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Reviews 243 différée jusqu’à la quatrième section, après un traitement de‘l’espace utopique’, ce qui entraîne quelques redites et laisse parfois l’impression d’un piétinement dans l’argumentation. On aurait également souhaité davantage d’éclaircissements, même spéculatifs, sur les causes de la rupture entre le Zola des Rougon-Macquart et des derniers textes, car malgré l’érudition impressionnante du livre, ce point capital demeure peu clair. Scharf a entrepris une tâche sans doute ingrate à bien des égards, mais il réussit à montrer que l’utopisme du ‘troisième Zola’ est une synthèse bien pondérée, encore que limitée par son époque historique, d’un grand défenseur des droits de l’homme. Arkansas State University Warren Johnson Solal, Jérôme, éd. Joris-Karl Huysmans, Tome 1: figures et fictions du Naturalisme. Caen: Minard, 2011. ISBN 978-2-256-91164-4. Pp. iii + 245. 23 a. A gifted prose poet and writer of short fiction, an important art critic whom Fénéon called “l’inventeur de l’impressionnisme,” the first president of the Académie Goncourt, Huysmans (1848–1907) was all these things, but perhaps above all a unique novelist ever torn between science and spirituality (i). Associated with Naturalism, Decadence, Symbolism, and the Catholic literary revival, his remarkable career thus witnessed virtually all of the major literary and artistic mutations of the last three decades of the nineteenth century and beyond. This collection of thirteen essays, the first volume in a series devoted to the author and edited by Solal, seeks to examine the current state of Huysmansian studies while at the same time sparking new fields of inquiry. Using a wide variety of stylistic, sociological, historical, thematic, psychoanalytic , and comparative approaches, the book pays special attention to Huysmans’s ambivalent relationship to Naturalism—a movement that he never really abandoned, if only in his life-long commitment to research and documentation. Hence, the collection seeks not only to analyze Huysmans’s durable membership in Zola’s Naturalist school—one that shaped his worldview and methods—but also to demonstrate how that same affiliation granted him the freedom to break away and find his personal voice. Divided into two major sections titled“Figures”and“Fictions”respectively, part one examines Huysmans’s artistic affinity with the various “figures” of Naturalism— its “maître” Zola, its “initiateurs” like the Goncourt brothers, and its primary and secondary “acteurs” like Maupassant, Mirbeau, Alexis, Céard, Hennique, Caze, and Descaves (5). René-Pierre Colin shows how problematic these relationships were for a Huysmans who dreamed of an “intimisme” that would supplant Naturalism (5). In studying his Correspondance with Edmond de Goncourt, Pierre-Jean Dufieff underlines the ambivalence and complexity of the two writers’ relationship, concluding that they nevertheless shared a certain type of sensibility he calls“naturalisme artiste” (25). Among other interesting facts in Marc Smeets’s essay on Huysmans’s reception in the Netherlands, we learn that the author was greatly admired by the Dutch neoRomantic writer Arij Prins. Noëlle Benhamou compares the satirical representation of peasants in Huysmans’s En rade (1887) and Maupassant’s little-known Mont-Oriol, published the same year, while Samuel Lair compares Satanism, possession, hysteria, and the symbol of the bell in Huysmans and Mirbeau. Part two examines how the various Huysmansian ‘fictions’ are traversed by their own desires and obsessions like food, prostitution, hysteria, and bachelorhood. Laurence Decroocq treats Huysmans’s unique take on gastronomy while Éléonore Reverzy and Jeannine Pacque analyze representations of women. Céline Grenaud’s essay on hysteria in Là-bas (1891) sees Charcot and Lombroso as influential sources, but emphasizes how Huysmans took his depictions beyond facile scientific explanations. Sylvie Thorel explores fresh terrain in her essay on the Huysmansian flâneur while Jean Borie compares the notions of travel and luxury in Huysmans and Larbaud. The volume also contains two invaluable contributions that treat little-known or unedited works. Solal’s essay on Huysmans’s compassionate portrayal of a female protagonist in the unfinished novel La faim provides refreshing new insights into an author known for his bachelor heroes, while Philippe Barascud’s...

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