French Romantic Travel Writing: Chateaubriand to Nerval par C. W Thompson (review)

focus too heavily on demystification, privileging Baudelairean suspicion of the photographic image (or Debord’s critique of the spectacle) over Barthes’s sense of the photograph’s indexical and emotional force. Unfortunately, the book itself does not include photographic reproductions to illustrate the detailed analyses of visual works. Nevertheless, this is an engaging and truly interdisciplinary study that offers compelling insights and thought-provoking connections. University of Chicago Alison James Thompson, C.W. French Romantic Travel Writing: Chateaubriand to Nerval. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. ISBN 978-0-19-923354-0. Pp. 472. £64. At the beginning of his study, Thompson wonders why well-known French authors embraced the Romantic travelogue during the first half of the nineteenth century, while their foreign counterparts in England and Germany did not do so to a similar extent. The author finds a response to his question in the “emergence of a distinctive Romantic travelogue that was born with Chateaubriand and Staël, died soon after Nerval in the 1850s, and is characterized in part by a novelistic impulse”(3). The author restricts his study to finished books in prose that were published by major authors, thereby concentrating on French literary travelogues as a genre. He states that most of the French literary travelogues he has examined share various Romantic themes, especially the quest for energy in its widest sense. Thompson considers works of over a dozen writers, including Chateaubriand, Staël, Stendhal, Nodier, Lamartine, Nerval, Hugo, Gautier, Sand, Quinet, Mérimée, and Dumas. The following four masterpieces are included among the numerous analyzed works: Voyage en Orient by Nerval,Le Rhin by Hugo,and Rome, Naples et Florence and Promenades dans Rome,both by Stendhal.The progression of Thompson’s study of the French literary travelogue can be seen in three distinct phases. The first phase comprises an introduction followed by four chapters and traces the development of the French travelogue from Empire to the first part of the July Monarchy, beginning with Chateaubriand and Staël and their contributions to travel literature, proceeding to the effects of travel for pleasure after 1815, going on to the latter part of the 1820s when literary travel increased in part due to subsidies from publishers and even from governments, and ending up after 1830 with the appearance of a subjective form of literary travelogue. The second phase of Thompson’s study contains another four chapters and explores the development of the French travelogue by studying texts grouped according to the following themes: Switzerland, Germany, and the Romantic ‘North’; the ‘Orient’ and Spain; the ‘Orient’ of the Maghreb and the Old Levant; and, in a different vein, the distinctive autobiographical travelogues of women writers. In the final phase, Thompson considers changes in the genre whose literary nature would gradually wane while travelogues became more informative and,as it were,more precise in their descriptions.Thompson 240 FRENCH REVIEW 88.1 Reviews 241 has included an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources in addition to a select chronology. I highly recommend this book for inclusion in any college or university library collection where there is a French and/or Comparative Literature program at the undergraduate level or above. Sweet Briar College (VA) Angelo Metzidakis Vaillant, Alain, éd. Dictionnaire du Romantisme. Paris: CNRS, 2012. ISBN 978-2271 -06813-2. Pp. cviv + 848. 39 a. This encyclopedic tome of 649 articles offers a fascinating analysis of Romanticism and an overview of its global influence on aesthetics and intellectual and cultural history.A biographical dictionary of authors and works, it also traces the evolution of key Romantic themes throughout literature, social and political history, philosophy, music, and the fine arts over ten geographical areas, including Northern and Western Europe, Russia and the Slavic nations, North America, Latin America, the East, and former colonial empires. Alain Vaillant’s invaluable essay, serving as an introduction, focuses on the European foundations of the movement. After outlining its genesis in Germany, he details how France in the 1830s becomes “le vrai centre romantique” (xxii), propelling Romanticism beyond an aesthetic and intellectual phenomenon, and creating a worldwide culture involving all aspects of life, such as fashion, leisure, public spectacles (in theaters and on the...