The Poetics of Literary Transfer in Early Modern France and England by Hassan Melehy (review)

Hassan Melehy is very clear about the aims and methodologies of The Poetics of Literary Transfer in Early Modern France and England. “This book,” he writes, “is about the formation of the literary canons in early modern France and England, by way of readings of four authors whose work displays a concern for the role of a literary canon in an emergent national state” (1). The four authors in question—Joachim Du Bellay, Edmund Spenser, Michel Montaigne, and William Shakespeare—are each, he says, “concerned with the problems of translation, specifically of how a text in a foreign language can be adapted as well as how an emergent national literature can build itself on material that is initially foreign to it” (1). Using an approach that “necessitates a combination of literary history and formalist methodology,” Melehy is interested in “advancing an understanding of literature as involving a mutual effectiveness between the present and the channels of transmission of the past” (1, 10). He is also, more largely, interested in bringing to light “the historical dynamics that continue to make the literature of the past of value to the present” (10).

Melehy’s introduction debates the benefits of historicist, formalist, and presentist approaches to the study of literature and demonstrates that the author is able to steer a course between them. Even before he knew very much about New Historicism, he says, his “study of Du Bellay involved practicing that approach’s broad examination of discursive networks that cut across institutionally prescribed genre distinctions,” yet also maintained “a notion of the autonomy of the literary text as a privileged site of the confluency and negotiation of discourses” (3). His debts to poststructuralist criticism are often evident in his prose style in phrases such as “Spenser is announcing that [his predecessors’] poetry is effectively in ruins, ruins from which he will build his own poetry and open the way to that of the future” (119) or “[Montaigne’s] book, the Essais, rather than making a place for itself in a closed literary canon, opens itself to experience” (153). Sometimes this falls slightly flat; at other times, as is the case with his discussion of the merits of Deleuze and Baudrillard’s different formulations of the simulacrum (12–14), this sensitivity to poststructuralist criticism provides a strong underpinning for Melehy’s argument. Deleuze’s notion of the simulacrum as “a repetition, a reiteration of another image that itself refers back to an image anterior to it” (13–14) subtends Melehy’s central position that “images of the past” are transmitted into the present “so that they may be reworked; the ensuing images then [entering] the momentum of history where they may be conveyed to the future.” “The simulacrum,” he maintains, “is an integral part of the poetics of literary transfer” (14).

The book is composed of four parts, each corresponding to an author. Parts 1 and 2, on Du Bellay and Spenser, work together well. Arguing, for example, that “Spenser outlines the foundation of the new English poetry on the ruins of Rome through a reworking primarily of Du Bellay” (119), Melehy suggests that Spenser “clears away all the space of antiquity and of his French predecessor who transmits antiquity to him” (122). Where Du Bellay’s poetry evinces “doubt as to the possibility of any durability at all,” Spenser, Melehy proposes, attempts to arrive at “a domain of poetry that brings earthly life into contact with the divine” (134). Spenser’s sonnets offer “a vision in which worldly vanity must realize its own precariousness” (117), but which simultaneously “demonstrates that the destruction of the old poetry is by its very nature also a creation of the new” (119). In other words, Melehy suggests that, by rewriting Du Bellay (“for whom immortality and eternity remain uncertain”), “the project of Spenserian poetics [is] to bridge the gap between the wished-for earthly immortality of poetry and the divine eternity...