Les dehors de la littérature: du roman populaire à la science-fiction par Marc Angenot (review)

prose and including documents that the editors hope will be of use to future researchers such as photographs, previously unpublished letters to Vivien’s sister, Charles-Brun and his wife, summaries of critical reviews, portraits of Vivien written by her contemporaries, and an index of the contents of Vivien’s personal library created by her great-niece, Imogen Bright. The contributions of Bright, who owns the rights to Vivien’s work, are evident throughout the volume. She has been generous in making Vivien’s papers available to the public, much to the delight of Vivien scholars. One example is the corrected proofs of Vivien’s short story collection, La dame à la louve, which reveal her meticulous attention to detail and methods of working. Although Vivien is primarily known for her Sapphic poetry, Martine Reid’s analysis of the narrative voices in these stories throws light on Vivien’s innovative approach to prose. Reid demonstrates how Vivien “opère assez systématiquement un travestissement de la voix narrative” by having first-person male narrators comment on the strong female characters who all refuse“une dynamique hétérosexuelle”(44). Patricia Izquierdo examines another neglected aspect of Vivien’s writing—her humor. She analyzes several “atypical” prose parodies that Vivien wrote during the last years of her life and argues that these humorous pieces reveal a profound rupture with her earlier Sapphic phase, and demonstrate the multiple authorial masks she was capable of adopting (71). Melanie Hawthorne describes Vivien’s cult appeal for the gay and lesbian community, and several contributors discuss her influence on other writers such as the poet Lucie Delarue-Mardrus (Anne-Marie Van Bockstaele), Maria-Marcé Marçal, a contemporary Catalan poet whose semi-autobiographical novel features a scholar researching Vivien’s life and work (Jean-Paul Goujon), and Vivien’s mentor, Jean Charles-Brun (Nicolas Berger). Berger highlights the close affinity between Charles-Brun and Vivien’s poetry and argues that he served as an alter ego for the author and “occupa pour elle une place au moins égale à celle de Natalie Clifford Barney” (73). Nicole Albert’s contribution, “Postérités de Renée Vivien,” provides an overview of Vivien’s reception,showing how she risked rejection by her contemporaries through her elaboration of “une mythologie féminine à rebours” so that she could be discovered by future readers (88). That future is clearly now, marked not only by reeditions of Vivien’s works,but the publication of this valuable collection which provides a resource for Vivien scholars and those just discovering this remarkable writer. Cleveland State University Tama Lea Engelking Angenot, Marc. Les dehors de la littérature: du roman populaire à la science-fiction. Paris: Champion, 2013. ISBN 978-2-7453-2524-2. Pp. 258. 35 a. The main planks of this book’s argument are to identify the logic of exclusion that has divested popular literature of its rightful place in literary history and reappraise the literary value of sub-genres such as the Gothic novel, the noir crime fiction, the more 260 FRENCH REVIEW 88.4 Reviews 261 socialist songwriting, and the ever-popular science-fiction. The scope of the study is limited to nineteenth-century France. The fundamental argument departs from the premise that the field of literary studies defines canonic literature by excluding or, more particularly, leaving most of what does not befit the status of belles-lettres “outside ” of literature (hence the title). In the somewhat diverse essays that follow the goalsetting “Introduction,” the argument takes another direction as the discussion turns instead to the perennial literary-historical debate over the ontological relationship between canonic and popular literature. One needs the other to define itself. Madame Bovary drew on kitsch literature—or the canonic Realist novel on noir crime fiction— to establish itself. This might justify the title of the first essay:“Ceci tuera cela.” In the case of popular literature in the nineteenth century (second essay), Angenot shows in one of the most insightful sections of the book that kitschification and serialization of literature were products of the contemporary popular demand and technological progress made in the printing and diffusion of such types of literature. Not to mention the apparent...