Corps, littérature, société (1789–1900) (review)

The task Corps, littérature, société (1789-1900) sets itself is not a small one: to evaluate the relationship of bodies, texts and society from the Revolution to the close of the nineteenth century. However, the voices in this collection of eighteen essays combine to offer a structured, detailed and often persuasive reading of the compendium's central theme. The work divides into four sections. The first explores the interaction of the body with various political discourses. Section two considers the destruction of the King and the state he incarnated, assessing the bodies, personal and political, offered to fill this void. The way in which history incarnates itself is the subject of section three, while section four devotes itself to the relationship between the body and textual creation. The strengths of this volume are various. Principal among them are the breadth of disciplines and genres it considers (history, the novel, theatre, poetry, autobiography and literary criticism). A comparable breadth is to be found in terms of the political regimes and authors explored as the collection moves between the Revolution and the Second Empire, from Sade to Huysmans. This breadth is clearly marshalled in structural terms as the compendium works to achieve the coherence edited volumes can lack. Whilst certain themes bleed beyond the subsection that would contain them, the collection largely enjoys a clear narrative flow. Bourdenet's piece on Le Chevalier des Touches closes with the words with which Dufour's subsequent piece starts: 'L'Histoire à fleur de peau.' Petitier's essay on the disintegrating body of the King is followed by Saminadayar-Perrin's piece on the problematic body of the people offered in its place. The quality of the contributions is generally very good. The commendable breadth of the collection is in part mitigated, however, by its reliance on certain canonical authors. Of the eighteen pieces, three are devoted to Balzac, three to Dumas and two to Sand. Whilst the quality of these essays is clear, the compendium's contention that the interaction of bodies, literature and society is a key concern throughout this era might have been usefully extended to consider other writers, such as those of the Naturalist school.

The idea that the revolution instigated a new conceptualization of the individual and political body following the disintegration of the King's body is an established one. However, Corps, littérature, société (1789-1900) innovates by moving away from a linear conceptualization of such a process. It revels in the complexities and contradictions of post-revolutionary bodies, bodies which at once act upon and bear the marks of history, bodies in process, bodies by means of which texts write themselves and the author assesses his/her own corpus. The collection is a vibrant piece. It constitutes a useful addition to the shelves of those interested in nineteenth-century developments in general and post-revolutionary representations of the body in particular.