This volume is a collection of essays drawn principally from papers presented at the Postgraduates’ Conference of the same name held in the Department of French at the University of Nottingham on May 31, 1997. The contributions are, predictably, very wide-ranging both in subject matter and approach and cover fin de siècle writing from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The quality of the contributions is overall of a high standard and will be of interest to those who work in a range of specialisms. Such specialisms may be principally author-based: Bloy, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Maupassant, Zola (who appears with perhaps surprising frequency), Duras and some lesser-known twentieth-century writers such as Kim Lefèvre and Eugène Savitzkaya; or they may be more thematically grounded: postmodernist politics, the figure of the woman-child in nineteenth-century decadence and today’s media.

A number of the contributions are analyses of a single text or a comparison of two or more individual texts by different authors. Such comparative analyses may prove to be extremely fruitful. Such is the case with Magalie JACQUART’s well structured and discriminating examination of the differing modes of black humour and irony in Bloy’s Le Désespéré and Villiers’ Contes cruels respectively. Jacquart’s dual approach reveals the subtle distinctions between these two examples of écriture de la cruauté: she analyses the particular devices employed by the two authors and then concentrates on their reception, exploring the specific malaise engendered in a reader of these texts. She is thus able to draw useful conclusions about the power of irony as a subtle force in the creation of what the reader may perceive as an écriture cruelle in terms of her/his engagement with ‘un univers horrible’. Such a dual approach demonstrates the importance of going beyond the accepted banners under which thematically or generically similar texts may be categorised, and it could be usefully applied to the close comparison of other sets of texts - not least those which are perhaps too easily grouped together as ‘fin de siècle’!

A little less successful, perhaps, is Emily ROBERTS’ comparative approach applied to Kim Lefèvre’s Métisse blanche and Duras’ L’Amant. The discussion of these texts runs along two axes: the sociological and the narrational. Roberts’ argument that the specifically socio-cultural context in Métisse blanche is eclipsed in favour of a more general tendency to ‘giv[e] voice to the oppressed’ is perhaps more convincing than her stated belief that this is also the case with L’Amant (p.59). This belief seems to be at least partly based on ‘the artistic possibilities of repetition’ in Duras’ texts (p.57). Perhaps rather than ‘repetition’ one could more properly speak of ‘ré-écriture’ here, and with it all that implies by way of intertextuality and self-referentiality. It is this perhaps that highlights Duras’ more radical approach which cannot surely be summed up as merely a ‘shift ... into the realms of legend’ (p.57). Perhaps, too, considerations of mother-daughter relationships might have usefully drawn on the growing body of literature on this subject. That said, the two texts make for an interesting juxtaposition and the parallels which are drawn between them as autobiographical / autofictional works in the context of post-colonial writing are convincing and thought-provoking.

Of the two contributions concentrating on the study of a single author, Jonathan PATRICK’s ‘Maupassant’s Men: Masculinity and the Franco-Prussian war’ offers a cogent reading of the crisis of masculinity. The paper perhaps raises the question as to whether the Franco-Prussian war was the main motor behind the inversion of roles in the last quarter of the nineteenth century or whether such inversion may be seen within the wider context of the decadent movement. Notwithstanding, considerations of masculinity and war are proving to be a particularly rich field of enquiry, as Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy has shown. One of the main strengths of this paper is that it points to one precise and fruitful way in which this issue - which has been generally neglected in an examination of nineteenth-century literature - might be explored.

Bruno SIBONA’s ‘Eugène, en cette fin de millénaire...’ analyses the works of Savitzkaya as examples of texts which deny their own temporality through negation, repetition and fragmentation. The argument that such processes are specifically ‘fin de siècle’ might well have been strengthened by reference to other authors (apart from Duras, mentioned in passing p. 77) who deal with the breakdown of plot and character as well as temporality in a wide variety of ways. Nonetheless, once again, a stimulating essay.

