Retrospectives: Essays in Literature, Poetics and Cultural History (review)

Students of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century French literature have long benefited from Terence Cave's restless reading and erudite essays on a wide range of topics, from devotional poetry to dramatic theory, from the rhetorical tradition to the emergence of the modern self, from reading to religion and economics. In addition to his six books, Cave has written a large number of influential articles that have appeared in many different countries and in both English and French. Several of the most influential of those articles, which range in date from 1970 to 2009, have now been gathered in revised form here, along with sections of Cave's 1999 Pré-histoires: textes troublés au seuil de la modernité, here translated and combined with other studies. The result is a very welcome overview of several of the central themes of Cave's work. The editors, who give an excellent introduction to Cave's approach and his favoured problematics, have assembled the studies in four sections. The first concerns shifts in the way people read and wrote about their reading in the sixteenth century. The second is devoted to poetry and its complex intertextuality Next comes a section that centres on what one might describe broadly as intellectual history, since it deals with concepts such as scepticism and the modern self or moi, matters approached with Cave's particularly refined literary and rhetorical sensitivity to chronological perspective, with an awareness that anachronism is not so much a simple fault of historical and literary thinking but rather a condition for such thinking. Cave's exemplary studies here demonstrate the limits of the traditional intellectual history with its tendency to isolate arguments from their complex textual embodiment. One of Cave's major contributions — the rise of suspense as a major poetic and aesthetic function — is represented here. The fourth and final section ranges beyond the early modern period into the late twentieth century. Suspense again appears, along with the drive for definitive closure. The recognition plot, which Cave studied in passionate detail in his major book Recognitions: A Study in Poetics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), is shown evolving into the Bildungsroman. Here Cave analyses texts ranging from Vida's 1527 Ars poetica to Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus (1984), but with particular attention to the figure of Mignon from Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. The editors note the importance in Cave's work of 'a poetics that is wholly orientated towards history' (p. 7), and they point out, appropriately, his openness to such movements as 'new historicism'. However, what appears to me to be most striking in Cave's approach to the historical study of texts is a double independence: Cave's own independence as a critic through the period of forty highly productive years during which '-isms' proliferated, and, secondly, his courageous defence of the insight that cultural production, notably in the case of literary texts, does not fit comfortably into common and homogenizing conceptions of period. This is an important collection of studies that reveals the coherence and abiding value of Terence Cave's contribution to French literary studies.