106 REVIEWS

A Publisher’s Paradise: Expatriate Literary Culture in , 1890–1960.ByCOLETTE COLLIGAN. (Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book.) Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014.ix+ 361 pp., ill. Between 1890 and 1960, according to Colette Colligan, Paris was home to ‘some of Anglo-America’s most heated contests over books, sex and censorship’ (p. 1). It is indeed the phenomenon of a veritable flourishing of expatriate publication and distribution of what she loosely calls ‘dirty books’ that directs her study of the political, commercial, and

aesthetic forces that made Paris a hotbed of literary achievement and circulation in a time Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/fs/article/69/1/106/634223 by guest on 27 September 2021 of restrictive regulatory laws abroad. In this context, and in what is essentially a work of re- covery, Colligan casts her net wide, tracing the fate of ‘high’ and ‘low’ pornographic litera- tures that date back to the Victorian Randiana and ’s Picture of Dorian Gray, throughtwoworldwarstoVladimirNabokov’sLolita, famously published in Paris in 1955. Colligan’s time frame, covering seven decades, proves historically and culturally fecund. While acknowledging the scholarly attention that has been given to 1920s Paris as a publish- ing haven (consider the release of James Joyce’s Ulysses by American Paris bookseller Sylvia Beach in 1922), she navigates literary territories across successive eras with considerable analytical aplomb. A major objective of the book is to bring to light previously obscured evidence of clandestine print activity — small-time smut-peddling, book-laundering, under-the-counter sales — whether in the service of ‘degraded’ works, or, latterly, the sexu- ally explicit novels of modernists such as James Joyce, Henry Miller, and D. H. Lawrence. Dividing her work into three parts presenting different perspectives on how liberal publish- ing laws in enabled the English sex book industry to thrive, Colligan proffers tales of derring-do relating to little-known authors, wily publishers, covert market strategies, and the vagaries of the contraband trade, variously subject to cultural undercurrents as diverse as Victorian prudery, turn-of-the-century decadence, and the repressions of Nazi-occupied France during the Second World War. A first section examines the way changing English anti-obscenity policing was implemented and eluded, sending the production and dissemin- ation of pornographies offshore, yet hardly stemming their flow. A middle section identifies the key expatriate dealers who operated from Paris, notably the British Charles Carrington: fringe publisher, risk-taker, translator, and eccentric bibliophile. But it is the final section, an analysis of three representative literary works, that truly reveals how daringly ahead of their time pornographic literatures could be. Consistent with the research methods of historical materialist Walter Benjamin, Colligan’s ‘retrieval’ of the past draws on the kind of data that can easily be lost from view: anonymous texts, incomplete records, underexposed literary artefacts, unfrequented archival files. Judiciously speculative, analytically rich, and never dull, her study inveigles the reader into areas of the once-banned literary output that put Paris in the vanguard of press freedoms eventually widely espoused by the and the United States. Given that it is sourced from an impressive range of primary and second- ary works, the book would have been well served by a selective bibliography. Nonetheless, it is a major addition to extant literature on publishing history and France’s seminal role in supporting controversial and marginal literary works from abroad.

ROSEMARY LANCASTER doi:10.1093/fs/knu253 UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA

De Guercy a` Charlus: transformations d’un personnage de ‘A` la recherche du temps perdu’.Par LAURENCE TEYSSANDIER. (Recherches proustiennes, 26.) Paris: Honore´Champion, 2013. 464 pp. This work of genetic criticism takes as its subject matter the indisputable centrality of the character Charlus to Proust’s novel. As Laurence Teyssandier highlights from the outset, Charlus is one of the most enigmatic, intriguing, and memorable of all the characters of