A History of Modern French Literature: From the Sixteenth Century to the Twentieth Century ed. by Christopher Prendergast (review)

ruling classes who “engineer consent” through the manipulation of language. The authors’novels seek to dismantle the dishonest use of language and restore it to a common and transparent state.Writing against linguistic domination involves challenging the fictions promoted by the dominant class through its false narratives and escapist theatrics in the media. Third, the authors write with the reader, drawing her or him into the struggles of the time by presenting narratives as puzzles requiring attention to detail and critical thinking to reassemble the pieces and construct a whole. The reader turns into a detective investigating a myriad of evidence for satisfactory explanations of complex social interaction and in doing so participates actively in the historical moment. The act of reading thus becomes political. This final perspective on the roman engagé, which depends on the notion of Wolfgang Iser’s implied reader, undermines Peyroles’s claim that reading the text is a political act. She does not explain how a form of writing that invented itself in a particular historical context can connect with an implied reader who is by definition removed from that context. An implied reader seeks verisimilitude in how history is presented instead of truthfulness in the claims and evidence presented in the narrative. Peyroles relies on Wayne Booth’s notion of a reliable narrator to assure the (implied) reader that the lived experiences recounted in the text can be trusted (459), but it must be noted that a reliable narrator gains trust through the use of language alone, without the certainty of a verifiable referent. One way to explore how the text instantiates a political act for the reader might be with a genetic approach that explores the avant-texte surrounding the lived experiences of the author and reconstructs the process through which the text was created. Another way could be through Philippe Lejeune’s notion of a pact between the author, who writes a collective autobiography for those sharing the author’s experiences, and the reader, who through the pact assumes some responsibility for the authenticity of these experiences. Hartwick College (NY) Mark Wolff Prendergast, Christopher, ed. A History of Modern French Literature: From the Sixteenth Century to the Twentieth Century. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2017. ISBN 9780 -691-15772-6. Pp. 725. This collection of thirty-two studies,including two introductory essays,encompasses major authors writing in French from Rabelais to near contemporary Francophone writers. (The first essay after the introductions is about Erasmus.) What these essays have in common is a sense of the complexity of all the authors studied. There is a recognition of the ambiguities and levels of meaning in their works that gives each study an open-ended quality. A running topic is the central importance of language, not only as a vehicle of expression but as a thematic concern of these writers. Nicholas Page’s study of Racine, for example, describes how the seventeenth-century tragic 266 FRENCH REVIEW 91.4 Reviews 267 dramatist steered a problematical course between the traditional principles of the genre and a revolutionary new ethos based on his realization of humanity’s enslavement to its own uncontrollable emotions, especially erotic sentiments. In an insightful essay on the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns, Larry Norman demonstrates the aesthetic liberalism of Boileau, usually thought to be the doctrinaire spokesperson of classical rules. Though an “ancient,” Boileau recognized in a very modern way the indefinable nature of the beautiful, the irrational response that a great work elicits. Catriona Seth contributes a thoughtful study on women authors of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. She analyzes the personal and political implications of Madame de Staël’s novel Corinne. She also points out how Madame de Charrière eschews traditional happy or tragic denouements and leaves to the reader the resolution of her heroines’dilemmas.Aleksandar Stevic discusses the failures of the young heroes of Stendhal and Balzac’s Bildungsromane to achieve success in a post-Revolutionary and post-Napoleonic French society that is itself having difficulty defining its structure and ideals.Prendergast’s essay on Sartre’s La nausée explores the seemingly contradictory situation of its protagonist-narrator. The latter dismisses literature as meaningless and...