Journal

Introduction

At the close of the 17^th century, John Locke, reflecting on the misuse and abuse of words, came to the following conclusion:

Life is a term, none more familiar. Any one almost would take it for an affront to be asked what he meant by it. And yet if it comes in question, whether a plant that lies ready formed in the seed have life; whether the embryo in an egg before incubation, or a man in a swoon without sense or motion, be alive or no; it is easy to perceive that a clear, distinct, settled idea does not always accompany the use of so known a word as that of life is.[1]

What was true in the 17^th century may still be true today. For what is life but a concept that resists definition? An object so close to us that we can’t even comprehend it.

To be sure we all live our lives, but we would be hard pressed to de­fine what living means, let alone what living is. Which came first, the pulse or the thought? Paul Valéry perhaps quite aptly wrote: “tantôt je pense et tantôt je suis,” intimating that one either lives or thinks, but to try and do both at the same time might well be folly or hubris.[2] If the life of the mind is distinct from the life of the body, are we condemned to live double lives? Valery’s hypothesis—either I think or I live, two distinct moments corresponding to two distinct activities and realities—may be the key to thinking about life: deposit life on the operating table to dissect it and think about it, or else think about the lives of others.

Current debates on the beginning of life—at conception or at birth?—are further testimonies to the complexity of the object and the ethical con­sequences of its definition. Whatever one’s convictions, life can be de­fined as an interval between birth and death, be they biological or symbolical. One reads in Richelet’s Dictionnaire françois, in the entry on “life,” that books, like animated beings, have a life of their own. All things have a duration, which constitutes their lives and in turn defines them. By extension, a life, “une vie,” is a chronicle of all that happened to a person between his or her birth and death.

If life can be given at birth and taken at death, it can also be auto­mated. Artificial life, with its better-known subset—artificial intelli­gence—have become a reality. Can the life simulated in a lab by a machine be called “life” at all? Or can life be created by living organisms only? As new as these questions may sound, they were debated in the 17^th century.

Most early modern attempts to define life were indebted to Aristotle. One recurring question, although formulated in many different manners, turned on the distinction between the living and the dead. In the Aristotelian tradition, it is form and its three faculties (vegetative, sensi­tive, intellective), not just matter, that defines the living body. While the activity of one or all of these faculties may account for the biological dif­ference between a living body and a lifeless one, it does not provide a solid argument for the specificity of human life. What makes a living or­ganism human? A soul. For many philosophers, the soul is more than an attribute of human beings, it comes to define life itself. The early modern conceptual imbroglio between life and soul has survived in the equally complicated modern union of life and psyche.

The early modern “life sciences,” as they are known today, were dominated by another approach to the living world, it too inherited from Aristotle: taxonomy. The classification of forms of life offered a mosaic of the great diversity of living organisms. Taxonomy orders life into catego­ries, organizes living beings and their living parts into classes. In doing so, it recreates a whole from its many different parts. Yet it may not help us understand the nature of life itself. Instead, an increasingly careful taxon­omy and scientific nomenclature shed a new light on the innumerable or­ganisms that constitute the living world. Life takes on then a kaleidoscopic quality.

In the 17^th century, life was also a measure of a person’s physical needs and of their moral character. A person de grande vie, for instance, had a great appetite for life, according to Richelet, while a person de petite vie, would be satisfied with little. Life as a measure of one’s moral com­pass served to appraise the sum of one’s deliberate actions and personal decisions. In moralist portraiture, life came to define a person and their qualities, interchangeably so. “C’est une personne de mauvaise vie,” is a moral sentence on someone’s way of life, on their life and person; in this example, also excerpted from Richelet’s dictionary, life, person and con­duct are conflated.

Biologists, taxonomists and psychologists will agree that life is the property of all living things. Even such a rudimentary definition raises more questions than it yields answers; it shows that of all concepts few, if any, are larger than life itself. But, as a concept, life has a history. It is a moment, or rather a succession of moments, of that long history that this volume presents. How did 17^th century naturalists, philosophers, play­wrights and clergymen understand life? By looking at specific manifesta­tions of life, be they experienced, imagined or speculated, early modern men and women of letters, and of all walks of life, as the phrase goes, elaborated fascinating, often complex, theories of the living, and con­cocted great life stories, either for themselves or for others.  

