Reviews 211 devenir” that defies the heuristic categories oral/written, cultural/universal, eastern/ western, and diachronic/synchronic. Part 1 destabilizes these dichotomies with a tree metaphor that plants the birth of the literary fairy tale in Renaissance Italy and tracks its aborescence in France and beyond (120). It accounts, too, for “pre-historical” (67) and interdiscursive roots from which this growth fed. The print history of the literary tale—this tree—does not look like a genealogy of tradition and continuity, but like a network of what Foucault calls rémanences, or traces left through discontinuity and rupture that caused gaps. The book’s second and third parts put this insightful methodology to work on two “rise tale” types that Ruth Bottigheimer has formally associated with early modern Europe. Section two treats Perrault’s “Chat botté,” AT 545, and three, Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy’s “Belle au cheveux d’or,” AT 531. EichelLojkine reads Perrault comparatively alongside Straparola and Basile, not in search of a“filiation générique,”but to illuminate the“parenté troublante”of this feline corpus. This section takes the additional step of discussing networks of meaning within the individual tale itself. Rethinking the Proppian structure, she locates the story’s axes of meaning instead in the dynamic that occurs between the text and the reader. The tale’s own “grade” (dénivelé) invites the reader to move intellectually among structural, figurative, symbolic levels to produce a greater appreciation of the echoes and contradictions mobilized within the tale. Section three takes on East-West and diachronic/ synchronic networks with “La belle au cheveux d’or,” whose motifs and characters have discontinuous rémanences with a story by Straparola, an early French translation of Straparola, a Yiddish fable, and a Persian tale. Finally, Eichel-Lojkine takes up animal helpers in these rise tales to argue that Renaissance Italy made the human-animal relationship germane to its restorative justice. This ruptured “parenté” with older stories, such as Kalila et Dimna, challenges the Judeo-Christian Renaissance model of man’s supremacy. This book presents a “patrimoine méconnu” supported by an innovative critical vision so that its discovery, particularly in France, invites new questions about tale history. University of Utah Christine A. Jones Fondanèche, Daniel. La littérature d’imagination scientifique. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012. ISBN 978-90-420-3610-9. Pp. 398. $114. Scientifically-informed approaches to literature—most notably cognitive and Darwinian—have held sway in literary studies for some time. Surprising, then, is the scant attention paid to science fiction. Fondanèche changes this with his encyclopedic work. The project has enormous scope, beginning with an early history that ranges from almanacs and la littérature bleue (religious pamphlets) to feuilletons and early short stories. From Lucien to Godwin, Bergerac to Voltaire, Fondanèche traces science fiction’s origins before tackling the first pioneers of the genre and situating them in the context of lending libraries and pulp fiction. Later chapters discuss the“masters”of the genre like Verne, Robida and Rosny aîné. Part of the fun of reading the work is checking one’s own level of surprise as the author recounts literary inventions. From the metro to the helicopter, rocket ship to hydrogen car, writers imagined new modes of transportation long before their actual existence. For our bodies, they created metal clothing, watches, food delivered to residences or in pill form, plastic surgery and cryogenics. For the home, we can read about geothermal heat, mobile homes, and this reader’s favorite—homes that move up and down the mountain to capture light and heat. No doubt most will be happy to know that literature predicted advances like women’s equality and the establishment of national parks. Some may be less heartened to know that it also predicted the expansion of English and the use of chemical weapons. Readers may well take issue with Fondanèche’s claim of an American deployment of nerve gas during the Gulf Wars. Assertions like these surely need more substantiation or should be qualified. The larger claim, however, is the extent to which much science fiction is dystopic, predicting overpopulation, arms races, and arms dealers. La littérature d...