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in the male-dominated dynamic of modern capital. It is worth noting in this context that the authors of the texts analyzed are overwhelmingly male; and that authenticity, which Hiner rightly identifies as one of modernity’s “most obsessive debates” (169), is “compromised when it is only performed, staged and not innate” (30). Fashion challenged fixed notions of identity, gender, and class often only to replace them with new constructions. This study will appeal to social historians as well as specialists of nineteenthcentury French literature and art, thanks to Hiner’s theoretical foundations and her discussions of the actual material conditions involved in the making and importing of cashmere shawls, the architecture of fans, or the evolution of handbags from simple dress pockets. The book’s illustrations place the reader in the atmosphere of the period considered (1830–70) and are used effectively and with wit. Hiner asserts that Emma Bovary reaches a significant threshold of awareness by “reading the material objects of fashion through which aristocratic ball-goers communicate and construct their identities” (145). It is an apt mise en abyme for the well-met goals of this study. Skidmore College (NY) John Anzalone IBBETT, KATHERINE. The Style of the State in French Theater, 1630–1660: Neoclassicism and Government. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009. ISBN 978-0-7546-6566-3. Pp. 176. $99.95. This book deals with frames, perspectives, and things hidden from view. In her study of the ways seventeenth-century French theater engages with political thought and practice, Katherine Ibbett asks what we might learn from our cultural monuments when we displace them from the brightly lit stage of tradition and consider them from the wings, as it were. At issue here are neoclassical tragedy and Pierre Corneille, two institutions made monumental during the nineteenth century. The story is well known: the education system of the Third Republic actively sought the origins of French national identity in the moral probity of the Cornelian hero, an exemplary “Frenchman” who resisted foreign invaders just as Corneille, enshrined as a national(ist) hero after 1870, eschewed in his plays stylistic and political corruptions creeping in from abroad. Ibbett, however, reads this narrative in a quite different way. She suggests in chapter one that Corneille’s plays involve complexly decentered considerations of the relations of state and theater. They stage dramatic engagements with political power that require of their characters tactical skills of patience, dissimulation, improvisation, and, indeed, scheming. By arguing that playwrights are compelled to employ related strategies to achieve their aesthetic goals, Ibbett suggests that the theater is itself a form of political engagement. In so doing, she seeks to give lie to the entrenched critical notion that Corneille had an obvious distaste for Italianist reason of state political theory. Ibbett lays the groundwork for this argument in the second chapter by considering two minor martyr plays by Puget de La Serre and Saint-Balmon. She shows how these plays draw the spectator’s attention away from the familiar portrait of the suffering saint and refocus it on the waiting women who tend his wounds. Ibbett understands this development as offering insight into the changing nature of spectacle: as the neoclassical scene of suffering is pushed decorously offstage, these plays effect a shift in emphasis Reviews 555 from spectacular event to quiet observation, giving Fronde-era audiences an alternative to political resistance in the form of a more docile civic companionship. Ibbett therefore draws our attention to what happens around the edges of the spectacular. She argues that political subjectivity emerges in the mundane activities that occur apart from, and in more passive witness to, the centrality of heroic events. In subsequent chapters, she makes the quotidian a model for understanding Corneille’s dramatic reflection on the nature of political action. Reading Corneille against early modern political thought, she argues that Corneille reflects on the necessity of “making do” in the exercise of state authority , an insight to be found not only on the neoclassical stage, but in the very theories of reason of state Corneille is so often described as having unambiguously rejected. The colonial governors of Polyeucte and Théodore (chapter three) and the female sovereign of...

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