Lectrices romanesques: représentations et théorie de la lecture aux XIXe et XXe siècles par Marie Baudry (review)

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 as the genre gained popularity and sought legitimacy, notably in France between the 1820s and the 1850s, male novelists increasingly cast such problem readers as female. The opening chapter surveys the representation of both male and female characters who read in novels of the period, observing that even descriptions of fictional male readers bear a taint of the genre’s association with the“feminine”(122). Baudry then considers how a link between novels and women’s “morality” comes to be posited in numerous fictions, in the context of nineteenth-century anxieties about a potential“confusion of the sexes”(98). Representing female characters who engage in“bad,”overly identificatory reading (169) becomes a device for imagining a more proper,critical (and implicitly male) mode of reading. In the third chapter, analyses of complex “mise[s] en abyme” (219) of reading in Balzac and Flaubert show how these novelists stage female readers in order to distance their own output (and their own readers) from what they deride as lesser or outdated literary aesthetics. The final chapter leaps to the twentieth century and argues that many theories of reading supposedly unconcerned with gender (Eco, Barthes, Picard) are actually structured around a division between critical and naïve reading that “reactivates the antimony of male and female reader-characters” (332). Feminist attempts at revaluing fictional female readers or a “feminine” mode of reading (Naomi Schor, Carla L. Peterson) are likewise found to paradoxically“reiterate [...] the usual stereotypes of sexual difference”(397).Baudry’s lucid and original engagement with theories of reading and with American feminist scholarship is one of the book’s strengths; more debatable aspects include the near-elision of the second half of the nineteenth century, and a number of short comparative excursions (it is unclear why examples from Russia or Portugal are considered, while novels from Germany or Spain are not).A few finer details occasionally get lost in the sweep of Baudry’s otherwise illuminating survey of classic novels: for instance, can Stendhal’s narrator really be taken at his word when he states that Mme de Rênal “n’avait jamais lu de roman” (57), or might we not read this statement as an ironic citation, in free indirect discourse, of that character’s amusingly unconvincing denegation? Overall, scholars will find much of interest in this fine contribution to the study of literary representations of reading, nineteenth-century gender studies, and the history of the novel in France. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign François Proulx Boisseron,Bénédicte. Creole Renegades: Rhetoric of Betrayal and Guilt in the Caribbean Diaspora. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2014. ISBN 978-0-8130-4979-3. Pp. 224. $75. L’auteure emprunte le terme de“renégats”à C.L.R. James pour définir la position originale des écrivains caribéens Anatole Broyard, Maryse Condé, Edwige Danticat, Dany Laferrière, V.S. Naipaul et Jamaica Kincaid. Originaire de Trinité-et-Tobago et ayant v...