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REVIEWS 85 he seeks to connect fiction with economic, social, and philosophical issues. In addition, the conflict he perceives between bourgeoisie and aristocracy explains the ideological purpose behind the predominance of heroines in eighteenth-century fiction: the threat to female virtue symbolized the threat to bourgeois culture. Once again, his valiant attempt to synthesize the material is not always convincing because of the complexity of the issues at stake and the broad generalizations such an attempt entails. The final two chapters, devoted respectively to the analysis of Diderot's La Religieuse (1761) and Sade's Justine ou Les malheurs de la Vertu (1791), illustrate the new narrative modes. DiPiero examines them through the seduction of female protagonists whose tales must convince readers to come to their help. As in the case of La Princesse de Clèves, he establishes a parallel between the seduction of Croismare by Suzanne Simonin and the seduction by the novel of its readers: in both cases, the "narratee" has the illusion of interpretive power. In effect, the self-referentiality of the narrative openly exposes Suzanne's seductive strategies to readers. Given these premises, I am puzzled by the conclusion which argues that readers of La Religieuse are cautioned by the novel "to be wary of the dulling effect of relying on narrative convention" (p. 329). There seems to be a contradiction between the two claims. How can one be seduced by a narrative which provides the tools to escape the seduction (through self-referentiality)? Situating his textual analysis within a socio-historical context, he concludes that La Religieuse is in a "continuum with bourgeois material and ideological culture" (p. 331). Sade's Justine, on the other hand, poses a threat to the bourgeois system of values. After examining the libertins' actions and their paradoxical quest for autonomy through the physical and/or verbal violence perpetrated against other individuals, DiPiero turns to Justine's ambiguous status as a victim. He subscribes to and develops the idea suggested by Roland Barthes that Justine appropriates her victimizers' language despite their very antagonistic relations. The seemingly stable edifying message about the advantages of bourgeois virtue (sexual restraint and the respect of property) is upset by the novel's dénouement: Justine's death—caused by lightning and thus nature—turns vice into a resistance to the oppressive ideology of the bourgeois notion of virtue. In his concluding remarks, DiPiero places his work in perspective and, recognizing his own possible blind spots, comments on the difficulty of occupying a position of mastery over his own narrative. As if to disarm his critics, he mentions some of the most obvious omissions: female authorship, sexuality, philosophical discourse, the commodification of the body, colonialism, the issue of race. Throughout this provocative study, in which novelistic fiction appears as a "literature of resistance," DiPiero breaks new ground, and the speculative risks he takes are definitely worthwhile for all the new avenues they open. The book covers much ground and is very commendable for its investigation of the political nature of texts seemingly concerned primarily with private matters. Nadine Bérenguier Harvard University Elizabeth Kraft. Character and Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Comic Fiction . Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992. xv + 202pp. US$35.00. ISBN 0-8203-1365-3. Elizabeth Kraft dedicates this book to the memory of a reading teacher with whom she studied as a child. In her conclusion, she describes the "ethical dimension" that teacher 86 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 6:1 gave to reading. For example, he asked his students to find in books "two ideas that you can put into practice to benefit mankind" (p. 155). Kraft offers us eighteenth-century comic fiction as an ethical alternative to the selfishness and impersonality that she attributes to literary modernism. She reads five eighteenthcentury novels—Tom Jones, The Female Quixote, Tristram Shandy, Peregrine Pickle, and Burney's Cecilia—as "eloquent" protests against the defeat of "communal values" by the modem tendency towards "the exploration of the personal" (p. 156). Following Richard Sennett, she argues that before the eighteenth century, human identity, the self, was "a unified whole" defined within a "traditional theocentric community" (pp. 27, 42), while after the eighteenth century the self...

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