Journal of European Studies articles from March 1994

Journal of European Studies archives from March 1994

From savage elements: epiphany in Primo Levi's Holocaust writings.
March 1, 1994... Primo Levi uses a version of modern epiphany originated by Rousseau and Wordsworth in the romantic period, appropriated by Browning and Pater in the Victorian, and refined by Proust, Joyce and Conrad in the modern.[1] But Levi's contribution to...

Mysticism and sexuality in the writings of Leon Bloy.
March 1, 1994... The standard Romantic stereotypes of woman - demonic or angelic, representing flesh or spirit, appealing either to man's dark, animal nature or, conversely, to his 'higher' instincts - were to be found in abundance in the work of Barbey...

Know the past: know thyself. Literary pursuits and quest for identity in A.S. Byatt's 'Possession' and in F. Duranti's 'Effetti Personali.' (Francesca Duranti)
March 1, 1994... Somewhere in the locked-away letters, Ash had referred to the plot or fate which seemed to hold or drive the dead lovers. Roland thought, partly with precise postmodernist pleasure, and partly with a real element of superstitious dread, that he...

Moliere: The Theory and Practice of Comedy.
March 1, 1994... Reviews French Studies Written with enthusiasm as well as erudition and offering both information and insights, this is a study which presents Moliere in a serious light. That does not mean Calder fails to see and appreciate the...

Justice and Difference in the Works of Rousseau: Bienfaisance and Pudeur.
March 1, 1994... Influenced by Derrida's view of Rousseaussist pity, the author presents a well-argued study of bienfaisance. The unthinking generosity of Mme de Warens is opposed to Julie's wish not to enslave beneficiaries, but to turn them into potential...

Lecons sur 'Les Illustres Francaises' de Robert Challe. Actes de la Table Ronde de Creteil.
March 1, 1994... This volume contains, with one exception, papers given at the one-day conference held in Creteil on 9 January 1993 and represents, it would seem, a hasty collective response to the fact that Challe's splendid but difficult novel had appeared as...

Fragile Lives: Violence, Power and Solidarity in Eighteenth-Century Paris.
March 1, 1994... We have here the English translations of two books which have both previously made their mark in French. Arlette Farge's illuminating study of the precarious existence of the poor in eighteen-century Paris is based on a shrewd, wide-ranging use...

The Gilded Youth of Thermidor.
March 1, 1994... We have here the English translations of two books which have both previously made their mark in French. Arlette Farge's illuminating study of the precarious existence of the poor in eighteen-century Paris is based on a shrewd, wide-ranging use...

Politics and Narratives of Birth: Gynocolonization from Rousseau to Zola.
March 1, 1994... Carol Mossman's brilliant The Narrative Matrix was a psychoanalyticfeminist study of Le Rouge et le Noir. In this second book, she looks back and forward from Rousseau's to Zola's version of gynocolonization - |the appropriation of maternal...

French Literature, Thought and Culture in the Nineteenth Century: A Material World; Essays in Honour of D.G. Charlton.
March 1, 1994... Professor Christopher Thompson's opening tribute to Donald Charlton underlines the enormous contribution to French Studies made by his predecessor in the departmental chair at the University of Warwick. Half of the contributors to this volume...

The Adultress's Child: Authorship and Desire in the Nineteenth-Century French Novel.
March 1, 1994... |What a tengled web' when a feminist gives birth to a son and has to confront the problem of |holding power over the gendered other that will soon hold power over us'. The result in this case is a bizarre mixture of personal anecdote,...

Baudelaire and Intertextuality: Poetry at the Crossroads.
March 1, 1994... As Dr Evans herself no doubt reflected, she might have used her conclusion as an introduction, not merely because it contains an etat present of criticism on Le Spleen de Paris, which situates and justifies her own work, not merely because it...

Emile Zola: 'L'Assommoir.'
March 1, 1994... Students of L'Assommoir are faced with a conspicuously wide choice of recent critical introductions, written by Clark, Desgranges and Carles, Furst, and Minogue respectively. They could do worse than to find themselves in the safe hands of the...

Letters of Gustave Courbet.
March 1, 1994... Not unlike his successive self-portraits, our view of Courbet seems continuously subject to correction. We may now be accustomed to the idea that behind the peasant buffoon there lay a deeply serious artist. It still comes as something of a...

Painted Love: Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era.
March 1, 1994... This book will invite comparison with Charles Bernheimer's Figures of Ill Repute (see JES, xxi ( 1991 ), 88-90). For if the facts of Parisian prostitution in the nineteenth-century have been authoritatively documented (notably in the classic...

Proust Between Two Centuries.
March 1, 1994... Time was when any discussion about literary greatness was brought to a happy stop by the argument that the greatest writer was the one susceptible of the most diverse serious readings. If this is so, then Proust, that target impossible for...