The conception of this volume—and we use the term purposefully—took place in the context of the 2012 annual conference of the North American Society for Seventeenth-Century French Studies, hosted at Van­derbilt University. This conference brought together scholars of seventeenth-century French studies, from both the United States and abroad, for three days of collegial discussion on “Life.”  As both hosts of the conference and co-editors of this special issue, we are deeply grateful to our colleague Patricia Armstrong (fellow dix-septiémiste and former Vanderbilt colleague and Director of Vanderbilt University’s College of Arts and Science Pre-Major Advising Program) and April Stevens (Ph.D. Candidate in French, also at Vanderbilt) for their extraordinary insights and focused help in making the conference a success. We extend thanks, as well, to the Florence Gould Foundation, Vanderbilt University’s College of Arts & Science, and Vanderbilt’s Department of French & Italian for the assistance, both in-kind and financial, that they provided. Following the conference, all presenters were invited to submit substan­tially expanded and revised manuscripts for consideration in the current volume. Each submission was refereed in a double-blind process by two specialists in the field; none of whom having a manuscript of their own under consideration for the same volume.

We understand that the current format of this volume represents a sig­nificant departure from NASSCFL tradition, and we wish to thank the fol­lowing persons and organizations for their willingness to allow us to imagine new directions in the life of French seventeenth-century studies:  Rainer Zaiser, Christine Probes, Perry Gethner, Vincent Grégoire, and the membership of NASSCFL; Katherine Dauge-Roth and the members of the Société Pluridisciplinaire des Etudes du 17e and the Cahiers du 17e Siècle.  We also wish, of course, to acknowledge Faith Beasley and Rose Pruiksma and Meadow Dibble for their knowledgeable help and encour­agement as we undertook the labor-intensive review process and copy-editing process in concert with Caroline Boone (Ph.D. candidate, Vanderbilt University).

University of Manchester

Vanderbilt University

Printable PDF of Brillaud & Tucker Introduction

The purpose of this volume is to translate a sample of eight seven­teenth-century French fairy tales into English. All the fairy tales included are authored by women, none have previously been made available in English, and all are representative of fairy-tale production during the late 1600s and of the authors’ unique styles. The volume is divided into a comprehensive introduction and five sections for each fairy-tale writer and her tales. It is followed by two sample critical texts of the period, intro­duced briefly, as a way of exemplifying the contemporary debate on the genre. At the end of the book, the reader will find a useful appendix listing the conteuses and their tales (the ones included in the volume are in bold­face), a comprehensive editor’s bibliography, and an index.

In their introduction, the editors start with an accurate background of the production of literary fairy tales in the late seventeenth century, con­textualizing these tales within the long historical and critical contexts of women’s history from ancient Greece to modern feminism. They then retrace the role of women in the production of the literary fairy tale, re­vealing the intertexts of these stories as proof that the fairy tale tradition was created and dominated by women who promoted themselves as indi­viduals within a growing literary field, legitimizing themselves in the process as authors. As the editors reveal, these fairy tales share significant references and motifs not only with Greek and Roman mythology, but also with medieval romances, with the pastoral and heroic novels of the early seventeenth century, and with the short novellas of their Italian predeces­sors, Straparola and Basile. Despite these influences, however, late seventeenth-century French conteuses distinguish their works both by re­fusing the restrictions imposed upon the novel after 1660, and those of the “compact” fairy-tale model of Perrault—rejecting the imposition of veri­similitude and instead relying heavily on the marvelous. As such, the late seventeenth-century conte de fées reveals itself as a predominantly “femi­nine” genre, one whose relationship to “modern” literary aesthetics is predicated on ideas that “natural,” intuitive eloquence is uniquely reserved for women.

The editors also offer a lengthy explanation for how this corpus of late-seventeenth-century French fairy tales has been received from the moment of their production to the present. Between 1690 and the eve of the French Revolution, women authors dominated the conte de fées genre; in addition to being widely read throughout France, England, Germany, and North America, their fairy tales were imitated and parodied in eight­eenth-century chapbooks. But after the late eighteenth-century conteuse Marie-Jeanne Le Prince de Beaumont began to compose fairy tales in acc­ordance with the “compact” Perraultean model, the dominant fairy-tale aesthetic began to shift. As a result, during the nineteenth-century, the long and complicated plots composed by earlier women authors were ex­cluded from the genre until the 1980s and 1990s when North-American feminist critics and literary historians renewed the interest in the forgotten genre, followed later by French scholars.

The editors have chosen samples of tales from each of the five leading conteuses of the 1690s, Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, Catherine Bernard, Charlotte-Rose Caumont de La Force, Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier de Villan­don and Henriette-Julie de Murat. The tales were selected to be—and are—a representative sample of the most prominent thematic and narrative features of each conteuse, while simultaneously showcasing the variety of approaches each writer adopted with respect to length and tone. The tales are chosen with particular attention to the plots, characters and situations, all of which complicate many stereotypical assumptions about the fairy tale as a genre.

Each section focuses on a particular author, starting with an accurate biography and overview of the individual’s writing strategies. Each tale is carefully annotated in the footnotes, which include clarifications about the specific meanings of certain words, as well as explanations of social, cul­tural, and literary norms and ideals relevant to the time period. The tales’ translation itself is precise, and apart from the repunctuating of long sen­tences and paragraphs, the original text is rendered meticulously.

