Proust et les “Moyen Âge” éd. par Sophie Duval, Miren Lacassagne (review)

Reviews 231 in terms of alienation and mediation; both embodied an underlying risk of interpretive failure or “willful perversion” of meaning (39). This theoretical reflection comes to full fruition in a “coda” on Joan of Arc as a discursive construct. Employed by Christine and Chartier as an efficacious mediating figure, Joan was seen by her detractors as a threat to newly constructed notions of national (masculine) identity. Delogu’s book is essential reading for anyone interested in late medieval allegory, political thought, and questions of gender. University of Georgia Catherine M. Jones Duval, Sophie, et Miren Lacassagne, éd. Proust et les “Moyen Âge”. Paris: Hermann, 2015. ISBN 978-2-7056-9037-3. Pp. 423. 38 a. The twenty-two essays by Proustians and medievalists gathered here revisit a rich field of research, long defined by studies from Richard Bales (Proust and the Middle Ages, 1975; FR 50.2) and Luc Fraisse (L’œuvre cathédrale, 1990). As its inventively formulated title signals, the volume emphasizes both the mediation of Proust’s knowledge about the Middle Ages (largely through the work of art historians, first among them John Ruskin and Émile Mâle), and his creative, polysemic redeployment of the medieval in his works and correspondence. Opening and closing essays by Sophie Duval and Stéphane Chaudier underline how Proust systematically uses “the distancing-effects of metaphor and allegory, irony and pastiche” (31) to negotiate between the Middle Ages as “resource” and “trap” (340): a repository of artworks, names, and tales that incite imagination and inquiry, yet can lead to no definite knowledge, and offer little“grip”on modern or personal realities (356). Highlights of the collection include essays examining Proust’s subtle critique of medieval antisemitism (Nathalie Mauriac Dyer) and of the politicized uses of the Middle Ages in nineteenth-century schoolbooks (Françoise Leriche); his reworking of allegories by Giotto and, more unexpectedly, Baudelaire (Guillaume Perrier, Matthieu Vernet); and his sources for the famous scene of the magic lantern in “Combray” (Kazuyoshi Yoshikawa). Equally fine chapters retrace the nineteenth-century lineage of the book/ cathedral analogy through Hugo, Gautier, and Huysmans (Stephanie A. Glaser); interrogate the link between “reclusion” and “spiritual discipline” in Proust and how it shaped twentieth-century receptions of the medieval (Virginie Greene, 239, 241); and situate the Recherche with regard to nineteenth- and turn-of-the-century discourses about medieval monuments as national“patrimony”(Laurent Baridon, 57).A remarkable essay by Simone Delesalle-Rowlson reconsiders Proust’s intimate letters to Reynaldo Hahn, traversed with pseudo-medieval “lansgage” (315) and often accompanied by drawings that whimsically rework religious images (a parallel essay by Elizabeth Emery provides an overview of these drawings and their publication history). This corpus, subject to censorship in some editions (328–32) or dismissed as childish and gratuitously campy in others (for instance by Philippe Sollers in L’œil de Proust, 1999), is here given thoughtful critical consideration, revealing its richness as “secret” but also “inventive, full of humor, and never ironic” (328). The volume’s handsome material presentation (60 illustrations, many in color) partakes in the same attention: whenever possible, Proust’s drawings are here reproduced as actual objects (existing on a material support, usually semi-translucent paper with a thick border), rather than as the decontextualized black-and-white images first published in Lettres à Reynaldo Hahn (1956) and often reprinted since. While the density of scrutiny throughout the collection could be thought to occasion repetitions (multiple contributors sometimes cite the same passages from Proust’s novel), editors choose to emphasize this through cross-references, creating instead a network of perspectives and recalls not wholly dissimilar from the structure of the Recherche. This exemplary book makes a significant contribution to Proust studies and sets a high scholarly, editorial, and aesthetic standard for edited collections. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign François Proulx Githire,Njeri.CannibalWrites: Eating Others in Caribbean and Indian OceanWomen’s Writing. Champaign: UP of Illinois, 2014. ISBN 978-0-252-03878-5. Pp. 256. $55. Close textual analyses in this study of works by female writers of Caribbean and Indian Ocean regions serve to reverse western mythical views of non-western and colonized peoples as cannibals.An abundance of...