Literary Studies

'Why read Emile Zola?’ asks one of the contributors to this volume. ‘Because his representation of society’s impact on individuals within it memorably depicts what it means to be a human being in the modern world.’ The publication of The Cambridge Companion to Emile Zola, edited by Brian Nelson, Professor of French Studies at Monash University, will be of great assistance in reading and rereading this realist writer, and will doubtless become an indispensable tool for researchers and students.

What do these essays reveal? The fascination which the naturalist novelist Zola (1840–1902) still exercises on his readers because of the profoundly organic nature of his writing. Despite the meticulous planning and the scientific method and framework underlying his enterprise to describe the social and familial milieux (the subtitle of the twenty novels [1871–93] comprising Les Rougon-Macquart is The Natural and Social History of a Family under the Second Empire), Zola’s art stems from its evocative power, its descriptive force, in a word, its ‘excitement’.

Katherine Barnes’s book on Christopher Brennan (1870 – 1932) is unusual in the Australian academy in that the work does not much concern itself with postmodern theory, or the kinds of questions that might arise from Brennan’s oeuvre for a modern reader. It bypasses the more familiar kind of enquiry, such as the intriguing questions that Brennan might be seen to raise in relationship to psychoanalysis, and whether or not he might conceivably have been a first-wave feminist. It is something quite different: an enlivening scholarly engagement with Brennan’s sources, especially those available to him in Australia, in particular his esoteric sources.

Shakespeare the Thinking is the final and posthumously published book of the Oxford critic A.D. Nuttall, who died unexpectedly in January 2007. Pitched at a wider readership than most of his earlier writings, the book is the culmination of Nuttall’s lifetime thinking about Shakespeare, and the work by which his remarkable originality as a critic will no doubt be most widely recognised.

When G.B. Barton presented his two works concerning the literary history of New South Wales to the Paris Exhibition of 1866, he hoped that they would enable readers ‘to form an exact idea of the progress, extent and prospects of literary enterprise among us’. The words are succinct, unobjectionable, and their sentiments influenced much of the literary history of the next century, much as the productions of that time were usually annals rather than analysis. Barton’s civic-minded project linked the maturing of Australian literature with its political culture. Implicit in his endeavour, though numerous others would use the metaphor outright, was the notion of ‘coming-of-age’. This chimera had as long a life as the search for the Great Australian Novel.

This is the latest volume of a reference work which should sit on the shelves of every municipal library. It assesses the lives of people, mostly prominent, who died in the years 1981–90. It lists them in alphabetical order; a further volume will be needed to embrace the 600 or 700 people whose surnames began with the letters L to Z.

Toward the end of his life, Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–98), French poet and founding father of Symbolism, published the prose collection Divagations (1897). This highly ambitious, eclectic work, a repository of Mallarmé’s aesthetic, revitalises the critical enterprise and shakes the very foundations of the literary act. His practice is inaugural, effecting a critique of the subject and of poetry that is unprecedented. Divagations shows the mature Mallarmé at the height of his achievement, inventing a new form of poetic journalism. From the outset, we are invited to read differently. These consummate, diverse pieces, comprising prose poems, lectures, journalism and portraits, are truncated from their original context and strategically redeployed. They illuminate each other differently and acquire a new potency, in tune with the poet’s vision of words in verse interacting like reflective jewels. The dazzling pieces on dance and current events provide a radical critique of contemporary values and show a sense of humour more familiar to readers of Mallarmé’s fashion journal. High and low interchange as the apparently trivial or frivolous acquires seminal status. The ‘Important Miscellaneous News Items’ offer some of the greatest examples of the new ‘Popular Poem’, celebrating the insight and autonomy of the modern reader.

The lives of scholars and critics, however distinguished they may be, however resourceful their narrators, do not always make for compelling reading, let alone for an account that runs so readably to the phenomenal length of John Haffenden’s absorbing two-volume biography of the English poet and critic, William Empson. Devoted as they are to things of the mind, most academics do not, after all, generally do very much that is likely to command the attention of a wider public, or make for sparkling story. ‘A quiet life’ – the phrase in which Lord David Cecil summed up the career of the Cambridge don and poet Thomas Gray (whose one big adventure was to move, when teased insufferably by his colleagues at one Cambridge college, to the fellowship of another Cambridge college immediately over the road) – seems almost to epitomise this entire genre.

Anyone browsing in bookstores in the past five years has undoubtedly come across one of the dozens of life narratives that emerged in the aftermath of 9/11. The attack on the World Trade Centre and the consequent ‘war on terror’ produced a new market for the publishing industry – and it has deluged us with offerings. Prominent among them are the sensational, eroticised best-sellers by Muslim women recounting their persecution under the Taliban; journalistic accounts of war by ‘embedded’ Western news correspondents from Afghanistan and Iraq; edited oral histories offering testimony by refugees to the trauma of war in the Middle East; and memoirs of exile by Iranian women living in the United States.