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JOVICIC, JELENA. L’intime épistolaire (1850–1900): genre et pratique culturelle. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2010. ISBN 978-1-4438-1867-4. Pp. 197. £39.99. Inscribed in the current interest of the social sciences in the ‘private’ and in the renewed focus of literary criticism on the author, L’intime épistolaire offers a fascinating insight into the correspondences of major letter writers of the second half of the nineteenth century, a synthetic study of which was sorely lacking. Jovicic combines a textual approach—in which she considers ‘epistolarity’ as a genre recognizable through specific traits within the larger first-person literature (autobiography, diary, etc.)—with a cultural approach centered on the concept of ‘intimacy,’ leaning on the Foucauldian notion of technologie de soi. After attempting to situate ‘intimacy’ between the ideas of ‘public’ and ‘private’ as presented by social thinkers (Habermas, Sennett, Foucault) and historians (Michèle Perrot, Alain Corbin), her first chapter goes on to trace the genealogy of the letter, from Cicero all the way through the expressive letter of the Romantics, in the context of a remarkable improvement of the postal system and an increased commercialization of letters. Jovicic examines the status of the letter’s recipient, and presents her method as a poétique based on thematic, rhetorical, and pragmatic analyses within a larger socio-discursive perspective. After pondering the exclusion of ars epistolandi from literature in the nineteenth century, an exclusion she explains by the trivialization of this form, and by the redefinition of ‘Literature’ itself, Jovicic launches into her “poétique épistolaire du prosaïque” (53). She examines three topics present in the letters: health (Maupassant, Zola, Goncourt), since the secularized body has now become an integral, and fragile, part of the notion of self; money (Baudelaire), as the modern self is largely apprehended through its properties; and leisure, the complement of bourgeois work, and a way of asserting the preferences of the self (Sand, Zola). Her next chapter deals with the construction of epistolary identity through various stereotyped ‘figures.’ Her study of the conventional figure of the tourist in the Orient—who is less in search of otherness than of a confirmation of his Occidental idées reçues (Flaubert, Maupassant, Loti, Eberhardt)—does not add much to current criticism on the issue; however, Jovicic offers compelling considerations of the postcard as a combination of photography and (open) travel letter. She goes on to demystify the image of the épistolière, and scrutinizes the figure of the transvestite in Eberhardt, Bashkirtseff, and Sand/Flaubert. Finally, she shows how the figure of the artist, invented in the nineteenth-century, develops in the exchanges between Zola, Goncourt, Daudet, and their friends. As a ‘cor-respondence’ rests on an interactive relationship, Jovicic’s chapter on the pacte épistolaire examines two subtle types of pacts. The study of the confessional letter, against the background of the religious practice and of the literary model of confession, allows her to gauge Baudelaire’s parody, Eberhardt’s thirst for an écoute, and the didactic and unstable exchange between Zola, Cézanne, and Baille. Jovicic then proposes a ‘scénographie’ of the love letter, caught between socio-cultural codes (best exemplified by the Secrétaires galants or Manuels amoureux) and personal expressivity. Finally, following a semiotic reflection on the proper name, her last chapter shows how the ‘signature’ functions as a risky ‘exposition’ of the writer, and as a threshold between life and death. Hence its role in a ‘thanatography’ illustrated by the consolation letter (Sand/Flaubert), and by the suicide, or para-suicide letter, which is both a cliché and a means of controlling one’s (im)mortality (Edmond de Goncourt, Baudelaire). In her conclusion , Jovicic summarizes the issues surrounding the publication of letters Reviews 573 by dead or living authors, and paves the way for future research on an archeology of intimacy in the nineteenth century. Written with rigor and elegance, her book can indeed provide a model for the study of other periods and other types of letter-writers. New York University Claudie Bernard LÉVY-BERTHERAT, DÉBORAH, et PIERRE SCHOENTJES, éd. “J’ai tué”: violence guerrière et fiction. Genève: Droz, 2010. ISBN 978-90...

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