The French Review

Reviews 221 monnayeurs by stating:“Nous vivons pour manifester.”His later reportages from Africa should have been discussed to underscore the earnestness of this statement. Clotilde Landais insightfully explores how Stephen King’s fictive writers discredit the institutional distinction between high and popular literature. Unfortunately, no overview or synthesis unites these essays. Because the editors concentrate on professional writers and their associates, dating from the advent of the mass market for prose narratives, the volume offers workers in that market the dreary fascination of shop-talk and professional gossip. It has relatively little to offer to students, teachers, and critics of French and Francophone culture. Oberlin College Affiliate Scholar (OH) Laurence M. Porter Grossman, Kathryn M. The Later Novels of Victor Hugo: Variations on the Politics and Poetics of Transcendence. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. ISBN 978-0-19-964295-3. Pp. xii + 285. £64. This study announces an ambitious double goal: first, to read Hugo’s final three novels within the Second-Empire context of their creation and initial reception; and second, to read Hugo “today” (meaning in the post-9/11 world) in order to explore “our own moral, political, and aesthetic challenges and to put them in a wider perspective ” (5). The second goal seems to be a response to the (truly worrisome) dearth of recent publications on Hugo’s novels: according to Grossman, apart from her own works, there have been only four major books devoted to Hugolian narrative since the 1960s (6). Yet Grossman’s work tends to be more convincing and interesting when it focuses on how Hugo responded to and attempted to shape events in his own time. Grossman argues that together, Les travailleurs de la mer (1866), L’homme qui rit (1869) and Quatrevingt-treize (1874) blend poetic and historical discourse in ways that reflect the aging Hugo’s preoccupations with revolutionary violence, with an ideal vision of social justice, and with his own legacy, both literary and political. This focus on the contemporary context yields some solid insights. For instance, Grossman convincingly demonstrates that the introductory “travelogue” chapter of Les travailleurs de la mer does not merely describe the geography and communities of the Channel Islands, but also mobilizes a subtle critique of Louis-Napoléon’s France. In her analysis of L’homme qui rit, Grossman interestingly applies critical theories of George Sand’s idealism to Hugo’s work, looking past overstated gendered distinctions between realist and idealist aesthetics. Her analysis of Quatrevingt-treize compares double identities of characters, objects, and places in order to talk about the complex role of history in a novel that brings together past Terror with a utopian vision of the future, in an effort to confront the recent events of the Paris Commune. By seeking always to prove the existence of an all-encompassing unity of vision that transcends the “superficial chaos” (7) of Hugo’s oeuvre, Grossman tends to downplay or gloss over some of the tensions and contradictions that make him (to some readers) so compelling. I appreciate more Grossman’s attention to small details. For instance, a reference to “Hugue(o)nots” living in the Channel islands demonstrates Hugo’s habit of slyly alluding to himself through coincidences of sound; as Grossman asks,“What better way to signal his status as a (political) protestant?” (47). These clever close readings make The Later Novels of Victor Hugo memorable and fun. Arcadia University (PA) Kate M. Bonin Harrington, Katharine N. Writing the Nomadic Experience in Contemporary Francophone Literature. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2012. ISBN 978-0-7391-75712 . Pp. 147. $60. The introduction, which explores the changing significance over time of such terms as nomadism, diaspora, and exile, sets the stage for a thought-provoking discussion of several well-known contemporary Francophone writers and the narrative conceptualizations of place and identity in their respective oeuvres.As Harrington posits, a primary aim of the volume is to “widen the scope of the study of nomadism in contemporary French and Francophone literature” (12) through her selection of four authors with complex bicultural and/or bilingual backgrounds who “envision writing as a way to anchor themselves in their uncertain position between nations, cultures, languages, and even between the...