Eighteenth-Century Escape Tales: Between Fact and Fiction ed. by Michael Mulryan and Denis Grélé (review)

Reviews 261 methods. Rather than a left/right political divide, she notes a generational, predominantly aesthetic one: Copeau and the Cartel “conquered” the Comédie-Française, all but Baty producing shows there by the later 1930s. It was then the avant-garde directors who, in turn, challenged the modernists. McCready’s insightful and highly readable study made me think about how classic repertory has continued—to the present—to be a site of contestation and creation in French theater; and how questions of tradition and national cultural identity dominate our own times, in theater and beyond. Western Michigan University Cynthia Running-Johnson Mulryan, Michael, and Denis Grélé, eds. Eighteenth-Century Escape Tales: Between Fact and Fiction. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2016. ISBN 978-1-61148-770-1. Pp. 132. The authors of this edited volume invite readers to consider a variety of eighteenthcentury escape tales, both historical and literary. These stories differ in many respects: chronology, gender, and the conditions of escape all distinguish the tales presented here. Yet, as the title suggests, the tension “between fact and fiction” provides a link between them. Each author emphasizes the way in which the escape tales they analyze reflected, as well as shaped, changing notions of the individual and his or her relationship to authority in eighteenth-century France. In the introduction, Mulryan and Grélé note the subversive potential of escape tales, which“carve out new spaces for those who are marginalized in relation to the socioeconomic system” (xxi). Together, the stories that are the subject of this book represent a fruitful exploration of conformity and rebellion in the final century of the Old Regime. Chapters one through three deal with historical prison escapes and their subsequent literary representations. In chapter one, Mulryan explores the intertextuality between Odysseus’s escape from Polyphemus’s cave and stories by abbé de Bucquoy, Jean Henri De Latude and Giacomo Casanova. Mulryan posits that Homer’s narrative served as a model upon which reallife evasions and their literary representations were constructed, illustrating“how the two [literature and history] interact to produce myth” which, in turn,“can supersede history as a source of transmission of cultural values” (3). In this case, the legendary escapees celebrated individual freedoms while undermining the absolutist state. Next, Léa Lebourg-Leportier argues that criminal biographies intended to promote authority instead transformed outlaws into national heroes by romanticizing individuals who transgressed moral and social codes. The author convincingly demonstrates the complex ways such texts influenced history. For instance, readers trapped in rigid social hierarchies“might vicariously experience rebellion to the status quo through the criminal’s story”(38). In elevating criminals to legends, popular biographies inspired readers to think about the possibility for social mobility. Indeed, in chapter three, Claire Trévien introduces the Comtesse de la Motte-Valois who manipulated images of her escape from prison to gain social and political capital. This example thus highlights the escape tale’s potential to improve its author’s position in society. In the remaining two chapters, Rori Bloom and Denis Grélé analyze fictional escapes while complicating common ideas about imprisonment. First, Bloom explains that in Manon Lescaut, des Grieux paradoxically finds peace in prison because he is free from desire. Then, Grélé compares utopia to prison in Les voyages et aventures de Jacques Massé. The protagonist visits an orderly kingdom that, although egalitarian, leaves little room for individual expression. Grélé reads Massé’s escape from utopia as an indictment of absolutism, no matter how well-intentioned:“[T]he virtuous despot is still a despot” (78). Finally, each of these escape tales illuminates the co-constitutive relationship between discourse and history. This volume is valuable for literary scholars as well as cultural historians interested in literature’s power to articulate social and political critiques in eighteenth-century France. Penn State University Elizabeth Tuttle Ollivier, Jean-Pierre. Proust cardiologue. Paris: Champion, 2016. ISBN 978-2-74533038 -3. Pp. 173. Previously the chef de service de cardiologie at the Val-de-Grâce hospital in Paris, the author of this study draws on his extensive medical knowledge to examine the function of the heart and the circulatory organs in the works...