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Book Reviews Patricia Hannon. Fabulous ¡dentities: Women's Fairy Tales in Seventeenth-century France. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1998. Pp. 226. Patricia Harmon's recent book is a finely documented and well-written study of women's fairy tales produced toward the end of the seventeenth century. While attentive to historical perspective , Hannon stays close to the texts she analyzes. She develops a convincing thesis setting male-invented heroines against female-crafted ones, locating that difference in stylistic concerns, in order eventually to set off the more profound ideological differences at stake between the two. In so doing, she proceeds in a tale-by-tale analysis. She argues that the salon women taking up this genre were not indulging in escapist activity but, to the contrary, engaging with modernist esthetics, claiming for themselves cartesian subjectivity, and breaking with confining prescriptions regarding their place in the world. Here they articulated their ambition and autonomy. Hannon is attentive to the immediate context of the production of these tales, to the times when they were penned, to the manner in which they came to be ascribed to women as a feminine activity , and to the way they articulated the tensions felt between the aristocracy, the court, the bourgeoisie , the salon, and the academies. She focuses especially on the way wealth figures into the stories, asserting that these writing women (Aulnoy, Bernard, Lhéritier, Murat, in particular) laid claim to rights that were blatantly inconsonant with the prescribed social order of the times through their deployment of narratives promoting social mobility and celebrating female empowerment through manifestations of material wealth. Harmon's close readings are useful to the reader in search of a way of understanding the tales beyond the literal, and their times beyond the obvious. Integrating historical, feminist and literary considerations, the study offers important analyses and original interpretations. At the same time, her book gives evidence of thorough reading and research, both of primary materials and of secondary sources, as well as of cautious and sound thinking. She evinces an impressive erudition, and offers to the reader numerous tantalizing leads to follow for further investigation of the topic. She is an attentive reader with a marked sensitivity to the text and makes good use of literary theory to analyze, without overwhelming, her primary sources. Her use of Gérard Genette's work on plausibility and motivation is especially to the point. But most notably, her thinking is consistently of a well-grounded feminist persuasion . Harmon's book will be essential reading for all future scholars of French women's fairy tales in early modern France, and for readers seeking to understand more completely the complex status of women toward the end of the seventeenth century in France. Michèle Longino Duke University James Lawler. Poetry and Moral Dialectic. Baudelaire's "Secret Architecture." Cranbury, NJ/ London/Mississauga: Associated University Presses/Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1997. In a short essay taken up in the Entretiens sur la poésie, Yves Bonnefoy ponders the significance of the publication of yet one more book devoted to the work of one of our great founding authors. As today with James Lawler's new analysis of Baudelaire's celebrated Les Fleurs du Mal, much emerges to urge Bonnefoy's enthusiastic welcoming of the imagined rereading ofthat which we may have thought we had neatly pinned down. For years Lawler has meditated and written on elements of the larger "structure" with which his reflection subtly engages in Poetry and Moral Dialectic. What now is offered is a full-blown, Vol. XL, No. 1 111 ...

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