In conclusion, this book, with its ample introduction and its interesting and relevant choice of tales, is of extreme value not only for scholars and students, but also for any lover of fairy tales wishing to rediscover and understand the origins of the French literary fairy tale tradition. I hope that the editors will consider more translations of this kind in the future.

Charlotte Trinquet du Lys, University of Central Florida

Barbara Woshinsky has authored a thoroughly researched and fasci­nating study of how early-modern conventual spaces figure in contemporary culture and literature. While other scholars have studied the convents themselves or the literature their communities produce, Woshin­sky instead examines works that reference enclosure but were written by those who live outside convent walls. Her objective is “to illuminate the unique place the convent occupies in the early modern imaginary, in the context of space, gender and power” (6), and she fulfills this objective through an analysis of a broad spectrum of both canonical and rare literary works published in France between 1600 and 1800. At the same time, her study is truly intermural in its approach to chronology and geography with references to Michel de Certeau (13, 24), the Shinto religion (33), Sue Monk Kidd (84), Humpty Dumpty (243), Norman Rush (245), Jane Austen (247), Nathalie Sarraute (257), Typhoid Mary (277) and Jean-Philippe Rameau (295), among others.

The metonymic readings that serve as a framework for the book’s organization render the latter somewhat forced in places, but this attests to the complexity of the subject matter and its theoretical underpinnings. In the first chapter, Woshinsky focuses on the allegorical images of the body in Counter-Reformation writings and its imprecise relationships to gender and the soul. (For some reason, this chapter has a decidedly different feel from those that follow, as though it were not part of the same thesis.) In the second, she addresses Jean-Pierre Camus’s conflicted attitude toward the female body and the sensuality associated with it that leads him to ad­vocate for its enclosure in his stories. Following these initial chapters devoted to religious writings that feature metonymic and allegorical read­ings of the female body, Woshinsky guides us ever deeper into the convents themselves, beginning with more secular and feminocentric rep­resentations of thresholds (Chapter 3), parlors (Chapter 4), cells (Chapters 5 and 6) and, finally, tombs (appropriately, Chapter 7). This well-written analysis weaves in and out of convent grilles, gates, corridors, chapels, and cells and demonstrates that the convent of early-modern France, like the female body and its coverings (veils, gowns, bed sheets) that it con­tained, were considered alternately hermetic and penetrable.

Woshinsky deftly guides the reader through this labyrinthine reading with a healthy dose of humor. I would often find myself blindsided by a sly aside (“And what does it mean for a soul to have nipples?” (55)), (“Fi­nally, what is accented by the title is…the fact that the narrator is…Portuguese: hence doomed—or free—to enjoy a degree of southern and female unreason not properly displayed in the country of Descartes, even by women” (247)); dry sarcasm (“However, there is a consistency in the women’s treatment, in that both Deucalie and Nerée are seen most positively once they are dead” (90)); a play on words (“Resurrected for the wedding, he fails to come up to conjugal expectations” (179)); or an hon­est criticism of her subject (“The next morning, he writes a triumphant (and bad) poem” (227)). Woshinsky is obviously having fun with her subject, and her readers cannot help but do the same. When she declares in exasperation that “[t]he vulgarity of the ending [of a poem written by a monk] taxes the translating skill of this scholar” (231), we should not be surprised that her subsequent translation is just as double-edged and naughty as the original.

Another unexpected quality of this book is its bibliography. While Woshinsky engages with seminal works by senior scholars, she does not limit herself to these studies. Instead, she also demonstrates a broad colle­giality infrequent in published academic works. Her bibliography includes conference papers and unpublished dissertations as well as other refer­ences to works by less-established academics. This approach, combined with the intertextual citations throughout, creates an overall impression of a current and well-balanced study.

I have very few criticisms of this work. There are some errors of proofreading: the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes occurred in 1685 and not in 1696 (162); there is no English translation for two quotations on the bottom of page 92; the English translation should precede the French original in the middle of page 270. Content-wise, I was surprised not to find a discussion of Mlle de Scudéry’s “Histoire de Sapho” in the section on feminutopias (124-34) nor a reference to Daniella J. Kostroun’s work on the Port-Royal nuns in Chapter 5. Finally, there is no mention of the Querelle des femmes which deserves at least a clin d’œil from the author. Nevertheless, these minor points do not detract from what is otherwise an excellent analysis and a thoroughly enjoyable read.

Jennifer R. Perlmutter, Portland State University

Racevskis’s excitingly fresh interpretation of Racine’s secular tragedies focuses on their “liminary esthetics”—that is, their exploration of “identity in suspension. . . . the human predicament of being caught in between states of being” (15). Drawing insights from Derrida, Nietzsche, and especially Heidegger, the author identifies a “poetics of the threshold” in Racine’s plays and convincingly argues that the tragedies’ distinctive quality lies in their illumination of the psychological anguish of characters self-consciously poised between past and future, action and inaction, subjection and sovereignty, life and death.