Postmodern Proust.
March 1, 1994... Time was when any discussion about literary greatness was brought to a happy stop by the argument that the greatest writer was the one susceptible of the most diverse serious readings. If this is so, then Proust, that target impossible for...

Jules Laforgue and Poetic Innovation.
March 1, 1994... The critical world has taken some time to catch up with Laforgue - 'Il faut etre de son age et meme en avant de son Age' - and has only just begun to give him the credit he deserves (ironically, he has had to pay for his debtors, Pound, Eliot,...

The Cambridge Companion to Sartre.
March 1, 1994... This is a volume of specially commissioned essays in a series of volumes which aim to provide critical introductions to the work of major philosophers. It is, in a way, a little surprising that Sartre should have been accorded the honour of...

Feet First: Jules Valles.
March 1, 1994... In 1972 London University Press published Redfern's edition of Le Bachelier. The conception of this new brain-child, the first comprehensive book in English on Valles's ceuvre, can easily be traced back to the LUP introduction; Feet First...

The Knight-Monks of Vichy France: Uriage, 1940-45.
March 1, 1994... One of the first reactions of the French to the experience of being defeated in the field of battle by the Germans is to try to reform their educational system. They did it after 1870 by putting greater emphasis on applied science, and after...

Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization.
March 1, 1994... De Gaulle's skill in catching the Whigs bathing and running away with their clothes was most visible in his solution of the Algerian problem. After having been brought back to power in 1958 by a right wing coup aimed at keeping Algeria French,...

Enlightenment and Conservatism in the Dutch Republic: The Political Thought of Elie Luzac, 1721-1796.
March 1, 1994... This well-written interesting study of intellectual history is of value not only for eighteenth-century Dutch history but, more generally, for that of Europe as a whole. Velema is at the historical cutting edge. For him, Enlightenment and...

Richardson's 'Clarissa' and the Eighteenth-Century Reader.
March 1, 1994... In the year in which he issued a hugely revised new edition of his novel Clarissa, Samuel Richardson wrote to his most devoted correspondent, Lady Dorothy Bradshaigh, about the demands made of him by his readers. He had received, he said, a...

British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire.
March 1, 1994... This book appears as the first in the new series |Cambridge Studies in Romanticism' (general editors Marilyn Butler and James Chandler), which is dedicated to |historicist' re-readings of the literary canon. That is to say, the books are...

Apprehending the Criminal: The Production of Deviance in Nineteenth-Century Discourse.
March 1, 1994... This Foucauldian analysis of the intertextual production of |the criminal' in French and English discourses of the fin de siecle will appeal to scholars in an array of disciplines, including literary critics, sociologists, anthropologists and...

Totalitarian Language: Orwell's Newspeak and Its Nazi and Communist Antecedents.
March 1, 1994... There is something slightly misleading about the title of the book. The kind of language which the rulers of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union tried to impose on their subjects was not an antecedent to Newspeak in the way that the poetry of...

Text: The Genealogy of an Antidisciplinary Object.
March 1, 1994... |When we quarrel over a university curriculum we are, whether intentionally or not, engaging the problematic of disciplinary reason' (p. 219). Such is the politics behind this history of the Text in which John Mowitt articulates |the relation...

National Histories and European History.
March 1, 1994... All revolutions require history to be rewritten. The demise of any established pattern sheds a new light on its past and generates speculation about the future. The recent period of change in Europe poses a particular challenge to historians....

The Making of Eastern Europe.
March 1, 1994... In his highly ambitious, unconventional and anti-chronological work, packed with the minutiae of factual information and ideas bridging an immense timescale, Philip Longworth takes us from 1909 back to the formation of Eastern Europe in C.AD...

Sebastian Brant's 'The Ship of Fools' in Critical Perspective: 1800-1991.
March 1, 1994... The series Literary Criticism in Perspective seeks not just to summarize and assess previous research into important works or authors, but also |to illuminate the nature of literary criticism itself, to gauge the influence of social and...

German Realists in the Nineteenth Century.
March 1, 1994... Amazingly, Deutsche Literatur im 19. Jahrhundert (1951), surely one of Lukacs's major books, has only now been translated into English. It contains essays on Kleist, Eichendorff, Buchner, Heine, Keller, Raabe and Fontane, written mostly in...

Rilke: Neue Gedichte.
March 1, 1994... Phelan's guide for students is clear, illuminating and thought-provoking. His aim is' . . . to interpret Rilke's project - as a whole.... The relations between the poems raise three issues which are central to Rilke's poetic undertaking: the...

Geist und Macht: Writers and the State in the GDR.
March 1, 1994... This volume of English and German essays is based on a conference at the University of Bath in September 1991 and offers a welcome contribution to the re-assessment of GDR-literature, 'from the relatively objective distance of the UK' (p. 1)....