Voyageuses européennes au XIXe siècle ed. by Frank Estelman, et al (review)

Reviews 261 Terms of the Debate,”chapter one provides background material including Augustine’s views on the notion of city and modern literary critics on utopia. Chapter two treats the role of relics brought to France from Constantinople or Jerusalem and the rivalry with Byzantium in Eracle and the Pèlerinage de Charlemagne.Both texts posit Byzantium as a model to be imitated, despite its political and religious separation from the West, but one that also engenders political tensions in the form of competing emperors and mistrust following the Second Crusade. Chapter three of part two, “Constantinople Desired”discusses narratives depicting a marriage alliance between a western man and the well-educated female relative of a Byzantine emperor. The unions in Partonopeus de Blois and Girart de Roussillon constitute a form of limited political renewal, in the former for the monarchy, in the latter through the construction of a monastery. Chapter four treats the Franco-Italian chanson de geste Macario and a chronicle of the Fourth Crusade, the Conquête de Constantinople by Robert de Clari, both of which include an alliance between the West and Byzantium that culminates in renewal. Admiration for Constantinople leads to the resolution of social conflicts despite the paradox that in the chronicle the city is conquered. Chapter five of part three, “The Renovatio of the West” examines the didactic texts Marques de Rome and two poems by Rutebeuf as expressions of attempted but failed renewal through translatio from Constantinople. Rutebeuf highlights hypocrisy in France that constrains renewal; in Marques, Rome replaces Constantinople. Chapter six takes up texts on Venetian historiography of the Fourth Crusade and the Peace of Venice to highlight civic and papal loyalty. Here, narratives of the past that describe Venice’s relationship with Constantinople and its Latin empire also suggest responses to current political strife in Venice. Devereaux succeeds in elucidating the ambivalent role of the city in the works with subtle, multi-step arguments and considerations of their implications for generic status. However, discussing two often very different texts in each chapter slows the argument at points and makes the chapters convoluted. Nevertheless, the book expands our understanding of conceptions of the city. St. Mary’s College of Maryland Laine E. Doggett Estelman, Frank, Sarga Moussa, et Friedrich Wolfzettel, éd. Voyageuses europ éennes au XIXe siècle. Paris: PU Paris-Sorbonne, 2012. ISBN 978-2-84050-814-4. Pp. 320. 22 a. The fourteen articles in this collection examine a wide variety of female travel literature written in English, French, and German and, together, help foreground research in an often-overlooked sub-genre of women’s studies. Spanning the entire century and featuring a rich and diverse selection of authors, the seven essays focusing on works in French analyze texts by George Sand, Flora Tristan, Jane Dieulafoy, and Isabelle Eberhardt, among others. In the first section, “La construction de soi,” two pieces stand out. Merete Stistrup Jensen’s “Le travestissement narratif dans les écrits d’Isabelle Eberhardt”explores the multiple voices in the recently restored manuscripts salvaged at the time of this young and enigmatic author’s death. Although Eberhardt does at times adopt a feminine narrative voice,it is only when writing—and dressing— as a man that she can overcome the social and physical limits of her sex and,consequently, experience broader intellectual and creative freedom. Jensen carefully demonstrates how the recurring motif in Eberhardt’s works of liberty resulting from the abandonment or killing of a woman mirrors the author’s own struggles, whereby writing is possible only after the female point of view has been neutralized.While Jane Dieulafoy shares her contemporary’s preference for male disguises,they have little else in common. As Natascha Ueckmann points out, far from the expectation that nineteenth-century European women travelers deal with colonialism differently because they themselves are both colonizer and colonized, Dieulafoy projects the same ethnocentrism as her male counterparts. Paradoxically, it is her emancipation from the constraints her own culture places on women that provides Dieulafoy with the opportunity to be an overt accomplice in Western efforts to subjugate other cultures.Although the second section, “Genre et altérité,”contains only one article on French travel...