Mapping Memory in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Culture ed. by Susan Harrow, Andrew Watts (review)

(132) also in the romance heroine to whom she compares the epic figure. She suggests that romance influenced epic. Here she reinterprets the longstanding tendency to discuss epic as expanding backwards to include the childhood of a hero in the larger narrative context,biography and genealogy increasingly forming parts of adult identity. Examples are wide-ranging, including well-known and lesser-known works, with careful contrasts of epic and romance characters (for example, Guillaume d’Orange and Gauvain). Part three,“A Slow Conversion of Sensibility,”illustrates the cultural changes of the twelfth century concomitant with change in literary taste, from noble women’s roles and instruction to marriage laws and changes in the administration of the sacraments , arguing convincingly for a“shifting change of direction in the history of mentalities ” (195) that endures today. “Works Cited” are divided into “Primary texts,” “Secondary Sources,”and“Reference Works.”Gaffney has read widely, and intelligently includes both collections of essays by title and by articles cited. There was a missing reference, Harf-Lancner 1994 (153, n145), but other items were present. Not only is this volume wide-ranging and thoughtful, it is also extremely readable. Though Gaffney carefully introduces her arguments and reviews her findings, she does so in a rhetorically pleasing way, not repeating words or structures that she has just illustrated . Furthermore, the volume is beautifully produced: no typographical errors, footnotes for easy consultation, and careful proofreading. This volume provides food for thought and suggestions for future projects, in a useful and readable way. Loyola University Maryland Leslie Zarker Morgan Harrow, Susan, and Andrew Watts, eds. Mapping Memory in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Culture. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012. ISBN 978-90-4203458 -7. Pp. 331. 66 a. Memory studies, now with their own eponymous journal, have become a vibrant, rapidly expanding interdisciplinary field.Holocaust and trauma studies have been their major foundations in the United States, whereas in France and the United Kingdom, a more pervasive sense of place and home long ago associated personal with local, regional, and national histories. Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project is the best-known example. Memory studies allow history and literature, the textual and the factual, and the material and the metaphysical to illuminate each other. All sixteen contributions are excellent.Among the best are Colette Wilson’s“Remembering the Paris Commune in the Twenty-First Century” (37–57), which uses Internet sources effectively. French schools and textbooks still suppress information about the Commune. This basically pacific, naively utopian movement generated a battle to control popular traditions, waged with plaques, statues, street names, and memorials. Rémi Dalisson’s “La Fête nationale”(157–73) traces successive nineteenth-century regimes’attempts to construct a triumphalist master narrative concluding with the ideal present of their ascendancy. 228 FRENCH REVIEW 87.2 Reviews 229 Priests generally presided over holiday ceremonies until the mayor and local instituteurs replaced them around the end of the nineteenth century. The Entre-deux-guerres period adds an element of ‘war culture’that emphasizes Armistice Day (11 November) and Joan of Arc. Sarkozy tried in vain to revive it. Lucy Garnier and Cécile Meynard’s “L’écriture du souvenir dans les‘Journaux’ de Stendhal”(209–33) explores Stendhal’s theories on the relationships between sense impressions and memories, which anticipate Proust. Stendhal records memories in the present in order to project the past into the future. He keeps several different kinds of records running parallel to each other, and allows himself to rewrite a past memory without obliterating the first version, as if on a magic writing pad or palimpsest. Tim Farrant’s“Remémorer Rabelais en France au XIXe siècle” explains that avant-garde writers of the 1830s emulated Rabelais and his contemporaries. Under the Restauration, Rabelais appears to offer “une riposte plus authentique, plus française, plus nationale, aux impostures du nouveau régime” (227). Chateaubriand broke the ice by calling Rabelais a transcendent genius; Nodier, Balzac, and Hugo took up the torch, as Michelet, Verne, and Jarry did later. Denis Saint-Amand’s“Souvenirs zutiques”(241–56), unveils serious opposition to Napoleon III and to the Third Republic underneath the superficially frivolous,obscene surfaces of mocking poems by...