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The Cambridge Companion to Baudelaire (review)

extracts the sociological specificity of the discourses employed and sharply delineates the elements of contrast separating the otherwise similar ways in which readers used the works of her chosen writers. She also shows the clear division between the responses to Les Mystères de Paris of the philanthropic bourgeoisie and those of the socially and economically disadvantaged, mounting in the process an effective challenge to Habermas’s claim that the French press of the period thwarted debate and self-awareness amongst its readers. The central analysis is preceded by a presentation of the context provided by letters addressed to earlier writers, notably Rousseau and Chateaubriand. A long opening section revisits the status of the French social novel in the 1830s and 1840s and the controversy it provoked. Although, here, both the broad outlines and certain of the details are familiar, the investigations of fiction and criticism alike are wide-ranging and take in some little-known material, for example Chapuys-Montlaville’s parliamentary diatribes against the roman-feuilleton. (One might, nevertheless, take issue with the inference drawn from an instance of the label article being used to designate the episode of a serialized novel. This was frequent practice at the time and not the reflection of a readiness to see the work as social analysis rather than fiction.) The thesis is related throughout to an apposite selection of primary and secondary sources, not all of which will be familiar to the literary scholar, though reference is lacking to the work on Balzac’s female readers by both David Bellos and Christiane Mounoud-Angles. The endnotes are admirably informative, yet this reader frequently felt the need for a bibliography and index.