Figures de l’héritier dans le roman contemporain ed. by Martine-Emmanuelle Lapointe, Laurent Demanze (review)

others all but unknown (one is available only online on the BNF site); they include Le guerrier philosophe, Angola, Thérèse philosophe, and André de Mirabeaux’s La morale des sens. Perhaps it is a shame that Les confessions du comte de *** and Les malheurs de l’inconstance did not get a chance to round out what might appear too schematic an opposition of mind and heart. Kavanagh often foregoes the most obvious examples, especially in art, preferring to find the telling trait in simpler or seemingly less characteristic works. It is thus in the nature of things that some comparisons may seem strained or in any event less persuasive than others. The intriguing originality of the discussion of Rousseau lies not in the summary of Rousseau’s political thought but in comparison and partial contrast with Boucher (Rousseau preferred engravings to paintings ). And basing an argument about Laclos’s “anthropology of pleasure” less on Les liaisons dangereuses than on Des femmes et de leur éducation is a neat turn, more firmly cementing the Rousselian connection while tracking transition. Du Bos’s thesis about the importance of subjective pleasure in art is called on as background to a chapter on the paradoxes of Boucher’s ambiguous reputation. Somewhat disconcerting is a comparison of his “illustration” of a tale by La Fontaine with more suggestive ones by Eisen and Fragonard—disconcerting in that the Boucher is not an illustration but a full-fledged canvas (67 x 55 cm), which, besides entailing rich pigments and fluid brushstrokes, is inherently incommensurate with in-12° black-and-white line engraving that measures perhaps 12 x 8. And, of course, Boucher did many landscapes in his early career—such as La forêt (1740), Le moulin (1751)—that might now strike some as “untypical” of his style. Even so—and anyone might have other quibbles—the voice is magisterial, the conduct is both firm and subtle, and the course is held. Kavanagh’s notes cover the technical points but do not do much to steer the reader to complementary readings that might be helpful for the development of particular lines of thought, for example, for Epicureanism specifically, Natania Meeker’s Voluptuous Philosophy: Literary Materialism in the French Enlightenment (2006). Peter Cryle’s two books, Geometry in the Boudoir: Configurations of French Erotic Narrative (1994) and The Telling of the Act: Sexuality as Narrative in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century France (2001), as well as Michel Delon’s Le savoir-vivre libertin (2000), also come to mind. Duke University (NC) Philip Stewart LAPOINTE, MARTINE-EMMANUELLE, et LAURENT DEMANZE, éd. Figures de l’héritier dans le roman contemporain. Montréal: PU de Montréal, 2009. ISBN 978-2-76062203 -6. Pp. 158. $12 Can. The editors of this special issue of Études françaises argue for the importance of notions of filiation in a number of contemporary writers, pointing out the significance in their works of the héritiers, not in the model of nineteenth-century inheritors of fortunes, but rather characters whose presence raises issues of family relationships and intergenerational transference. Contemporary writers reveal themselves to be less interested in lieux de mémoire as they are with reconstructions by the subject of a fragmentary and fugitive narrative in which the subject reframes him/herself by internally assimilating the community of his/her ancestors . This perspective is broadly and perceptively assessed in an important essay, Reviews 557 “Le silence des pères au principe du ‘récit de filiation’” by Dominique Viart, who coined the term récit de filiation in 1996 and who has addressed other aspects of this question in other venues. He argues for a significant mutation in French literature between 1975 and 1984 during which texts focused more intently on realities beyond themselves, including the subject and his attempt to cope with issues of filiation, heritage, and flawed transmission. In this contribution he reflects on how some of these narratives marked by paternal silence can be viewed as attempts to reestablish frayed communal bonds. Although his is the final essay in the dossier, it might profitably be read first, to be followed by Laurent Demanze’s article investigating how the valuation...