The book’s nine short chapters analyze Racine’s nine secular tragedies from La Thébaïde to Phèdre, examining their dramatization of characters poised at the thresholds of power, love, and existence itself. These thought-provoking readings exemplify Racevskis’s call for a flexible approach to Racine’s work that recognizes each play’s singularity while exploring their shared engagement with the problem of liminality. Among the book’s rich and varied discussions, Chapter 3’s exploration of “temporal construction” in Andromaque is one of the stand-outs. Here, Racevskis breaks from traditional interpretations emphasizing the way characters are haunted by the past and shifts his focus, subtly but crucially, to how they express the “paltriness of the present” (81) and the “radical ambiguity of the future” (90). In addition to teasing out Andromaque’s complex temporal structure, this reading brilliantly analyzes how the play imparts feelings of terrifying uncertainty to its spectators. Indeed, throughout the book, Racevskis makes the case that “in-betweenness” not only serves as a major fictional theme but also generates the plays’ emotional effect on audiences. For example, he usefully compares La Thébaïde with Rodogune to illustrate, by way of contrast with Corneille’s depiction of power’s dangers, how Racine derives terror from its revelation of the throne as an unresolved void. Other readings elegantly synthesize analyses of Racine’s poetic language with attention to the plays’ inscription of dramatic space, time, and movement; this is especially true for the chapters devoted to Britannicus and Bérénice, which demonstrate how the idea of the threshold permeates all aspects of Racine’s dramaturgy up to and including set design.

Racevskis’s stated ambition in tackling all of Racine’s tragedies in this streamlined book is to articulate a new basis for understanding the coherence of the playwright’s work. While the book accomplishes this goal, one drawback to its comprehensiveness is that it sometimes leaves the reader wanting more on a particular play. For example, Chapter 4’s skillful reading of Néron’s court in Britannicus as a Foucauldian panopticon concludes with a tantalizing gesture to the thresholds occupied by an excluded Britannicus and imprisoned Junie (103), leaving the reader eager to know how Racevskis would interpret the play’s expression of these characters’ suspended states of being. In other respects, the completist approach is a strength. By proceeding chronologically through the tragedies, Racevskis succeeds in demonstrating the evolution of Racine’s liminary aesthetics throughout his career. The thresholds structuring earlier plays often delimit a space of worldly power. By the later tragedies (Mithridate, Iphigénie, and Phèdre), the characters’ articulation of their suspended state points toward the “ontological threshold” between existence and non-existence. In these chapters, the book also returns to a Heideggerian interrogation of poetic language, as when Chapter 9 considers Phèdre’s sustained examination of language’s failure to communicate innermost truths. The book concludes with a brief analysis of the resolution of the liminary aesthetic in sacred tragedies Esther and Athalie, where ambivalence dissolves under the certainty provided by an omnipotent Judeo-Christian god. This coda effectively throws into relief the secular plays’ reliance on the aesthetic of the threshold, which, Racevskis argues, is especially compelling for today’s audiences who are grappling with the biological and ecological limits of existence.

Precisely by setting aside well-worn, more narrowly historical con­cerns for Racine’s relationship to Jansenist theology or the development of French national consciousness, Tragic Passages succeeds in articulating the play’s relevance for modern audiences and opens new lines of inquiry without foreclosing the ambiguity of the plays’ meanings. Very occasion­ally, the desire to liberate the plays from narrow historicism goes a little too far. For example, I wonder whether “self-actualization” is really the best term to designate the state to which Racine’s characters aspire, loaded as it is with the particular assumptions of twentieth-century American psy­chology. Yet such a minor anachronism is a small price to pay for Tragic Passages’ refreshing point of view on Racine’s tragic œuvre. Throughout the book’s pages, Racevskis articulates theoretically sophisticated readings with such lucidity that they could be employed in many undergraduate classrooms. This is no small advantage for a book that aims and succeeds at offering richly insightful new ways to appreciate Racine’s works in our era.

