Sur les pas de Flaubert: approches sensibles du paysage éd. par Philippe Antoine (review)

the lack of a clearly articulated focal point, this volume should interest a wide range of scholars. Regrettably, formatting inconsistencies (for example, only some chapters have bibliographies) and numerous typographical errors might prove distracting. University of Mary Washington Brooke D. Di Lauro Antoine, Philippe, éd. Sur les pas de Flaubert: approches sensibles du paysage. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014. ISBN 978-90-420-3897-4. Pp. 216. 54 a. This motley collection of twelve essays examines the travel writings of Flaubert and a number of other nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French authors like Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Dumas, Mérimée, Sand, Gautier, the Goncourt brothers, and J.H. Rosny the Elder. Using a variety of stylistic, sociological, historical, thematic, psychoanalytic, and comparative approaches, the book pays attention to the authors’ sensory perceptions of landscape, thus affirming the role of the body and the totality of the senses (not just sight) in the experience of travel. The essays share the common belief in the special authenticity, sincerity, and transparency of the travel narrative, as opposed to the more staged and deliberate fictional account. Indeed, often travel writings are not expected to be read as literature per se and, as such offer a unique and intimate perspective on the writer as a person. In her essay on nineteenth-century scientific writings about Tenerife Island, Anne-Gaëlle Weber shows how the senses of taste, touch, and smell served the needs of practical experimentation and were used to mark the difference between seekers of empirical truth versus armchair travelers. In his reading of texts of French explorers of Tibet, Samuel Thévoz analyses the complex sensory-motor processes entering into play when the voyager-writer confronts a totally unfamiliar, unmapped environment. Frédéric Calas studies the vast corpus of literary “voyages en Orient”from Chateaubriand to Loti, concluding that sight is far from the predominant sense, especially in Flaubert, whose travel writings, part of his correspondence that he did not expect to be read as literature, are peppered with examples of synesthesia. Thierry Poyet further develops these insights by showing how Flaubert’s youthful travels awakened his sexuality and opened him, if only briefly, to new sensory experience. The next two contributors, Sarga Moussa and Alain Guyot, examine sonic landscapes. Moussa explores constructions of Oriental nighttime (when the voyager is figuratively blind thus more reliant on the other senses) in the works of Chateaubriand, Lamartine, and Flaubert, while Guyot demonstrates how Chateaubriand enlarged the scope of sensory possibilities in the travel narrative compared to his predecessors, Rousseau and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. Nathalie Solomon shows how seemingly trivial sensory perceptions, in Dumas and Gautier, are in fact an essential tool in understanding their special brand of irony and the Romantic voyage in general. Odile Gannier examines the Romantic traveler’s culinary adventures with local cuisine, while Sophie Lécole, Philippe Antoine, and Pierre Dufief study Gautier in Spain, Flaubert in 190 FRENCH REVIEW 90.1 Reviews 191 Brittany, and the Goncourt Brothers in Algeria, respectively. Laurie Guillaud, in the final essay of the volume, opens new vistas on sensory studies with her interesting look at the marvelous creatures, hybrid fauna, and neo-primitive landscapes peopling the works of the science fiction visionary J.H. Rosny the Elder. The collection is a highly diverse and stimulating addition to the body of scholarship devoted to exoticism, landscapes, and travel narratives during the major century of French colonialism. University of New Orleans Juliana Starr Baudry, Marie. Lectrices romanesques: représentations et théorie de la lecture aux XIXe et XXe siècles. Paris: Garnier, 2014. ISBN 978-2-8124-2542-4. Pp. 471. 49 a. This book examines how mid-nineteenth century novels systematically represent flawed readers as female, and argues that this gendering pervades the ways reading has been theorized in the late twentieth century. Why, Baudry asks, did the emblematic figure of the reader shift from Don Quixote to Emma Bovary? And how has the long shadow of Flaubert’s heroine structured various theories of reading? Until the nineteenth century, in a pan-European tradition that dates back to Cervantes, novels depicted characters of both genders falling prey to naïve or excessive reading; yet...