Écrire les hommes: personnages masculins et masculinité dans l’oeuvre des écrivaines de la Belle Époque éd. par France Grenaudier-Klijn, et al (review)

context of lending libraries and pulp fiction. Later chapters discuss the“masters”of the genre like Verne, Robida and Rosny aîné. Part of the fun of reading the work is checking one’s own level of surprise as the author recounts literary inventions. From the metro to the helicopter, rocket ship to hydrogen car, writers imagined new modes of transportation long before their actual existence. For our bodies, they created metal clothing, watches, food delivered to residences or in pill form, plastic surgery and cryogenics. For the home, we can read about geothermal heat, mobile homes, and this reader’s favorite—homes that move up and down the mountain to capture light and heat. No doubt most will be happy to know that literature predicted advances like women’s equality and the establishment of national parks. Some may be less heartened to know that it also predicted the expansion of English and the use of chemical weapons. Readers may well take issue with Fondanèche’s claim of an American deployment of nerve gas during the Gulf Wars. Assertions like these surely need more substantiation or should be qualified. The larger claim, however, is the extent to which much science fiction is dystopic, predicting overpopulation, arms races, and arms dealers. La littérature d’imagination scientifique does raise questions concerning methodology. While it is interesting to assess true and false predictions for the future, it can seem like a parlor game.Yes, writers imagined the future accurately, but is there no value to the literature beyond these predictions? The need for methodology is most evident in Fondanèche’s treatment of plot. One wonders how he chose which plots to relate and why. Fondanèche spends so much time being comprehensive of both plot and detail that he has little time to argue for larger claims of significance. Still, he maps the terrain of a new field, and for this he is to be commended. Who will come next to show us why it matters? Kenyon College (OH) Katherine Elkins Grenaudier-Klijn, France, Élisabeth-Christine Muelsch, et Jean Anderson, éd. Écrire les hommes: personnages masculins et masculinité dans l’œuvre des écrivaines de la Belle Époque. Saint-Denis: PU de Vincennes, 2012. ISBN 978-284292 -345-7. Pp. 315. 24 a. With its focus on the portrayal of men, this collection is a welcome addition to the growing body of scholarship devoted to Belle Époque women writers which typically privileges that of women. Drawing from a huge corpus, the eleven contributors aim to demonstrate how nine novelists“utilisèrent le pouvoir de leur plume pour dénoncer certains abus, fantasmer l’égalité, rêver l’émancipation ou tout simplement créer un ‘homme de papier’” (25). What quickly becomes obvious is the overwhelming negativity of these portraits: men are “maléfique[s]” in Colette (194); “défaillants” in Lucie Delarue-Mardrus (226);“des sources de malheur psychologique et physique, de 212 FRENCH REVIEW 88.3 Reviews 213 tourments sentimentaux ou moraux” in Georges de Peyrebrune (72); “égoïstes, axés sur leurs propres intérêts” in Thérèse Bentzon (66); and “[incapables de] construire, [de] créer une relation heureuse, [de] partager l’amour, [d’]assurer un mariage sain et satisfaisant” in Anna de Noailles (257), to cite just a few examples. While singling out individual essays is always challenging, particularly when they are all, as is the case here, of such high quality, those by Diana Holmes, Patrick Bergeron, France GrenaudierKlijn , and Brigitte Jandey merit special consideration. Holmes focuses on the depiction of husbands and lovers in works by Daniel Lesueur, underlining the fundamental incompatibility of marriage and “l’épanouissement sexuel et affectif des femmes” (104). Lesueur’s solution is to offer the possibility of extramarital love, which results in heroines who are, paradoxically, adulterous“anges de vertu”(98). Bergeron proposes that the central theme of Rachilde’s work is “une dégradation de l’amour, [...] une ‘déséducation’ sentimentale” (126) carried out “par la virilisation de la femme [...] et par la dévirilisation de l’homme” (127). The time to read Rachilde “sans rougir”— especially in this age of gay pride and of queer...