Ellen R. Welch, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

In the introduction to Lecture sartrienne de Racine, Krüger indicates that her goal is to juxtapose Sartre’s and Racine’s “conceptions de l’homme et de la condition humaine” as well as “leurs stratagèmes dramaturgico-psychologiques” (11), in order to demonstrate the modernity of Racine. More concretely, this comparatist study has two objectives. First, Krüger demonstrates the similarities between Sartre’s ideas and those emanating from Racine’s circle, primarily Pierre Nicole and Pascal. Second, the author traces in great detail the manifestation of these ideas in Racine’s Britannicus, Bajazet, and Andromaque. The ideas in question come primarily from several of Sartre’s philosophical texts (above all, L’Être et le néant) and from two of his plays, Huis clos and Les Mouches. Major points of contact between Sartre and Racine include the importance of the other/autrui for both, the close tie between Racinian amour-propre and Sartrian mauvaise foi, and the proclivity that both demonstrate for closed spaces in their plays. She works through these ideas with great care and perseverance. The notion of the regard is extremely important for both, and Krüger discusses numerous variations: “le regard d’autrui,” “le regard supérieur” (for example Amurat in Bajazet and Agrippine in Britannicus), and “le regard regardé.” Other subjects include role-playing, hatred of the other turned against the self, the urge to possess the other, and the effect of death on how one is judged. As my listing indicates, there is considerable breadth in subject matter.

While the author presents careful, thoughtful work, and shows great promise as a future scholar, the Lecture sartrienne de Racine exemplifies why a dissertation should not be published without revision. Many dissertations have been turned into books, but in order for the gap between the two to be bridged, certain important adjustments need to be made. There are four areas in this study where the absence of such modifications is problematic. The first concerns the audience for the book. Since a dissertation is above all a demonstration of one’s intellectual accomplishments, thought is given to impressing the public with one’s erudition, rather than to drawing in and engaging the reader. This 252-page book contains 1,118 footnotes and literally hundreds of quotes from Racine’s plays. It is virtually impossible to read a paragraph without the flow of the argument being repeatedly interrupted by footnotes and quotes. The second dissertation-like feature, while not as off-putting for the reader, instead compromises the value of the study as a whole: discussion is limited to only a few texts by each author. Krüger examines only three of Racine’s twelve plays and only two of Sartre’s eleven. Similar limitations are placed on Sartre’s philosophical texts. Such a strategy makes perfect sense for a dissertation, but a book that contains only two tiny mentions of Phèdre should not be entitledLecture sartrienne de Racine. It is never made clear whether the ideas expressed would function equally well in discussions of other plays by both playwrights. The author makes two half-hearted attempts to justify her choices among Racine’s plays, but one does not apply well to Andromaque (the centrality of the struggle for freedom [21]) and the other—the conception of love—is in no way limited to Britannicus, Bajazet, and Andromaque. Third, there is a decided tendency to include tangential work, so that we find all of Pascal’s mentions of flies; a lengthy and ill-fitting examination of the baroque that includes Dionysius, melancholy, the camp, and cross-dressing; and an exposition of Sartre, Calderón, and Pirandello that excludes Racine entirely. Chapter IV, in particular, reads like a grab bag of tangentially related material. The fourth problem with the book is its structure. As is typical of dissertations, the first chapter deals with the scholarly and theoretical background, but no concrete reference is made to Racine’s theater until page 100, and none to Sartre’s theater until page 129. All four of these areas should have been addressed before publishing this dissertation as a book, and all four make the book less engaging for the reader.

I would like to emphasize that whatever problems there are here, Annika Krüger shows enormous promise as a scholar. The careful manipulation of detail in conjunction with wide-ranging abstract thought is impressive. The patient intelligence and care that went into producing this study are evident on every page. In conclusion, this is a careful study by a young scholar who shows much promise for the future, but the book should have been reworked before publication.

Nina Ekstein, Trinity University

Jane McLeod’s Licensing Loyalty is a clearly written and cogently ar­gued study of state-media relations in the ancien régime. Tracing the evolution of the French state’s regulation of the printing industry from 1667 through the Revolution, McLeod examines the “mutually beneficial” relationship existing between royal authorities and provincial printers through a presentation of case studies and archival data (8, 123). Whereas previous scholars have analyzed printers as operating outside of and in opposition to the state, McLeod convincingly demonstrates their agency in lobbying government officials for favorable policies. In their dealings with royal officials, printers adopted five distinct but overlapping identities: as university men, as clients engaged in patronage networks, as businessmen, as guildsmen, and as loyal officers of the king. The latter roleconstitutesthe central focus of the book (35), as McLeod meticulously investigates the ways in which printers self-fashioned an identity as “pillars of monar­chy” and thereby positioned themselves as loyal subjects of the crown as they vied for the limited number of printing licenses permitted in the king­dom. Far from advocating for freedom of the press, McLeod maintains that the printers themselves—initially in Paris but ultimately throughout the countryside—clamored for increased regulation of their industry by insisting upon the dangers presented by those who would seek profit from the publication of seditious works. While provincial printers favored regulation in order to reduce competition, to protect the dignity of their art, and to solidify their own wealth, royal officials considered the use of li­censes, quotas, and permissions as a means to limit the subversive potential of the printed word in the aftermath of the Fronde and the rise of religious heterodoxy. Beginning with the 1667 order in council requiring a license to print in provincial towns, the French government expanded its regulation of the book trade throughout the eighteenth century, creating a Bureau de la Librairie with its own inspectors and enhancing the role of the chancellor, lieutenants of police, and intendants in enforcing the quo­tas that limited the number of printers in France. As McLeod argues at several junctures, the interaction between the provincial press and the French crown was the site of endless lobbying and bargaining, and in highlighting the state’s struggle to license loyalty, McLeod demonstrates that absolutism was “negotiated rather than imposed” (8).

