. In retrospect, this desire to fight is a visceral endorsement of Perišić’s novel; he pushed me into a fight-or-flight response mode that primed my psyche to receive his story. Though the presence of the word “Iraq” in the novel’s title will no doubt lead some to assume it’s a war novel, it really doesn’t count as one. It contains ramblingly incoherent reports from Toni’s unhinged cousin Boris—an Arabic-speaking Croatian whom Toni has dispatched to Iraq to cover the American “Shock and Awe” invasion of 2003— but no scenes actually take place in the country, and Iraq functions mostly as a metaphor and a pawn in Zagreb’s inbred journalistic war. Our Man in Iraq is ultimately about the psychic experience of Balkanization and capitalization, which Toni, like the rest of the former Yugoslavia, has undergone. The dissolution of the communist stronghold into a tangle of struggling and (particularly from 1991–1999) warring states has been narrativized in the West as a victory of capitalism and democracy: communism fell, people fought over territory awhile, but they eventually got with the program of global capital and market-driven thinking. The novel shows the working through of this national history in Toni’s mind and life; he not only endures all phases of this transformation but is keenly aware of them, and in fact discusses them openly. “We’d grown up in strange European systems and placed too much hope in rock ‘n’ roll,” he says of himself and a friend. Toni is the anti-rube, the anti-innocent, fully invested in and responsible for the changes he embraces. He arrives in Zagreb from his home village as a young economics student, joins the Yugoslav People’s Army, returns to “study” at university (seemingly majoring in drunken antagonism), picks up an actress girlfriend, and somehow works his way to the editorship of a newspaper. The turn of the millennium was a very opportunistic time in Croatia, apparently, and when we meet him, Toni is nothing if not an opportunist. Perišić neither sentimentalizes the old ways—what I can only describe as tribal crony Communism—nor demonizes the new worship of global capital, which makes his novel that much more tough-minded. He doesn’t get polemical and drag Toni through the mud to demonstrate the difficulties of any social or economic system. Instead, he shows us the mud that Toni, whatever personal identity he once had now lost among the choices he’s made, drags himself through in search of things he does not understand and has never asked himself if he truly wants. It is the way he handles his cousin Boris—the titular “Our Man in Iraq”—that most reveals Toni’s specific species of lostness. We first meet Boris through his email reports from Iraq, cascading and looping works of stream-of-consciousness prose poetry that reflect an intensely immediate life. Boris, a fellow Croatian war veteran generally considered mad by all concerned, sees events in Iraq quite nakedly, partly to his environment and partly to his own buffer-free nature. Meeting Boris solely through his voice gives him an almost oracular authority within the book. He seems, in his unfiltered worldview and expression, to grasp the chaos of...

Breathing Back My Life

This article is a performative personal narrative inspired by the writing of Eve Sedgwick (1998) and Stacy Holman Jones (2011) using a Halibun style of writing (a method of writing employed by the Japanese poet Basho that combines prose and haiku poetry to describe life experiences in a poetic manner) as a way of enhancing events that have led the author to give up a familial relationship. The article examines a failed relationship between father and son. The author discovers that not all familial relationships are healthy and that not all investigations lead to a positive conclusion. It is the process that is most healing. Rather than experiencing reconciliation, the reader is left with the understanding that it is acceptable to let go of a relationship—even a familial one—that stifles, which then allows a refocusing of energy on those relationships that lift us and allow us to breathe. Using breathing as a metaphor, the narrative reveals the difficulty of allowing ourselves the ability to let go of a failed relationship.

Remembering the Beginning: “All Electrons Are (Not) Alike” by Rosmarie Waldrop

Through a close reading of “All Electrons Are (Not) Alike,” the opening poem of Rosmarie Waldrop’s latest collection of prose poetry, Driven to Abstraction (2010), this paper shows how the poem deconstructs history and memory through criticism of language. Retelling the narration of the conquest of the Americas, “All Electrons Are (Not) Alike” calls into question the beginning of what was to become US American national identity. Putting Waldrop’s poem in the broader context of transnational criticism, I argue that its deconstructive poetic and philosophical use of language contributes to the transnational turn, helping to create the room that transnational criticism needs in order to come up with new, more appropriate ways of structuring literary studies.

Gaufroi de Danemarche et le chevage, des décasyllabes aux proses

Study of an episode of the legend of Ogier the Dane (the conflict between Ogier’s father and Charlemagne) in French medieval versions of different dates, which aims to show the remanieurs’ work and to draw the connections between David Aubert’s text in prose and the alexandrine and prose versions derived from the anonymous decasyllabic Chevalerie Ogier.

