Studies in French Fiction in Honour of Vivienne Mylne (review)

178 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION fall to Walter Scott, who had already begun a draft of a novel that would be published in 1814 as Waverley" (p. 94). Traces of a developmental model are still evident at the end ofthe study, which closes with the falling off, or limitations, of Romantic fiction—a ballistics theory of form, with rises, peaks, and falls. He ends, significantly, with a critique of Romantic discourse and its limitations in Peacock and in James Hogg, a final critique of the Romantic cult of subjectivity and the centred self: "Hogg's novel puts into question late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century assumptions about the coherence of the self, about the power of writing to make the inward self present to others, and about the self-validating authority of autobiographical and expressive writing" (p. 261). He brings together here the crucial questions that hover in and around this study about the novel and cultural power: For how could the novel or fiction be both propaganda—a means for intervening, for good or for ill, in actual moral and social change and conflict—and yet, as art, also be above such change and conflict? Or, to put the question another way, when fiction aspired to an was it not simply trying to mask its own partiality, tendentiousness, and bias in order to achieve greater rhetorical effectiveness in pursuit of its particular political or classand gender-based goals? Is art or literature apolitical or simply another way of being political? (p. 252) Were this study a bit more theoretical, Kelly might have had recourse to J.M. Bernstein's study of Lukács and his theory of the novel, in which Bernstein argues that this is the essential problematic of the novel: "the novel is the attempt to write the world as it is in terms of how it ought to be" (The Philosophy of the Novel: Lukács, Marxism and the Dialectics ofForm [1984], p. 215). These are, however, rather small complaints about an otherwise excellent study, one that is substantially better than the modest outward form the series and survey would indicate. Gary Kelly's English Fiction ofthe Romantic Period 1789-1830 is an excellent study of the cultural work performed by Romantic fiction. James Thompson University ofNorth Carolina—Chapel Hill Robert Gibson, ed. Studies in French Fiction in Honour of Vivienne Mylne. London: Grant & Cutler, 1988. 375pp. Students of eighteenth-century French fiction are well acquainted with Vivienne Mylne's contributions to the field, in particular her study The Eighteenth Century French Novel: Techniques ofIllusion (1965, rev. ed. 1981). Mylne's interests are REVIEWS 179 wide-ranging, however, and the present Festschrift looks at works from different periods, offering a variety of critical approaches. Given the constraints of space, I will confine most of my remarks to the articles on eighteenth-century topics, approximately one-third of the total. Following a piece by the editor, Robert Gibson, on Mylne's life and works, along with a bibliography of her writings compiled by David J. Shaw, the first article on a work ofeighteenth-century fiction is Roger Cardinal's analysis of Cazotte , "Le Diable amoureux and the pure fantastic." Cardinal argues persuasively that Cazotte's novel, while dismissed in Todorov's Introduction à la littérature fantastique, is nevertheless a striking specimen of the genre. Cardinal's own elegant reading neatly underscores the novel's tensions between gender identities, the real and the unreal, the human and the non-human. Henri Coulet's "Quelques réflexions sur le réalisme et sur Marivaux" offers some personal musings by a distinguished scholar on Marivaux's relation to "realism." One of the pleasures of reading Marivaux, according to Coulet, is in the complicity established between writer and reader—neither is "innocent" or duped by novelistic illusion. He concludes by suggesting that even Marivaux's early "fanciful" novels "annoncent la manière critique dont Diderot inscrira la réalité dans le roman," a notion certainly worthy of development. "Journalistic fictions and editorial realities" are provocatively juxtaposed in Angus Martin's account of Beffroy de Reigny's Cousin Jacques series of periodicals from 1785-92. In this look at late eighteenth-century journalism...