Paul et Virginie (review)

608 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 13:4 Blanchot, and Klossowski on the infamous marquis. The Invention ofthe Libertine Body may not have the idiosyncratic appeal ofthese previous works on Sade. But it does academically the work the others could not do. Indeed, here Sade is re-placed in the context of the Enlightenment. Hénaff illustrates the way in which Sade puts an end to the classical episteme in all its discursive projects, narrative, scientific, or anthropological (Sade is compared to La Mettrie, Helvétius, Holbach, Rousseau). At the same time, he studies how Sade's thought fares in modern philosophy. If Lacan has taught us to read Sade with Kant, Hénaff teaches us to read him with Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud. This is an exhaustive approach to one of the most difficult and paradoxical authors of the eighteenth century, and Hénaff has given his work a coherence and an intelligence which remain unsurpassed. Hénaff's book comes after a recent wave of biographies of the famous eighteenth-century libertine—all tendentious by inclination. Here theparti pris of the body ofworks and of Sade's writing is affirmed as a defying and enlightening alternative. Pierre Saint-Amand Brown University Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. Paul et Virginie. Ed. Jean-Michel Racault. Le Livre de poche classique. Paris: Librairie générale française, 1999. FFr30. ISBN 2-253-00729-3 This new edition of Bernardin's bestseller provides an excellent introduction to the author, the text and the historical period that saw its creation. Jean-Michel Racault devotes nearly one hundred pages to introductory material and the result is a most satisfactory presentation of the novel and its many qualities. He puts the novel into its cultural setting by showing the relationship with other works and other themes of the period. He is also conscious of the desire to categorize the novel as a fictional form—is it a pastoral tale with a difference, a moral tale, or a Utopian fiction? There is a brief account of the reception of the novel and a longer study of the ways in which the text influenced later writers. There follows a most useful glossary of the technical terms to be found in the novel, a brief chronology, and a short but useful bibliography. Racault reprints the text of the 1789 edition (the same choice was made by Guitton in his 1989 Classiques Garnier edition). This has the undoubted advantage of sending the long "Préambule" to the end of the volume where it can be read by those readers who want a further, later, reflection on the novel. Racault has modernized the spelling and punctuation, as the text is clearly intended primarily for the student reader. Convenient footnotes and variants are to be found at the bottom of the page, and the volume concludes with a reading of a number of the relevant manuscripts which have remained in Le Havre, in particular the "jupon bouffant" episode which inspired so many illustrators. Racault's edition offers a REVIEWS 609 sound, scholarly approach to the novel, which will be much appreciated both by students and their teachers, and it represents excellent value for a modest cost. Malcolm Cook University of Exeter Janice Farrar Thaddeus. Frances Burney: A Literary Life. Literary Lives. New York: St Martin's Press; London: Macmillan, 2000. xii + 263pp. ISBN 0-333-60763-5. This book is one of at least three full-length studies of Frances Burney which appeared in the year 2000—a token of intense interest which shows no sign of diminishing. It focuses closely on her development as a writer, effectively demonstrating the quiet energy with which she dealt with the social and literary assumptions of her time. Considering the exigencies of the life she led, the sheer volume of her work is amazing. Janice Farrar Thaddeus provides a vivid account of the special "female difficulties" that Burney encountered. Readers, however, may have some reservations about Thaddeus's approach to the fiction. Like some other critics, she sees Burney as "reinventing the novel" (p. 33)—but the early reception of her work does not really bear this out. She was clearly writing within contemporary expectation...