This work deals with Zola's realistic depiction of the effects of class, environment and heredity on his fictional women and the children they rear, providing insight into the difficulties facing mothers in late nineteenth-century France. The study of maternal figures in Zola's Rougon-Macquart reveals the extent to which the author's explicit goal of depicting reality is often accompanied by narration that casts doubt upon maternal behavior.

French realism's immortal siren crawled from the gutter to the heights of society, devouring men and squandering fortunes along the way. Zola's 1880s classic is among the first modern novels.

Reconstructing Woman explores a scenario common to the works of four major French novelists of the nineteenth century: Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, and Villiers. In the texts of each author, a “new Pygmalion” (as Balzac calls one of his characters) turns away from a real woman he has loved or desired and prefers instead his artificial re-creation of her. All four authors also portray the possibility that this simulacrum, which replaces the woman, could become real. The central chapters examine this plot and its meanings in multiple texts of each author (with the exception of the chapter on Villiers, in which only “L’Eve future” is considered). The premise is that this shared scenario stems from the discovery in the nineteenth century that humans are transformable. Because scientific innovations play a major part in this discovery, Dorothy Kelly reviews some of the contributing trends that attracted one or more of the authors: mesmerism, dissection, transformism, and evolution, new understandings of human reproduction, spontaneous generation, puericulture, the experimental method. These ideas and practices provided the novelists with a scientific context in which controlling, changing, and creating human bodies became imaginable. At the same time, these authors explore the ways in which not only bodies but also identity can be made. In close readings, Kelly shows how these narratives reveal that linguistic and coded social structures shape human identity. Furthermore, through the representation of the power of language to do that shaping, the authors envision that their own texts would perform that function. The symbol of the reconstruction of woman thus embodies the fantasy and desire that their novels could create or transform both reality and their readers in quite literal ways. Through literary analyses, we can deduce from the texts just why this artificial creation is a woman.

This annual French XX Bibliography provides the most complete listing available of books, articles, and book reviews concerned with French literature since 1885. Unique in its scope, thoroughness, and reliability of information, it has become an essential reference source in the study of modern French literature and culture. The bibliography is divided into three major divisions: general studies, author subjects (arranged alphabetically), and cinema. Number 59 in the series contains 12,703 entries. William J. Thompson is Associate Professor of French and Undergraduate and Interdisciplinary Programs in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Memphis.

Aimer et Mourir offers a wide-ranging selection of essays that collectively address how, from the Middle Ages to the present, the notions of love and death get inextricably associated with the narratives that are women’s lives. Some of the essays tackle male writers’ representations that link women and, in particular, women’s sexuality, with death, resulting in the figures of the femme fatale, the woman in parturition, and the desiring vampire. A number of essays reiterate that women’s hyper-sexualized bodies have been used as a social construct and a psychological screen upon which to project a fear of death. The challenges to this pat reduction of “woman’s” domain come from the mostly women writers represented here—and they span from Marguerite de Navarre to Amélie Nothomb. These women writers rework the old formulae, giving us instead death-defying memories of love, love regenerative of language (as of bodies), love forcing the frontiers of death, or love creatively redefined within the parameters of death. Nor are these new narratives imagined as belonging to women alone but rather as attesting to a richer, more varied, and greatly sensitized human experience.

Marcelline Block’s Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema breaks new ground in exploring feminist film theory. It is a wide-ranging collection (re)visiting important theoretical questions as well as offering close analyses of films produced in the United States, France, England, Belgium, and Russia. This anthology investigates exciting areas of research for critical inquiry into film and gender studies as well as feminist, queer, and postfeminist theories, and treats film texts from Marguerite Duras to 21st century horror films; from Agnès Varda’s 2007 installation at the Panthéon to the post-Soviet Russian filmmakers Aleksei Balabanov and Valerii Todorovskii; from Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof to Sofia Coppola’s postfeminist trilogy; from Chantal Akerman’s “transhistorical, transgressive and transgendered gaze” to the “quantum gaze” in Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park; from Hitchcock’s “good-looking blondes” to the career-woman-in-peril thriller, among others. According to the semiotician Marshall Blonsky of the New School University in New York, “given the breadth of the editor’s choices, this volume makes a splendid contribution to feminist and cinematic fields, as well as cultural and media studies, postmodernism, and postfeminism. It lends readers ‘new eyes’ to view canonical and other film texts.” David Sterritt, chairman of the National Society of Film Critics, states that this anthology “should be required reading for students and scholars, among other readers interested in the interaction of cinema with contemporary culture.” Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship is prefaced by Jean-Michel Rabaté’s brilliant essay, “Mulvey was the First…”