La mise en prose des Vigiles des morts de Pierre de Nesson, texte inconnu attribuable à Jean Miélot

In 1457, the Burgundian copyist and writer Jean Miélot transcribed in his own hand most of the Latin and French prayers added to a personal book of hours belonging to Philip the Good, who had inherited it from his grandfather, Philip the Bold (BRUSSELS, KBR, ms. 11035 – 37). Among these is a prose version of the Vigiles des Morts by the French poet Pierre de Nesson. This article presents this text, unknown to philologists until now, and suggests that it should be attributed to Jean Miélot ; this copy (the only evidence of this text) would therefore be an autograph manuscript. A study of the way the translator has turned the verse of the Vigiles into prose enables us to refine our knowledge of the nature and role of the drafting and copying work performed by Jean Miélot for the Duke of Burgundy.

Ancient Mediterranean Sacrifice by Jennifer Wright Kunst and Zsuzsanna V´rhelyi

474 BOOK REVIEWS amples from modern popular culture and her intention is to explore “the perceived role” of fate and fortune “across various aspects” of Greek “daily life” (153). VASILIKI GIANNOPOULOU University of Oxford,vasiliki.giannopoulou@classics.ox.ac.uk ◊ Ancient Mediterranean Sacrifice. Edited by Jennifer Wright KUNST and Zsuzsanna VÁRHELYI . Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. xviii + 330. Hardcover,£45.00/$74.00. ISBN 978-0-19-973896-0. If a reviewer must deal with a volume of essays by fifteen hands, about four societies (Egypt, Israel, Greece, and the Roman Empire), and about five religions (add Christianity to Roman paganism), he may be relieved that, to judge from the title, he has to deal with one period, one sea, and one rite, but this feeling is deceptive: the subject of this book, the rite of “sacrifice,” is controversial. David Frankfurter’s essay, “Egyptian Religion and the Problem of the Category ‘Sacrifice’,” shows that, if “sacrifice” means what Classicists commonly suppose, there was no such thing in Egypt. Frankfurter’s essay is in the first section of the book, entitled “Theorizing Sacrifice,” but the same evangel appears in an essay in the second part, “Negotiating Power through Sacrifice,” for here James Rives, in “The Theology of Animal Sacrifice in the Ancient Greek World: Origins and Developments ,” shows that “sacrifice” was not an important subject for Greek and Roman writers until well into the Common Era, a conclusion that means that early objections to sacrifice, as by Xenophanes, were not objections to the rite, a subject that did not interest these writers, but objections to eating certain foods. At this point, the cautious reader (including the reviewer, sworn to caution) might wonder when or where “sacrifice” is to be found, but this volume has not yet reached its peak or nadir, its third section, “Imaginary Sacrifice,” in which Kathryn McClymond, in “Don’t Cry Over Spilled Blood,” shows how the Mishnah deals with “ritual errors” in the performance of sacrifice, but does so centuries after Israelite sacrificesceased to occur. BOOK REVIEWS 475 McClymond raises the question of what “sacrifice” means. Does it mean animal sacrifice more than, or instead of, vegetal or liquid sacrifice? The ancient evidence says otherwise, and Stanley Stowers, in the lead essay in the “Theorizing ” section, conveys as much through his title, “The Religion of Plant and Animal Offerings versus the Religion of Meanings, Essences, and Textual Mysteries.” Stowers is unfair to essences, which include incense, but his attack on meanings and mysteries is polemically understandable. A sacrificial offering was first of all a donative, not a mammal. If an offering need not be a mammal, it need not be violent , a conclusion that raises objections to the two best-known theories of sacrifice , those of Walter Burkert and the French duo of J.-P. Vernant and Marcel Detienne. When acts of violence are nonetheless associated with sacrifice, we ought to interrogate our sources, as emerges from Zsuzsanna Várhely’s “Political Murder and Sacrifice: From Roman Republic to Empire.” In “The Embarrassment of Blood: Early Christians and Others on Sacrifice, War, and Rational Worship ,” Laura Nasrallah does likewise, too, but includes state-sanctioned violence. Roman and Christian writers who associate some killings with sacrifice are playing a prose version of the game that Albert Henrichs has shown that the tragedians play—the gameofrhetorical transgression. Then there is the other stand-by of recent theories—the notion that sacrifice consolidated communities. Once Christian emperors banned public pagan sacrifices, private pagan sacrifices were all that remained, and so a rite that once was sometimes communal (for it was never always so), became private, as noted by Michele Renee Salzman in “The End of Public Sacrifice: Changing Definitionsof Sacrifice in Post-Constantinian Rome and Italy.” If scholars using the term “sacrifice” have been too sure of what it means, they also have been too sure of the attitude of their sources—Henrichs’ lesson, again, illustrated in this book by Fritz Graf’s “A Satirist’s Sacrifices: Lucian’s On Sacrifices and the Contestation of Religious Traditions.” About sacrifice as about other things, Lucian is funny because he is clear-minded. His image of Zeus...

