Transformations of Petrarch in Nineteenth-Century France by Jennifer Rushworth (review)

This thoroughly researched work by Jennifer Rushworth comes in the wake of Petrarchism and more generally of Medievalism Studies. The political and sociological analysis, led through the prism of Petrarch's reception, are particularly interesting and they also situate this work within the broader discipline of Cultural Studies.

The author aims "to explore the specifically French motivation behind the reception of Petrarch in the nineteenth century and to investigate the different forms that this reception took" (2). The volume studies the reception of Petrarch's poetry through its French transformations in its broader sense—that includes translations and rewritings. While Rushworth's study is only focused on the French nineteenth century, its roots draw from the 1750s and 1760s, in order to discover the three writers "who were to be foundational for modern French Petrarchism" (7): Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the abbé de Sade.

The focus of this work is therefore the translations and rewritings of Petrarch in a specific period, but the author analyses them in an innovative perspective. The latter involves a reception theory reading through various cultural elements like biographies, festivals, essays and reviews, thematic journals, etc.

This ambitious project had to overcome the obstacles of language, especially for many specific terms that were left untranslated—and rightly so—and for the French translations that had to be retranslated in English. Maybe, it should have been written in French with an English introduction for every chapter. As it is, the use of English makes this work lose some of its idiomatic literary flavour. Nonetheless it allows all readers to enjoy its heuristic and cultural approach.

Indeed, Rushworth shows how Francesco Petrarca, through his transformations, plays an antithetical role in the French nineteenth century, between national and local tensions. First, Petrarch takes part in the construction of a French national imaginary in the aftermath of the French Revolution and during the Napoleonic Wars. Second, he is not claimed as a French poet but as an Avignonese or Provençal poet "to the greater glory of the city and region in the face of cultural and linguistic domination from the north after the Unification" (10). The numerous features of French Petrarch and Laura seem to come within this continual opposition between singularity and plurality, between the nuances of peculiar interpretations and the major characters of literary tradition.

The first part analyses not only the most important and the less known French translations of Canzoniere and Triumphi, but also their issues concerning title, order, numbering, and division of these collections. The author explains here also the continuity and discontinuity between French translations of the Latin Petrarch and of the Italian Petrarch.

The second part is dedicated to French nineteenth-century Petrarchism and more generally to the influence of Petrarch in French literature. In this perspective, the genre of the Petrarchan novel (roman pétrarquiste) seems to be one of the most prolific devices for poetic appropriation in this century: "the increasing popularity of the novel in nineteenth-century France, conjoined with Romantic medievalism, enables a true transformation of Petrarch from poetry to prose" (187).

How many Petrarchs do we have to consider in order to describe his cultural influence? An Italian, a French, a Provençal, a national, and a local Petrarch? As the centuries go by, we keep crowning new Petrarchs in relation to our culture and feelings, our ideologies and desires. This learned essay allows us to appreciate the performativity of the myth of a French-Italian Petrarch, and it may well be a first step towards a more comprehensive subject and a more complex challenge for Cultural Studies—uncovering the myth of a European Petrarch.