Regards sur la tragédie 1736-1815: histoire, exotisme, politique ed. by Karine Bénac-Giroux, Jean-Noël Pascal (review)

seeks to reconstruct the actual medieval audience of these books. Alden identifies the growing class of civil servants—who became some of the most important bibliophiles of the fifteenth century and who frequently engaged in their own literary activities—as the most likely audience for these works. Book historians in particular will appreciate this work, both for its content and as a model of how new philology can radically revise our understanding of a musical and literary corpus. Literary scholars may be disappointed by the near complete absence of any serious engagement with the actual songs transmitted in these books, but they will certainly find ample information to expand (indeed, revise ) on current readings of these lyrics. All may be surprised by the editorial decision to relegate color reproductions as well as crucial codicological descriptions of the codices to the press’s Web site. The advantage of having access to digitized illustrations is at the expense of slow download and an outdated layout of the documents. As for the appendixes, most will find a need to print out the graphs for clarity. In spite of this less than elegant attempt of producing a hybrid scholarly book, Alden’s study will stand as one of the most important works on the Loire Valley chansonniers and will undoubtedly inspire many scholars to look anew at these fascinating volumes. University of Virginia Deborah McGrady BÉNAC-GIROUX, KARINE, et JEAN-NOËL PASCAL, éd. Regards sur la tragédie 1736–1815: histoire, exotisme, politique. Toulouse: PU du Mirail, 2010. ISBN 978-2-8107-0099-8. Pp. 236. 23 a. The study of tragedy in the age of Voltaire has long been undermined by the association of the tragic form with the grand siècle in which it was first elaborated and by a critical tendency to dismiss eighteenth-century tragedy as a form in decline . In this issue of Littératures, Bénac-Giroux and Pascal have collected ten articles on the theater of the Enlightenment in an attempt to right these wrongs through an examination of the ways in which tragedy came to express “la modernité idéologique” of the Enlightenment and to draw from that ideology of modernity “l’énergie spectaculaire d’un véritable renouvellement” (5). The generic title and vague subtitle hint at the collection’s lack of a precise focus, but in fact, this is one of its strengths: the breadth of the articles collected here demonstrates not only the variety of forms of tragedy and the complexity of their evolution over the course of the period in question, but also the depth of fine work being produced in eighteenth-century theater studies today. After a solid opening essay by Pascal, which traces the long shadow cast by Voltaire across the latter part of the eighteenth century (through readings of plays by Saurin, Dorat, Leblanc de Guillet, and Billardon de Sauvigny) and touches on all of the themes suggested in the volume’s subtitle, the other nine articles are organized implicitly into sections according to those themes: history, exoticism, and politics. The first section is the loosest, including Ligier-Degauque’s essay on colonialism, based largely on her reading of Alzire and its contemporary parodies ; Bec’s examination of the theme of patriotism as it emerges from plays set in ancient Rome; and Maligne’s analysis of La Harpe’s political tragedies, in which he also takes into account La Harpe’s own critical writings. Under ‘exoticism’ we 818 FRENCH REVIEW 86.4 find Bret-Vitoz’s taxonomy of plays with Egyptian themes, Marchal-Ninosque’s reading of Lemierre’s La veuve du Malabar and its parody La veuve de Cancale, and Bénac-Giroux’s treatment of identity and exoticism in Lefèvre’s 1776 Zuma. The third group of essays is the strongest: Hillerin’s article on the image of the king in tragedy between 1760 and 1789 is erudite and convincing, and Ambrus’s treatment of M.-J. Chénier’s tragedies is well written and original. A fitting final article for this section and for the volume is Jacob’s analysis of Luce de Lancival’s 1809 Hector. Here, Jacob examines the tension between...