The first comprehensive evaluation of the French state’s licensing policy, McLeod’s study shifts the field of the history of the book in two important ways. First, Licensing Loyalty centers on the network of printers in the French provinces, rather than emphasizing the book trade in Paris or the importation of forbidden books from abroad. In this respect, McLeod both challenges and complements work by Henri-Jean Martin, Robert Darnton, and others who have overlooked the complications arising from the government’s efforts to establish its authority throughout French ter­ritory. Second, McLeod diverts attention from the clandestine “literary underground” and sheds light instead on the authorized, state-sanctioned press. By analyzing the ways in which provincial printers alternately co­operated with and subverted royal officials, McLeod’s work paints a more complete picture of the public sphere in early modern France. In this re­gard, one wonders why McLeod waits until Chapter 7 to examine the reality “Behind the Rhetoric”—the extent to which licensed printers were responsible for the production and distribution of clandestine texts. Char­acterizing the printers’ allegiance to the crown as a “grudging and contingent loyalty” in the study’s final pages (210), McLeod ultimately qualifies her own assessment of provincial printers as “pillars of monar­chy” in a pretty significant manner. The fact that France’s own elite printing houses disseminated texts previously believed to have originated from Grub Street merits fuller consideration, and McLeod could have in­tegrated this material throughout the study to add further nuance to one of her book’s central arguments.

McLeod’s social and political history evokes the fascinating characters populating the world of book production in early modern France, empha­sizing the material concerns drivingtheir motivations and the complexity of their interactions with royal officials. Well-researched and written with verve, Licensing Loyalty is a valuable contribution to the history of the book, to the study of state-media relations, and to the history of French administration. 

Kathrina LaPorta, New York University

The great merit of Delehanty’s book is to challenge a pervasive myth responsible for the grand siècle’s monolithic isolation from the general flow of French cultural history: the notion of the era’s near universal sub­scription to la doctrine classique.  Whether articulated in terms of neo-Aristotelian unities, the system of bienséances, or the rigid separation of “higher” and “lower” genres, the French seventeenth century’s poetic out­put and the critical apparatus deployed to describe and evaluate it are said to have been the subject of fixed rational rules grounded in the putatively objective properties of the poetic work of art. It sufficed to set a given work alongside the timeless archetypes of the ancient past and apply the infallible laws those archetypes teach in order to determine its character and worth. True, especially dating from the querelle des anciens et des modernes touched off by Perrault’s “Siècle de Louis le Grand” of 1687, the discourse of classical rules was increasingly confronted by the emer­gent, sentiment-based discourse of taste: an enigmatic organ of appreciation possessed of an ineffable je ne sais quoi impervious to ra­tional legislation. The rise of taste is nonetheless said to have marked the beginning of the end of classical doctrine, ushering in a defiantly modern, unapologetically anti-classical culture whose triumph coincides with the transition to the siècle des Lumières. Where, then, les classiques asserted the primacy of a rational poetics of objective rules, enlightened modernes explored an aesthetics rooted in private feeling that licensed the eighteenth-century rejection of eternal verities in favor of the contingencies of empirical experience.

Delehanty opens her counter-narrative by showing how the discourse of feeling was decisively at work at the very moment classical culture reached its apogee with the inauguration of Louis XIV’s personal reign in 1661. As she notes in her introduction, on “mimesis and transcendence” in neoclassical France, the noontime of the poetics of rules is largely con­fined to the decades from 1630 to 1660, when the order of the day was perfection of the dramatic and especially tragic vraisemblance required to achieve a fully convincing imitation of affecting human action. So long as poets focused on the representational technologies needed to create the emotional impact associated with a well-wrought tragic plot, the discourse of rules held sway. However, even at this stage the rules aimed not simply to convince but above all to please; and the pleasure involved was con­sciously emotional—a pleasure, moreover, that, as the tragedies of Pierre Corneille in particular demonstrate, was readily described as sublime. As Delehanty remarks, the emphasis on mimesis, creating a persuasive repre­sentation of human action, inevitably constrained dramatic poetry’s reach: “Tragedies present the human condition, allow us to see ourselves, and move us to reform ourselves, if necessary. They do not go beyond the limits of our world or our understanding” (16). Nevertheless, especially in the vraisemblance extraordinaire that Corneille claimed for his own pro­ductions, poetic mimesis could and did strain the confines of ordinary experience by inducing readers and spectators to swallow feats of self-sacrificial nobility they would have choked on in the natural course of things.

