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Book Reviews97 University of East Anglia," and Chapter Three consists of four book reviews that do not appear to have been revised at all but merely juxtaposed — one, two three, four. Other chapters are lectures or articles whose arrangement produces no sense of logical progression. It seems that a linguist familiar with reader-response criticism might have suspected that a group of essays originally directed to a series of diverse addressees is not likely to assume homogeneity when collected, but this does not seem to have been the case. The result is an egregious lack of cohesiveness. What is profitable in the book is Fowler's interest in tying criticism — once it is completely untied from formalisms — to historical causation so that "texts are opened to the same kinds of causal and functional interpretations as are found in the sociology of language generally." In "The Referential Code and Narrative Authority," which this reader found to be the book's most useful chapter, Fowler describes the form and the rhetorical and ideological functions of "generic sentences" so as to shed light on the problem of the intrusive author in the tradition of bourgeois realist fiction, applying his findings as well to the histor of nonfictional genres. His explorations here and in a later chapter on anti-language in fiction are interesting and skillfully done. In addition, throughout the book Fowler usefully ties together studies by such scholars as M.A.K. Halliday, M. Bakhtin, and D. Hymes, often suggesting alternate (if not new) areas to explore. It is worth noting that while Fowler occasionally alludes to the Prague Structuralists and to Jan Mukarovsky, he is apparently not familiar with the later work of this group. It is unjust to criticize the Mukarovsky of "Standard Language and Poetic Language" and not acknowledge the one of "Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value as Social Facts," especially when Mukarovsky provides an eloquent rationale for a program much like that being proposed — some 50 years later — by Fowler. LEE H. DOWLiNG University of Houston Robert Barry Leal. Drieu la Rochelle. Boston: Twayne, 1982. 156p. This volume is Leal's second book on Drieu la Rochelle, the first, Drieu la Rochelle: Decadence in Love, having been published in 1973 by the University of Queensland Press. While the late 1970s witnessed a renewal of interest in Drieu after Gallimard's reprinting and reediting of the author's unavailable works, most studies have focused on him as an historical figure. Leal's aim is to concentrate exclusively on Drieu's imaginative writing. He sees its unifying theme as the attempt by the individual "self" to define its relationship with the decadence of contemporary society. The first chapter, devoted to Drieu's youthful war poems and short stories, serves to illustrate the writer's early preoccupation with death, decadence, misogyny, and fascism. Chapter Two, "The Search for Literary Structures," examines Drieu's works of the early 1920s, Etat civil. Plainte contre inconnu, and L'Homme couvert de femmes. Leal excuses Drieu's technical weaknesses — unnecessary repetition, clumsy transitions of point of view, authorial "paternalism" in a tendency to explain at length the characters' words and actions — as indications of the writer's literary adolescence and experimentation. On the other hand, he finds, in Etat civil, a significant development in Drieu's discovery of the mirror as a device for illustrating the multiplicity of the self, a constant preoccupation 98ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW throughout the writer's work. Chapter Three, "Individual Reactions to Decadence," concentrates on Drieu's three works of fiction of the prewar period, Bleche, Une Femme à sa fenêtre, and Le Feu follet. Their main features of interest are an increasing complexity in psychological analysis and social criticism and an evolution from the particular to the general. Drieu's fiction of the early 1930s — Drôle de voyage, La Comédie de Charleroi, Journal d'un homme trompé, and Beloufcia — is analyzed in Chapter Four, "The Quest for Identity." Its principal significance lies in a widening range of points of view, the introduction of an exotic element, and a somewhat surrealistic conception of women as a means to mystical experience, although, as Leal points out, "women remain essentially an...

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