Jeux d’influences: théâtre et roman de la Renaissance aux Lumières ed. by Véronique Lochert, Clotilde Thouret (review)

Long summaries of cognitive critics, disruptive punctuation, and definitions of jargon force rereading for comprehension. Invented uses of words like “paraphrastic ” (247) and “collation” (124 ff) are annoying and one wishes that other, more conventional terms could be used. The conclusions, however, reward the persistent reader; the study offers a useful compendium of cognitive literary theories with excellent demonstrations of parallels across lengthy epic texts. From here, one hopes for a broader range of texts to test this aesthetic of repetition in oral style: different versions of texts (e.g., Aliscans), developments of texts over time (chansons d’aventures, prose) and place (Leverage’s examples are largely northern—Anglo-Norman and Parisian). Leverage’s carefully argued study thus opens the door to further interdisciplinary research on the nature of audience and perception of medieval texts, then and now. Loyola University Maryland Leslie Zarker Morgan LOCHERT, VÉRONIQUE, et CLOTILDE THOURET, éd. Jeux d’influences: théâtre et roman de la Renaissance aux Lumières. Paris: PU Sorbonne, 2010. ISBN 978-2-84050-656-0. Pp. 282. 22 a. Originally delivered at a conference on the relationship between dramatic and narrative writing from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment, the fifteen essays in this interesting, attractively presented volume investigate points of contact and mutual exchange between two genres often considered only separately . The editors begin their introductory comments with a citation from Mikhaïl Bakhtine and immediately emphasize the dialogue between the theater and the novel in the early modern period. The richly comparative studies gathered here examine “les croisements et les contaminations, les influences mutuelles, la constitution de modèles en miroir, les procédés que les deux genres ont en partage” (10). The first four essays fall under the general heading “Modèles théoriques. Les variations d’un paragone” and, as this title suggests, focus on theoretical questions raised in treatises and other types of writing about the two genres . With great pertinence, Agathe Novak-Lechevalier’s “Roman et drame chez Diderot: une élaboration en miroir” demonstrates how the eighteenth-century philosophe contributed to displacing the “couple classique épopée/tragédie” (62) and thereby encouraged the development of serious consideration of dramatic and narrative genres. With a work like Le fils naturel, which he styles a drame, falling somewhere between comedy and tragedy, Diderot opens up a closed classical system of generic distinctions. His Éloge de Richardson calls for a similar rethinking of the novel as genre, going so far as to refer to Richardson’s novels as drames. Ultimately, “sous l’impulsion des théories diderotiennes se construit une véritable interaction entre les deux genres” (66). Diderot clearly holds a key place in the discussion of the complicated relationship between theater and novel. In the concluding essay of the first section of Jeux d’influences, Sophie Marchand discusses the ways in which, for much critical discourse of the period, Richardson’s novels became the “lieu d’une convergence inédite entre théorie romanesque et théorie théâtrale” and contribute to the renewal of “un théâtre perçu comme déliquescent” (75). The second set of essays, “Effets de théâtre dans le roman,” straightforwardly addresses the influence of the theatrical on novelistic works as varied as Boiardo’s Reviews 955 Inamoramento de Orlando, Rabelais’s Pantagruel and the Tiers livre, and the novels of Fielding and Lesage. Having abandoned a career in the theater following passage of the Stage Licensing Act of 1737, Henry Fielding turns to the novel. Baudouin Millet, investigating Fielding’s many references to the theater in his novels, maintains that the English novelist is “l’inventeur au XVIIIe siècle d’une écriture qui exhibe la référence au théâtre” (129). Christelle Bahier-Porte bases a convincing essay about Lesage on the hypothesis that in his novels, the theater “peut être considéré comme un modèle de réception de ces œuvres [...] comme une grille de lecture possible du roman” (136). In other words, the reader of a novel by Lesage becomes, in effect, the spectator of a theatrical event. Lesage contrives to “transformer le lecteur en spectateur” (139). In the penultimate section, “À la crois...