Prose Poems of the French Enlightenment: Delimiting Genre (review)

Reviewed by: Prose Poems of the French Enlightenment: Delimiting Genre Tili Boon Cuillé (bio) Fabienne Moore. Prose Poems of the French Enlightenment: Delimiting Genre. Surrey: Ashgate Publishing, 2009. x+319pp. US$99.95. ISBN 978-0-7546-6318-8. Fabienne Moore proposes her Prose Poems of the French Enlightenment as a prehistory to Suzanne Bernard’s Le Poème en prose de Baudelaire jusqu’à nos jours (1959), tracing the origins of the genre back to the quarrel touched off by the publication of Fénélon’s Les Aventures de Télémaque in 1699. Moore’s book thus serves as a companion piece to Jean-Marie Roulin’s L’Épopée de Voltaire à Chateaubriand: poésie, histoire et politique (2005), which uncovers a previously unrecognized French eighteenth-century epic tradition. Moore bases her study on the identification of approximately sixty lost, miscategorized, under estimated, or forgotten prose poems that can be distinguished by the presence of a “legitimizing preface in defense of elevated prose” and by their “conspicuous” use of traditional poetic figures (5). Rather than providing a comprehensive overview of the genre, like Vista Clayton in The Prose Poem in French Literature of the Eighteenth Century (1936), or a cross-century survey, like Christian Leroy in La Poésie en prose française du xviie siècle à nos jours (2001), Moore initiates us into the intricacies of the eighteenth-century debate about its legitimacy, providing in-depth analyses of the works that, by questioning or defying prior generic restrictions, created the need for a new generic category defined in part by its resistance to categorization. The term “petit poëme en prose” was coined, we learn, not by Charles Baudelaire but by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (160). Dubbing the genre “one of the least known ‘inventions’ of the French Enlightenment” (2), which has previously fallen outside studies of both poetry and prose, Moore undertakes what proves to be an invaluable project of recovery. Fénélon’s Télémaque provides the perfect starting point for Moore’s study: an unprecedented publishing sensation situated midway between the epic and the Bildungsroman, it became the preferred reading material [End Page 736] not only of the Duc de Bourgogne, for whom it was intended, but also of Rousseau’s Émile and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul. Moore interprets Fénélon’s choice of prose as both aesthetic and political, indelibly linking the new genre to the critique of unenlightened despotism and the aristocracy. Rather than grounding her study in a brief yet probing analysis of Fénélon’s spiritual convictions (which she reserves for chapter 6) and the generic and political stakes of his work, Moore proceeds to peel the proverbial onion. Juxtaposing Fénélon’s work to Louis Aragon’s 1922 prose poem of the same name, she reveals the genre’s fundamental status as palimpsest, or hypertext: just as Fénélon rewrites the Odyssey (and Baudelaire rewrote his own verse poems), Aragon rewrites Télémaque. This approach admirably sets up Moore’s subsequent focus on prose poems as translations (or pseudo-translations, in the case of Montesquieu) of verse originals, a practice largely responsible for the eighteenth-century development of the genre. Though readers who find themselves backtracking from Aragon’s, to Rimbaud’s, to Marivaux’s response to Fénélon’s work in reverse chronological order might prefer a somewhat more top-down approach, the Rousseau-like journey from present time to the posited point of origin alerts us to Moore’s primary interest in the reception of Fénélon’s work, which served as a model for sub sequent forays into the genre. Moore’s analysis of the work’s reception effectively highlights the shift from an emphasis on form to an emphasis on affect that plays into the changing definition of the genre in the course of the century (2). After exploring the cultural phenomenon known as “Telemacomania,” Moore enters into the complexities of the cultural debate about prose poetry, marshaling ample evidence of the nascence of the genre in the form of neologisms (Rousseau’s “prosaïser,” Staël’s “dépoétiser”), parodies (particularly Chaussepierre...