Booknotes Notes de lecture

Michel Jeanneret. Perpetuum Mobile, Metamorphoses des corps et des oeuvres de Vinci à Montaigne. Paris, Macula, coll. Argô, s.d. [1997]. Pp. 331.

Après ses deux derniers ouvrages {Des Mets et des mots [1987] et Le Défi des signes [1994]) qui avaient profondément renouvelé notre connaissance des grands auteurs français de la Renaissance, Michel Jeanneret publie un nouveau livre à la fois en version française et en version anglaise (Johns Hopkins University Press). C'est à la notion de métamorphose que s'attache l'érudit pour suggérer le foisonnement créatif des oeuvres et leur perpétuelle gestation. Vinci, pour l'art, Erasme, Rabelais, Ronsard, Palissy, Du Bartas et Montaigne pour la littérature, sont au coeur de cette étude et révèlent leur quête incessante de la varietas, et leur insatisfaction, leur angoisse même, devant la finitude. Jeanneret éclaire parfaitement le processus génératif de leurs oeuvres qui reproduisent, dans les formes, la fascination qu'exerce sur les artistes la métamorphose comme motif et comme concept.

FRANÇOIS ROUGET, Queen's University

Walter S. H. Lim. The Arts ofEmpire: The Poetics of Colonialism from Ralegh to M//ro«. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated Univer- sity Presses, 1998. Pp. 275.

Walter Lim's instructive book consists of five essays on Ralegh, Donne, Spenser, Milton, and Shakespeare's . A "Poetics of Colonialism" does not quite emerge from these essays, but they converge sufficiently for one to speculate on how such a poetics might be characterized. The 57 references to Queen Elizabeth establish her status as an icon but also draw attention to her shifting place in an uneasy liaison between the literary and the literal. These ambivalences need to be brought into engagement with the diverse yet coalescent forms of nationhood set

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out in Helgerson's now-classic book. Helgerson does not find imperialism inherent

or even implicit in his "forms." Lim presumably thinks otherwise (p. 23). In this reviewer's opinion, he is correct in doing so. But the continuities of a discourse (or more ambitiously, a poetics) that brings the forms of nationhood and the imperial imagination into engagement with each other need to be brought out more strongly

if the book is to proceed in the direction of its title. There is a basis in the essays for this move forward. The individual case studies are thoughtful, well-documented, and lucidly

argued. It is sad, however, to see Donne's Elegy XIX studied without any reference to his puns. In a discourse of liaisons — particularly when the participants subvert or even invert each other — the pun can be considerably more than a verbal device. There is no reference to the Trinity of post-colonial thought — Said, Bhabha, and Spivak — but the book has unobtrusively benefited from their thinking.

BALACHANDRA RAJAN, University of Western Ontario

Patrick Cheney. Marlowe's Counterfeit Profession: , Spenser, Counter- Nationhood. Toronto: Press, 1997. Pp. xii, 402.

This important new book follows Cheney's 1993 study of Spenser's literary career, Spenser's Famous Flight. Here he turns his attention to a more difficult subject, the brief and brilliant career of , which has never appeared to possess the clear sense of purpose so self-consciously embraced and advertised by Spenser. Cheney argues, however, that Marlowe's career was fashioned in an equally deliberate manner. In opposition to Spenser's Virgilian poetics of nation- hood, Marlowe's Ovidian "tragic poetics of counter-nationhood . . . foregrounds a bitter objection to the power structure's tyrannical, deterministic suppression of individual freedom" (p. 21). Where Spenser's Virgilian path took him from to epic, the Ovidian path pursued by Marlowe leads from amatory poetry (Ovid's

Elegies) through (the seven plays) to epic (Lucan 's First Book, ). Supporting this re-imagined career path are some assumptions regarding the dating of Marlowe's work that will no doubt be debated: of particular importance to Cheney is that the rarely considered translation of Lucan is no apprentice piece, but a late work to be set alongside Hero and Leander in the final Ovidian epic phase of the poet's brief career. Marlowe's Counterfeit Profession offers helpful and insightful readings of individual texts (the chapter devoted to "The Passionate Shepherd to His

Love" is something of a tour de force), but the real contribution of this worthy book lies in its comprehensiveness {all of Marlowe's work is examined) and in its attempt to find coherence in a canon that has always appeared something of a jumble.

BRIAN PATTON, King's College, University of Western Ontario