In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

however, that the essays are all blessedly short and to the point. Altogether, it is a treasure trove and a valuable resource for students, teachers, and scholars alike in a variety of fields. When future scholars of American culture examine the period 1990–2010 and beyond, they could use this work as a primary text. It is an excellent compendium of essays and has much to say about who we are now. Pomona College (CA) Margaret Waller ABBOTT, HELEN. Between Baudelaire and Mallarmé: Voice, Conversation, and Music. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009. ISBN 978-8-0-7546-6745-2. Pp. xi + 245. $99.95. Recent scholarly work, including several important books also published by Ashgate, has gone beyond analogies between the “musicality” of poetry and the “poetry” of music, terms that are all inherently problematic to begin with. The relations between words and music and the theoretical issues they raise are of particular interest for nineteenth-century France, when poets commonly alluded to music with regard to their poetic practice. Baudelaire and Mallarmé wrote famous essays on Wagner, and composers wrote major vocal and instrumental works based on or alluding to contemporary poetic texts. Abbott has branched out from this field of research into an original and useful area: she examines the different senses of voice and its relation to poetry. She develops notions like voicing, resonance , and sensation and brings them to bear on Baudelaire’s and Mallarmé’s theoretical writings, their verse and prose poems. She begins by examining treatises on poetry during the century and pointing out two usually neglected aspects of traditional rhetoric: actio, which is related to the way poetry is voiced, and memoria. She associates this “memorability” with bodily response, thereby tying it to the immediacy of voicing; she locates passages by her poets that evoke the relation of poetry to sensation. Part 2 is centered on these notions of the body and the physicality of voice. Here and throughout, Abbott studies sounds like murmurs, laughter, and cries, as well as verbal language. In her chapters on “exchange,” Abbott treats the different ways voices are made to speak and respond within the poems, including personification , prosopopoeia, direct speech, dialogue, and apostrophe; and she pays special attention to texts where voice, language, or music are explicitly thematized. Resonances go beyond individual texts; one section treats those among Mallarmé’s poems of the 1860s. Abbott also treats strange and foreign voices like those of cats, clocks, and l’Azur, which may threaten the poet’s own voice, but may create poetic effects that transcend time and death. A final chapter treats music, beginning with the musical metaphor, with its ambiguities and potential contradictions. She highlights the arbitrary, but poetically fruitful relation between and among music (sung and instrumental), language , and emotion. A section on song settings of poems by Baudelaire and Mallarmé is particularly valuable, no doubt enriched by Abbott’s experience as a singer herself. Throughout, Abbott establishes parallels between the two poets, but she also points out important distinctions between them, like their use of punctuation or Baudelaire’s more frequent use of reported speech. Mallarmé receives more consideration than Baudelaire, perhaps because he wrote so much about language and poetic practice, and Abbott details these writings. Critics often mine these texts for ideas that they then use to analyze his poems, and that 816 FRENCH REVIEW 84.4 is the case here. One might sometimes quarrel with Abbott’s translations of the poets’ works or with certain of her interpretations, but by and large her readings both elucidate and demonstrate her points, and provide new insights into these often-studied texts. A section in chapter 1 treats reading practices in the nineteenth century. One wants to learn more about the ways poetry was read aloud, recited, and performed , beyond the tantalizing, but inconclusive passages from and about Baudelaire and Mallarmé that Abbott has uncovered. Where did it happen? At home in the evening? In social gatherings, literary salons, cafés? On stage? Who read or declaimed the poetry: men? Women? Professionals? Did settings and practices change during the course of the century? Abbott would be well-positioned to examine these questions. Her book represents a...

pdf

Share