L’Orient des revues (XIXe et XXe siècles) ed. by Daniel Lançon (review)

At a time when there are exciting new approaches to the connections between literature and the press (notably by Marie-Ève Thérenty and Alain Vaillant), this slim edited volume provides a useful series of glimpses into ‘the Orient’ (Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa) in periodicals from the 1830s to the mid-twentieth century. The study of the press is particularly relevant to our understanding of literary Orientalism because many literary travelogues (‘récits viatiques’), along with Orientalist fiction and poetry, were originally published in periodicals. A collective work of this kind is able to show us the multiple, and often contradictory, perspectives apparent in the press, reflecting what Thérenty and Vaillant have called its impersonal and dialogical nature. As several of the contributors point out, this multiplicity of attitudes is invaluable in the case of writing on the Orient, colonialism, and decolonization, since it suggests a need to nuance ideas of a homogeneous discourse of Orientalism. Only one of the contributors, Pascale Roux, examines a periodical published outside France (and one which does not reflect any real ‘writing back’, but rather the Egyptian francophone cultural elite of the 1920s and 1930s, and its difficulty in positioning itself in relation to Orientalism and Egyptian identity). Nevertheless, there is plenty of ideological range in the texts studied. The sheer breadth covered in each contribution is a challenge, in response to which some contributors display an ‘esprit de synthèse’, notably Marion Moreau in her discussion of the Eastern question, and of national identities conceived in ethnic terms in Eastern Europe, as revealed in the Revue des deux mondesbetween 1829 and 1856. Others begin with a numerical approach that at times resorts to lists (for example, on the Magasin pittoresque) or to Moretti-style biometrics in a more theoretically informed contribution by Guillaume Bridet dealing with India as a subject, and articles by Indian writers, in the journal Europe. More precisely focused contributions include Françoise Genevray’s discussion of Pierre Leroux’s writings on China and India, published in the left-wing Revue indépendantein the years preceding the 1848 revolution. Michel Murat gives a lively sense of the field’s diversity in two contributions: the first reveals a range of attitudes to colonialism in the Mercure de Francebefore the First World War, with some remarkable in-fighting behind the scenes (giving way to pro-colonial consensus after the war); his rather acerbic second contribution deals with the post-Second World War period, contrasting the engagement of Les Temps moderneswith what he sees as the belated orientalism of the NRF.