The other contributions to this volume follow a specific theme through ‘fin de siècle’ writing. Two of them take as a basis one or more texts by Zola. The first of these, Larry DUFFY’s ‘Beyond the Pressure Principle: a Thermodynamic Investigation of the Death Instinct in La Bête humaine’, draws substantially on the writings of Deleuze and Serres (though not, perhaps strangely, on Noiray’s work) to present a soundly argued thesis of the way in which this ‘investigation’ shows how the fundamental fêlure that dominates the Rougon-Macquart cycle represents ‘a deferral of Equilibrium, and the [Freudian] thermodynamic Death Instinct at one and the same time’ (p. 33). Zola can thus be seen as subscribing, perhaps unwittingly, to an epos which is contrary to the closed systems that appear at first sight to be at work in the cycle, and which, implicitly, moves him closer to twentieth-century modes of thought.

William GALLOIS’ ‘Ending resistance or Resisting Ending? Politics across the Fins de Siècle’ presents an argument for seeing in Zola’s Rougon-Macquart in particular a lack of totalisation which can pose as a form of radical postmodernism. Thought-provoking though this essay is, I do feel that it would benefit from a consideration of Zola’s wider oeuvre, particularly the final cycles (Les Trois Villes and Les Quatre Evangiles) and his unrealised plan for yet another fresco, this time dealing with the Third Republic, La France en Marche. These final works and project show that in fact Zola could not reject utopianism and totalisation; nor was he hostile to ‘the idea of the nation, of France’ (see p. 46) - especially in the final, uncompleted cycle. Gallois makes an interesting case for meaning being generated at ‘more local levels’ (idem.) in the first novel series, but this does not prevent the latter from constituting only a part of an overall late nineteenth-century Franco-centric totalising vision (‘Histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le second Empire’). Furthermore what has always been recognised as a brand of pantheism may well be seen rather to relate to a residual romanticism rather than to anti-Western radical postmodernism. It is true that Sandoz - and indeed Jacques Lantier and Denizet in La Bête humaine - seem to represent in their different ways a critique of ‘the grand promises of Realism’ (p. 46, n. 23), but these are, I would argue, ‘blips’ in the overriding thrust of Zola’s novelistic enterprise. It is healthy once in a while to propose a debunking of the overriding view of an author’s writerly practice and underlying ideology; however, in this case perhaps the tentativeness suggested by the use of modal verbs (pp. 47 & 42) should be stressed rather than the misleading final sentence which makes Zola out rather unambiguously to be a postmodernist avant la lettre.

Finally we have Ruth Schurch-Halas’ ‘Femme-enfant, Enfant-femme: un symptôme Fin-de-Siècle? La perversion du féminin dans la sous-culture populaire dans ‘child beauty pageants’ aux Etats-Unis et dans les récits décadents de la France’. The rapprochement between the two phenomena is convincing, though rather too broad to be successfully exploited in the space of a short article. The whole question of the visual as opposed to the linguistic perhaps needs to be addressed here, and the late twentieth-century ‘enfant-femme’ figure that Schurch-Halas points to could be usefully contextualised with the mythologisation of Hollywood child stars... Nevertheless, this is a bold essay whose wide bibliography will be very useful for those interested in the image of woman- and child-hood from decadent literature to modern media-constructed images.

The title of the whole volume and the conference from which it drew its contributions is, of course, one which runs the risk of being over-used at this time and which begs a number of questions, a fact that Anne FRÉMIOT is not afraid to admit in her short but comprehensive introduction. She is to be congratulated on having successfully carried out the difficult task of editing: there are a few problems of line continuation and the odd typographical error, but overall, this volume is extremely well presented, very reasonably priced and despite any individual reservations that have been expressed here, is very worthy of a place on library bookshelves.

Above all, the speed with which it has been produced is to be praised; one of the inevitable problems of publishing the proceedings of any conference is the delay in their appearance. With an increasing number of postgraduate conferences now taking place - a development that is to be welcomed and encouraged - speed of publication is vital if the work of the contributors is to be disseminated. More volumes of this sort should be produced and as rapidly as possible after the event - a task that could well be facilitated by recourse to on-line technology.

SARAH CAPITANIO
University of Wolverhampton