The Cambridge Companion to French Literature ed. by John D. Lyons (review)

'The past is never dead. It's not even past' (William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun, I. III). John Lyons uses this quotation in his Introduction to this stimulating volume, in which he makes it clear that his aim as editor was not to pack as much 'coverage' as possible into the limited space available, but to present a series of overlapping and mutually reinforcing perspectives on French literature across the centuries. 'The chapters of this book,' he writes, 'are interlaced just as the French literary tradition itself consists of connections, often unexpected, from period to period, author to author, book to book' (p. 2). The opening chapter by Karen Sullivan thus discusses medieval romance in relation to the characteristics of the modern novel, and asks what 'realism' would have meant in the Middle Ages. Elisabeth Ladenson relates the modern reputation of the French for writing pernicious and obscene books (particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) back to earlier genres such as the medieval fabliau. Ian James shows how the twentieth-century crisis of philosophical subjectivity may be seen in the light of the ambivalence that characterizes the whole French literary-philosophical tradition from Montaigne onwards (on the one hand 'the desire to ground knowledge and thought within the subject of experience'; on the other 'the experience of this subject itself as without ground', p. 246). For practical reasons, this volume concentrates on Hexagonal literature and does not address the literature of the francophone world (although Charles Forsdick's chapter explores contemporary 'translingual' writing in French and the ways in which such writing allows us 'a glimpse of French as a language detached from its close ties to a single nation', p. 219). Other chapters are by Deborah McGrady ('Joan of Arc and the Literary Imagination'), Marc Bizer ('Poetry and Modernity'), Tom Conley ('The Graphic Imagination and the Printed Page'), John Lyons ('Tragedy and Fear'), Elizabeth Goldsmith ('Galant Culture'), Michael Moriarty ('Varieties of Doubt in Early Modern Writing'), Caroline Warman ('Nature and Enlightenment'), Rosemary Lloyd ('Nostalgia and the Creation of the Past'), Jennifer Yee ('Exoticism and Colonialism'), Carrie Noland ('Poetic Experimentation'), Edward Hughes ('The Renewal of Narrative in the Wake of Proust'), and Warren Motte ('The Novel in the New Millennium'). The strength of this book lies not simply in the excellence of the individual essays but also in its kaleidoscopic nature. By focusing on a particular topic or genre in a particular period, but suggesting links to other periods and other topics, these essays combine to form a thoroughly convivial Companion.