a panorama of European reviews starting with L’Hydropathe, Le Décadent, Le Panurge, Le Chat noir and La Plume. These are followed by Remy de Gourmont and L’Ymagier; Le Centaure and its English models. Chapter v deals with modernism and British little reviews: Arts and Crafts, Symbolism, Rhythm (1911–13) which, despite its title, focused on the visual arts and contemporary artists: Picasso, several others associated with Fauvism, the future Vorticist, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and the Scottish artist Fergusson who became the artistic director. Chapter vi evokes the Polish Chimère, four Hungarian Art Nouveau periodicals, Spanish ones published at the turn of the century, and Jugend (1896–1940), wide ranging in its interests but not at all averse to satire and humor. This conspectus would not be complete without pointing out that publicity, both visual and verbal, is not neglected nor are Lacerba and Vzorval. The general bibliography (525–51) is most impressive, the only obvious omission being the annotated edition by Jean-Jacques Lefrère of Jean Aljalbert’s Mémoires en vrac published by Du Lérot in 2005. Paul-Henri Bourrelier’s authoritative study of La Revue blanche (Fayard, August 2007) was probably too late to be included. in addition each contributor has provided a specialised bibliography. The indices are excellent. All quotations are also given in the original. The error in note 5 on p. 356 is due to the translator not having understood that Edward Marsh’s anthologies of Georgian Poetry took its name from the advent of George v.

Patrick Modiano’s career now spans thirty years, some twenty major novels, and the most prestigious French literary prizes. Widely interviewed in the press and on television, he is a well-known figure with ties to the film community, first collaborating with Louis Malle on the award winning film about the French Occupation—Lacombe, Lucien (1974), then more recently working on adaptations of his novels with major directors such as Patrice Leconte and JeanPaul Rappeneau. He also had a brief cameo as Catherine Deneuve’s ex-husband Bob in Raoul Ruiz’s Généalogies d’un crime (1997), and served on the jury of the Cannes Film Festival in 2000. Although Modiano’s work in film grows out of his work as a writer, photography is a crucial reference in his writing. This emerges clearly in his collaboration in the production of two photographic albums. He provided the framing narrative for the first, the 1990 Paris Tendresse: a selection of photographs by Brassaı̈, famous for his nocturnal photographs of Paris in the thirties; and contributed a short autobiographical essay to the second: a very poignant album (Elle s’appelait Françoise, 1996) produced in memory of the actress Françoise Dorléac by her sister Catherine Deneuve. These apparently circumstantial pieces frame the larger autobiographical project that makes each of Modiano’s ‘‘novels’’ a recognizable member of a family of works in which photographs serve as evidence, found objects, clues, souvenirs, symbols, metaphors and narrative shifters. They are in fact a constant presence, although almost exclusively in the form of ekphrasis: the description of an (usually) imaginary object. Photographs both mask and reveal the gaps in Modiano’s narratives—stories which constantly reprise what the narrator of Vestiaire d’enfance identifies as

In ‘the first study to examine in depth the twelve texts specifically concerned with life-writing’ (p. 11), Dervila Cooke focuses on a crucial aspect of Patrick Modiano's literary production. As Modiano's narratives invariably represent an effort to reconstruct, or reinvent, a past, either his own or that of fictional and fictionalized others, the conventions of autobiography and biography assume considerable importance in his writing. Although earlier studies have not neglected the problem of identity in his work, or its status as ‘autofiction’, Cooke focuses exclusively on the ambiguities and contradictions of Modiano's approach to life-writing. Present Pasts divides into two unequal sections: the first, on autobiography, analyses four ‘autofictions’, Livret de famille, De si braves garçons, Remise de peine and La Petite Bijou, followed by four ‘fictitious autobiographical projects’, Quartier perdu, Vestiaire de l'enfance and La Place de l'Étoile. The second part, on ‘biographical quests’, groups Les Boulevards de ceinture with Chien de printemps (as works where the writer uses imaginative speculation to create a sense of his ‘biographee’), and Voyage de noces with Dora Bruder (as works where the writer attempts to approach the same subject from both fictional and documentary perspectives). The substantial introductions to the various sections both explain and justify the groupings, situating Modiano's work in relation to the theory and practice of autobiography/autofiction and biography/biofiction. In order to clarify distinctions made in these theoretical sections, Cooke introduces a dimension of reader response theory, postulating four types of virtual readers of Modiano's texts, from the uninformed ‘yardstick reader’ who, knowing nothing about Modiano, might idly pick up one of his books, to the ‘multiple-text reader’ who has followed the writer's career and read much of his work. Their differing assumptions about the fictional status of Modiano's (auto)biographical narratives are contrasted throughout the various sections, for instance, ‘Voyage de noces, which is presented as a fictional autobiographical quest of Ingrid Teyrsen on a diagetic level, is biofictional for the reader who knows that it is a fictionalized account of the real-life figure of Dora Bruder’ (p. 216). However, assessing these differing assumptions in relation to each of the works overburdens the text and ultimately blurs the initial theoretical distinctions, even between such crucial terms as autobiography and biography. Moreover, the similarities between Modiano's various ‘novels’ leads to repetition, as Cooke examines the same issues from slightly different angles in the introductions and each of the individual chapters. Most sucessful are the readings of particular novels. Cooke's impressive grasp of the Modiano corpus reveals how much a book such as Dora Bruder, ostensibly a shift toward more traditional biographical narrative, owes to earlier fictional works. Present Pasts is not the best introduction to Modiano's work, but ‘multiple-text readers’ will profit from the author's knowledge of the œuvre.

