La représentation de l’histoire dans la nouvelle en langue française du XIXe siècle éd. par Concepción Palacios, Pedro Méndez (review)

Reviews 263 Proust refers to a range of medical procedures affecting the heart, including le pansement , l’incision, and la transplantation. Highlighting la poitrine as a central location of “manifestations confondues avec la vie et l’emotion” (93), Ollivier expands his study to include a wide range of physical activities, such as breathing (an exchange of fluids and gases similar to that taking place in the heart),Albertine’s sleeping (an opportunity for the Proustian narrator to listen as she breathes), and sex. If references to doctors and medications appear more frequently in the Recherche than in the nineteenthcentury novel, Proust conjures up this world in unique ways, often applying medical terminology to non-medical subjects,and in many instances,describing the transmission of immaterial substances as processes of inoculation, contamination, medical seeding (ensemencement), or injection. Ollivier’s study also extends to the cœur mystique, such as the cœur enflammé of Giotto’s Charité fresco, as well as to the sport of cycling, fueled by the heart and lungs. For readers already familiar with the Recherche, this volume, by reinforcing the link between physiological functions and the subjectivity of human emotions, makes an intriguing contribution to scholarship on Proust and medicine. Brandeis University (MA) Hollie Markland Harder Palacios, Concepción, et Pedro Méndez, éd. La représentation de l’histoire dans la nouvelle en langue française du XIXe siècle. Paris: Garnier, 2016. ISBN 978-2-81243623 -9. Pp. 362. The present volume—the third by the two editors—offers a selection of critical essays on récits courts from the genre’s Golden Age. Many of the topics covered in previous volumes are also a part of this latest collaboration, including the reception of the French short story in Spain and the interdependence of French and Spanish literature. Strategically positioned as the opening chapter, René Godenne’s overview of history in the nouvelle historique provides an excellent framework for the subsequent chapters. In their respective essays, Yvon Houssais and Carmen María Pujante Segua undertake a defense of short fiction in general—seemingly a requisite element in studies of the genre—that is supported by Ángeles Sirvent Ramos’s presentation of Stendhal’s nouvelles. By emphasizing Stendhal’s affection for short prose and the inspiration he found in Spanish literature and history, Ramos counters the view that these short texts are mere ébauches for Le rouge et le noir or La chartreuse de Parme. One thread running through the collection’s twenty essays is the notion that the short story is the ideal medium for looking at history “par le petit bout de la lorgnette” (142). Ironically, its limited scope, often mistaken for superficiality, is the strong point of the genre.As Houssais observes,“par la généralisation,l’exemplarité,le système symbolique qui se met en place, la micro-histoire mise en place dans le texte court devient emblématique de la grande histoire” (65). Edurne Jorge Martínez’s examination of Alphonse Daudet’s stories set during the Franco-Prussian war illustrates Houssais’s observation. A participant in the defense of Paris, Daudet wasted no time translating his experiences into the literary texts that comprise the first part of Les contes du lundi. Because the Prussian occupation was still fresh in the readers’minds when the collection was published in 1873, the stories “ont atteint une portée littéraire quasi immédiate” (168). Understandably, perhaps, given that the majority of the volume’s contributors are Spanish academics, la matière d’Espagne is either a primary or secondary focus of many of the studies. To be sure, many nouvellistes—among them Stendhal, Hugo, and Mérimée—drew from Spanish history and culture, the result of, María del Rosario Álvarez Rubio asserts, the Romantic portrayal of Spain as a“terre de sang et de rituels, de passions et de conflits”(231). If the influence of Anglophone writers such as Edgar Allan Poe and Walter Scott on the nineteenth-century French short story has long been established, the inspiration that Spain provided those same authors has yet to be fully explored by scholars on this side of the Atlantic. It...