It is, though, only in the years following Louis XIV’s seizure of per­sonal power that the ersatz transcendence in which Corneille specialized became a dominant public theme. As Delehanty puts it, “In the late 1660s and early 1670s, the aspirations for the literary work changed signifi­cantly. No longer was the goal of the literary work only to show us the human condition, but also it aspired to something beyond that condition. Literary criticism took a turn toward the transcendental realm” (18). In making this turn, poets and their critics laid claim to a mode of knowing as transcendental as poets’ newfound aspirations. Where the rule-based po­etics of mimesis set limits roughly coincident with those of ordinary experience, the self-conscious transcendentalisms of the nascent Ludovi­can age pushed beyond; and the vehicle of transcendence was the je ne sais quoi of aesthetic feeling.

The most obvious signal of this change is the publication of Boileau’s 1674 translation of Longinus’s On the Sublime. In the perspective of the traditional interpretation of la doctrine classique, this presents an apparent paradox. For, on the basis of the simultaneous publication of L’Art poétique, Boileau is conventionally identified as the very embodiment of the theory of classical rules. The turning point in Delehanty’s counter-narrative is accordingly chapter 3, “Boileau and the Sublime,” in which she not only argues for the emergent role of transcendence in L’Art poétique itself but goes on to discuss Boileau’s increasing abandonment of a poetics of rules throughout the rest of his career, culminating in his last three Réflexions, where analysis of the objective properties of literary works yields to talk about the effects the sublime produces on readers in the domain of transcendent feeling.

What gives Delehanty’s ground-breaking reading of Boileau still greater weight is the way she anchors that poet’s evolving transcendental­ist speculations in the antecedent writings of Pascal and Bouhours. Pascal supplies at once the warrant and model for the story the book tells. As Delehanty argues in chapter 1, Pascal captures not only the underlying conflict between the human condition on which literary mimesis fastens and the transcendence of God but also the key appeal to inchoate feeling, the famous Pascalian “heart,” as the one true means of achieving knowl­edge of the absolute. As Delehanty subtly demonstrates, Pascal’s model poses problems. If the chief organ of literary knowing is the heart, ena­bling poets and readers to escape the confines of mere mimetic reason in the way Pascal urges it does in our relation to the divine, then literature arrogates creative powers reserved for God alone. Moreover, as Pascal sees it, the only means of provoking the conversion of flesh-bound crea­tures like us is the kind of direct, personal teaching modeled by Jesus Christ in the gospels and provided by private reading of scripture con­ceived as the living word of God. Whence, in chapter 2, Delehanty’s analysis of Bouhours’s efforts to thread the needle of “divine and human creation” in order to grant the latter the power of adducing sacred truths without falling into the sacrilege of assigning human beings a divinity they cannot possess. What Boileau finds in the sublime, then, is a creative power authenticated precisely by what Longinus had already called the more than merely human origin for which the sublime serves as the me­dium. In the encounter with the sublime we discover both truths that transcend ordinary human experience and our own equally transcendent power to do so. The je ne sais quoi of sublime feeling thereby enables us to have our cake and eat it, too, in that what sublime poets create and readers feel is our own only insofar as we become vehicles of the tran­scendence sublimity presents.

In a sense, Delehanty’s story reaches its high point with Boileau: the rest reads like a tale of inevitable decline. With chapter 4, on Rapin, the rigorous transcendence Pascal, Bouhours, and Boileau aim for fades into the sentimentality of moral emotion. What had given access, however im­perfectly, to knowledge of the divine becomes a means of teaching virtue; and while virtue makes us better beings, it does not change our natures as carnal inhabitants of the world of lowly mimesis. Rapin’s disenchanting emphasis on virtue grows still more limiting in his English successor, Dennis, the subject of chapter 5. For though Dennis seeks to ground liter­ary experience in scriptural religion, he can only do so on the basis of a theory of mind that reduces both literature and scripture to an empty occa­sion for the manifestation of mental powers that have, in the end, nothing to do with either. A distinctively literary mode of knowing ceases to be literary at all, opening the way for the aesthetic theories of Du Bos, where, as Delehanty argues in chapter 6, the focus on the psychology of human emotion drives out not only detailed analysis of the works of art that prompt it but transcendence as well.