Hospitality, with its varying rites, its local and cultural variations - whether itis considered a virtue or an obligation - always involves welcoming an 'other', a stranger, 'a foreign body' into one's own space. This has its inherent dangers as there is always the possibility that the guest will turn on the host, exploiting the host's generosity or attempting to usurp the host's position. As Myriam Roman and Anne Tomiche point out in the introduction to Figures du parasite, ambivalence is fundamental to the nature of hospitality - and, precisely because the parasitical relationship embodies the most ambivalent relationship between guest and host, 'Ie parasite est l'element indispensable pour interroger les ambivalences de l'hospitalit6' (Roman and Tomiche, 33). This essay will focus on the relationship between guest and host in three films which portray French society through the issue of hospitality. While these three films are from different eras (Renoir's La Regie dujeu, made in the troubled months just before the Second World War; Claude Chabrol's New Wave classic from 1959, Les Cousins; and Karim Dridi' s 1995 postcolonial film Bye Bye) they are all grounded in periods of crisis and/or transition in French history where the distinction between guest and host blurs or breaks down, making it difficult to assess whether a perceived threat to French society comes from within or without. La Regie dujeu is set on the eve of the Second World War in 1939 and reflects not only Renoir's disgust with the outcome ofthe Munich agreements that carved up Czechoslovakia, but also with the state of mind of French society as his country drifted inexorably toward war. Chabrol' s film, which came out twenty years later, is one ofthe founding films of the New Wave, coinciding with de Gaulle's return to power in the wake of growing unrest in Algeria, the creation of the Fifth Republic, and the first phase ofthe dissolution of France , s colonial empire. Karim Dridi' s Bye Bye grows out of another period of cultural transition, during which French society has had to confront the difficulty of assimilating African immigrant populations with different cultural norms, as well as second-generation immigrants who have grown up between two cultures. While Bye Bye is only one example of what might arguably be called a transitional, rather than a peripheral genre, 'Beur cinema', Dridi's film explicitly focuses on hospitality, and notably two crucial moments in the rites of hospitality: the guests' arrival and their departure. The first part of the essay will concentrate on the parasitical relationship which, as Michel Serres has argued in Le Parasite, plays a crucial role in the diverse systems and institutions that make up human society. The second part of the essay will treat the relationship between guests and hosts in Renoir and Chabrol's films, considering them

In Wallace Stevens' An Ordinary Evening in New Haven, a certain Professor Eucalyptus philosophizes that search for reality is as momentous as the search for god.' If this search drives the scientist, the philosopher, or the poet, it is no less the quest of artists for whom the search is bound up with the need to confront the real with forms of their own making, forms that embody hypotheses about the nature of reality and of art. Crucial to the artist's search are both the limits of realistic representation-for as one of Balzac's artists notes: pour notre malheur, il est des effets vrais dans la nature qui ne sont plus probables sur la toile2-and the status of the representation: its referential relationship to an object considered outside the page or frame, what Stevens' poem terms eye's plain version... a thing apart, / The vulgate of experience (I.1-2). This paper will explore the limits of representation as they emerge in three short stories, in order of consideration: Zola's L'Inondation3, Michel Tournier's Les Suaires de Veronique in Le Coq de Bruy~re4, and Balzac's Le Chef d'oeuvre inconnu5. All three stories adopt, at least superficially, the realistic aesthetics for which Balzac and Zola are the traditional models. Zola's story is based on an actual flood of the Garonne River; Balzac describes the events that befall the young Nicolas Poussin in a studio on the Quai des Grands Augustins three centuries before Picasso would take up residence there. Tournier's story takes place in Arles during the yearly Rencontres internationales de la Photographie, which the author most certainly attended, and its first person narrator could, by essentialist reduction, be taken as Tournier himself. This evocation of an actual historical setting serves to authenticate the events of the narrative, and in turn they are a foil for the realism of the painterly or photographic representations that figure in each story. The imbrication of first degree realism (the referential qualities of the narrative) and second degree realism (the discourse in the narrative concerning photographic and pictorial realism) complicate the reader's notions of representation and of referentiality. Each story dramatizes the limits of realist representation, that is,

Miniature books, eighteenth-century novels, Tom Thumb weddings, tall tales, and objects of tourism and nostalgia: this diverse group of cultural forms is the subject of On Longing , a fascinating analysis of the ways in which everyday objects are narrated to animate or realize certain versions of the world. Originally published in 1984 (Johns Hopkins University Press), and now available in paperback for the first time, this highly original book draws on insights from semiotics and from psychoanalytic, feminist, and Marxist criticism. Addressing the relations of language to experience, the body to scale, and narratives to objects, Susan Stewart looks at the "miniature" as a metaphor for interiority and at the "gigantic" as an exaggeration of aspects of the exterior. In the final part of her essay Stewart examines the ways in which the "souvenir" and the "collection" are objects mediating experience in time and space.