Models of Collaboration in Nineteenth-Century French Literature: Several Authors ed. by Seth Whidden (review)

love that depended on passion capable of giving individual pleasure, happiness, and definition” (178). Chapter 2, “Love at War,” evokes the century-long conflict played out in novels between a traditional view of marriage as the dutiful union of two families and the more “modern” union of two individuals. The fictions of chapter 3, “Thunderstruck at First Sight,” introduce passionate commitment to the other into marriage, and with it the anxiety of instability. Chapter 4, “The ‘Tahitian Mirage’ and the Dream of Serial Love,” explores the myth of “natural love” as a corrective to the Catholic Church’s condemnation of adultery. Chapter 5, “Divorce and the Death of Love,” teases out from legal decrees and literary works the symbolism of divorce as irreversible break with the past. Chapter 6, “The Roses and the Thorns of Love,” treats the consequences of applying the principle of liberty to physical love as depicted in both fictive and non-fictive texts: promiscuity, disease, and disappointment at the diminution of passion’s all-consuming ardor. Because much of this material has previously appeared in article form, a certain amount of repetitiousness from chapter to chapter blunts the incisiveness of Pasco’s evocation of the conceptual shift in love’s priorities from collectivity to individuality. Specialists of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century France will find that Revolutionary Love has a great deal to commend it. Its examination of how the Enlightenment’s public ideal of “happiness” came to intersect with the private sphere of intimate personal relations suggests a new field of intellectual inquiry, one that might be called the sociology of literature. And the vast repertoire of literary works that it meticulously documents invites researchers to engage in case studies, close readings, and nuanced interpretations within this field. Scholars undertaking such work will be aided by Revolutionary Love’s brief introduction and succinct conclusion; extensive bibliography of works of fiction, letters, memoirs, history, social history, and criticism; thorough index; and abundant footnotes. Smith College (MA) Mary Ellen Birkett WHIDDEN, SETH, ed. Models of Collaboration in Nineteenth-Century French Literature: Several Authors, One Pen. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009. ISBN 978-0-7546-6643-1. Pp. xiii + 187. $95.95. This collection of twelve essays provides a panoramic view of issues relating to questions of authorship as the individual contributors examine numerous incarnations of collaboration, both in praesentia and in absentia, in various genres. The focus of most of the essays is the nineteenth century, although two deal with pre-revolutionary collaborative efforts, and the final one examines the notion of interpersonal and inter-textual networks among Belgian modernist literary journals in the 1920s. Within the nineteenth century, the contexts of collaboration presented include groups such as the Romantic cenacle, the poets contributing to the Tombeau de Théophile Gautier, the Cercle Zutique, the Médan group, and the authors affiliated with the Revue Wagnerienne, in addition to contexts more limited in scope such as Maurice Denis’s illustrations of works by Verlaine and Gide or novels such as L’Ami Fritz and Manette Salomon in which two authors present their joint efforts as if they were one. In his introduction, Whidden situates the underlying premises of the volume in relation to other current scholarship on collaborative literature, notably that of 812 FRENCH REVIEW 84.4 Wayne Koestenbaum in Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration. He takes issue with several of Koestenbaum’s central assumptions regarding collaborative texts, questioning in particular Koestenbaum’s emphasis on collaboration between two (rather than several, or even many) authors and his condition that both authors in a collaborative effort admit to the collaboration. Whidden further distinguishes the studies in the present volume from the approach of Whitney Chadwick and Isabelle de Courtivon in their Significant Others, arguing that sexual partnership need not be considered a necessary component of collaborative authorship. Proposing a broader approach, he maintains that there is much to be gained by examining the nature of collaborative texts, rather than trying to enter the mind of the writer(s). In addition, he attempts to differentiate the focus of the present essays from critical studies of intertextuality. Referring to Julia Kristeva’s definition of the latter phenomenon...