Voices of Negritude in Modernist Print: Aesthetic Subjectivity, Diaspora, and the Lyric Regime by Carrie Noland (review)

anthropological perspective: Michael Meere and Caroline Gates find a reflection on community building through farce in Rabelais’s Quart livre, while Fabien Cavaillé convincingly reads two important Montaigne essays as statements on the civic value of theater and festival. The volume also includes some probing politico-historicist approaches to performances composed more or less exclusively for the court. These include two readings of court ballet, the first on early Valois spectacles that Elizabeth R. Welch reads as polysemous diplomatic messages, the other on Louis XIII’s surprising self-representation as a not-so-dignified, not yet fully realized absolute monarch. The volume ends with an impressive intertextual reading of several pastoral rewritings of Sydney’s Arcadia by Richard Hillman. The pastoral genre is also represented earlier in the volume: Christian Biet, one of France’s recognized specialists in early modern theater, has provided an essay on Fonteny’s Le beau pasteur in which he finds a provocative generic (and gender) revision that distinguishes the French bergerie from Italian and Spanish models, principally through the introduction of homosexual male desire into the traditional subject matter. Biet argues that this revision both remains faithful to Virgilian prototypes and anticipates the neoclassical reconstruction of the heroic temperament in France.Among the other excellent essays in this volume, some remain arguably more focused on textual criticism. Such is the case of Corinne Norot’s thoughtful take on Jean de La Taille as “French Humanist Comedy in Search of an Audience” and of John D. Lyons’s masterful reading of the Théodore de Bèze’s Abraham sacrifiant as both a model of humanist invention and spiritual witness to a time of moral crisis in France. In all, this volume makes a strong case for the renewed vitality of this often under-appreciated field. Boston College Stephen Bold Noland, Carrie. Voices of Negritude in Modernist Print: Aesthetic Subjectivity, Diaspora, and the Lyric Regime. New York: Columbia UP, 2015. ISBN 978-0-23116704 -8. Pp. 344. $55. Although so much has been written on Negritude, the materiality of its poetic texts—including the contexts of publication,forms adopted,and immediate reception— has long been a neglected area of study. Noland, an expert on modernist poetry, skillfully fills this gap in six artful chapters. Whereas many recent studies of Léopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé Césaire, and Léon-Gontran Damas have focused on theoretical elements, Noland takes the archive as her point of departure, leading her to explore the complex relationship between writings and the historical moment of their production. The result is dazzlingly original readings of some of the most celebrated works of Francophone literature, which unlock new interpretive dimensions. In the introduction , Noland states that her study approaches Negritude “as an experimental, text-based poetic movement” and shows how its authors deliberately explored “the 262 FRENCH REVIEW 90.3 Reviews 263 possibilities inherent to the printed textual support” (1). In particular, she considers the crisis that these writers experienced as a result of writing for print, arguing that their works “present a challenge to both form-based (deconstructive) theories and identity-based theories of poetic representation”(3). Chapter 1,“‘Seeing with the Eyes of the Work’ (Adorno): Césaire’s Cahier and Modernist Print Culture” examines the publication history and reception of Negritude’s inaugural poem, focusing on the 1939 version. In chapter 2,“The Empirical Subject in Question: A Drama of Voices in Aimé Césaire’s Et les chiens se taisaient,”Noland provides an interpretation of Césaire’s first drama, rewritten over a span of fifteen years, in order to illustrate how this play encourages readers to view its empirical subject as a“complex amalgam of conflicting voices”(25). Chapter 3,“Poetry and the Typosphere in Léon-Gontran Damas,”analyzes the graphemic features of Pigments, including the typeface and layout of Negritude’s first poetic volume. In chapter 4, “Léon-Gontran Damas: Writing Rhythm in the Interwar Period,” Noland proposes to reconsider notions of “soundscapes” created through textual means by arguing that each reading differs slightly from the last. In chapter 5, “Red Front/Black Front: Aimé Césaire and the Affaire Aragon,” Noland continues her analysis...