In one sense, Delehanty’s version of the shift from classical poetics to Enlightenment aesthetics brings us back to what has always seemed its retrospective moment of inception, namely the emergence of eighteenth-century aesthetics seen as at once a triumph and consequence of Enlight­enment secularity. To the absolutism of classical rules enlightened moderns oppose the relativisms of human experience; and a prime articu­lation of this contrast is the doctrine of the aesthetic and the primacy it awards pure private feeling. However, by showing both how deeply the antecedents of Enlightenment aesthetics reach back into the neoclassical age and how the proto-aesthetics of the sublime are linked to a thirst for transcendence Pascal’s and Boileau’s early eighteenth-century descen­dants reject, Delehanty enables us to begin to think about the underlying historical dialectic by which, in the aesthetic writings of Kant and the Ro­mantics if not of Burke and Hume, transcendence makes a comeback. What I most heartily recommend in the book is thus the renewed sense of dynamism it brings both to the grand siècle and to its contribution to the larger patterns of French and more broadly European intellectual and artistic culture.

Christopher Braider, University of Colorado, Boulder

La Motte is best remembered today for his role in the second round of the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. But he was also a prolific and gifted playwright who tried his hand at virtually every dramatic and operatic genre, as well as dramatic theory. Les Originaux, his first very work for the stage, composed at age 21, is a very entertaining comedy that gives us glimpses of his future potential. In addition, this play, destined for the Italian troupe, provides a fairly typical example of the type of comic entertainment they were providing Parisian audiences in the final decades of the century. It also shows how far from the original commedia dell’arte model this company had moved by 1693: only about one-third of the scenes are improvisations (in Italian), while the vast majority of the play consists of written-out scenes in French. At the same time, the comedy incorporates episodes of singing and dancing, sometimes combined with machine effects.

Arguably the comedy’s most original feature is the abundance of dra­matic and musical satire. Some of the allusions constitute a celebration of the great masters of the preceding generation, especially Molière, who is repeatedly named and imitated. One surprising touch is that the heroine, Colombine, not only displays a passion for drama and claims Molière as her favorite author, but also composes comedies and displays real ability. Although she is not a bas-bleu and admits that she is exaggerating her passion for wit in order to discourage her father in his attempts to marry her off, she may well signal La Motte’s appreciation for the women writ­ers of his day. At the same time, La Motte’s spokespersons in the play, who, startlingly, include Colombine’s tyrannical father, criticize both the lack of talent on the part of current playwrights and the lack of interest from audience members, who either spend their time in the theater flirting with the opposite sex or spend long periods away fighting in the war. Ref­erences to opera focus on the poor quality of the libretti and on the sameness of the recent works—a point Assaf underscores by listing the new operas produced in the three-year period preceding La Motte’s com­edy. Although La Motte feels that composers and poets working in the decade following the deaths of Lully and Quinault are sticking too closely to the consecrated models, that does not stop him from quoting directly from two of those masters’ operas.

Assaf provides a wealth of useful information that helps to explain the historical and cultural context, while identifying many of the numerous literary and musical allusions and explaining their pertinence. However, there are some that he fails to identify. These include the direct quoting of the hymn to liberty from Lully and Quinault’s Isis (III.5) at the start of the comedy’s final divertissement, and there are interesting structural and thematic parallels between the two works. The expression “la folle enchère” (III.12) must have been intended as a reference to the comedy by Mme Ulrich and Dancourt, performed just three years earlier. And the series of theatrical allusions in I.4 needs elucidation. As Lancaster noted, the recently deceased actor and playwright was probably Raymond Pois­son, and the authors of two comedies dealing with the Phaéton myth were Boursault and Palaprat. I suggest that the playwright who, after a series of tragedies set in Rome, chose a Byzantine subject is Campistron. The refer­ence to a “prodigue Boisset” in the passage from Colombine’s comedy that she reads aloud presumably was a topical reference, as well. If, as Assaf suggests, Colombine’s compositional activity was meant to refer to Mme de Villedieu, who had died ten years earlier but whose novels still retained their popularity, this could conceivably allude to her lover, An­toine de Boësset de Villedieu (whose name she would adopt, though they were never married).

The well-researched introduction combines relevant background in­formation (about the author, the history of commedia dell’arte companies in France, the makeup of the Italian troupe in 1693, the play’s initial re­ception) with a detailed, scene-by-scene analysis of the play. It could have been expanded to relate this dramatic debut to La Motte’s dramatic career as a whole. Les Originaux is in many respects a first draft of his Moderne position, especially given the praise of liberty, originality, and preference for contemporary writers and taste.

The text, presented in original spelling, is carefully presented and an­notated. Typos are rare, but three of them risk confusing the reader: a speech attributed to a wrong character (II.5), a faulty listing of characters in a scene heading (III.5), and a stage direction that is centered and printed in all capital letters (III.9). The bibliography is short but helpful, and the illustrations, showing the frontispieces and some of the original music, are a delight.

Francis Assaf is to be commended for reintroducing this charming and historically significant comedy to modern readers. The volume definitely belongs in every university library.

Perry Gethner, Oklahoma State University

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