Seeing Through the Mother Goose Tales: Visual Turns in the Writings of Charles Perrault.

Philip Lewis. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. 300 pp. $39.50. ISBN: n.a.

Philip Lewis presents his work in two parts, or rather in two directions that could have continued to remain separate fields and hence destroy the unity of his study but which, as he has shown, turn out to be complementary. Reminding the reader of Perrault's central position at the court of Louis XIV, Lewis insists on Perrault the "courtisan" of the early years. The Perrault of the Carrousel of 1662, as well as the one at the heart of the debate between the Anciens and the Modernes is what Lewis bases his study on at the beginning of his work. It is there that the author analyzes the production of Charles Perrault and its role in the founding of aesthetic philosophy and thought processes of modern times. More particularly, it is around the work of three renowned authors of the seventeenth century (Descartes, Boileau, and Racine) that his argument in this first part of his book is developed. He sees the work of Perrault as the most formidable undertaking of interpretation and re-appropriation of the ideas of these three literary figures of the Grand Siecle (The Cartesian Turn: Perrault Against Descartes; The Sublime Turn: Perrault Against Boileau; The Pretorial Turn: Perrault Against Boileau). From this study of dislocation and assimilation comes the very essence of early modern French culture: the complex relationship between literature and the arts. From the fundamental role in the society of images to the dictatorship of the dictionnaire, from classical rhetoric to the problem of visualization in Descartes, Lewis leads the reader to a place where sight and the act of seeing compose above all le grand art.

In the second part of his book, Lewis analyzes the literary production that made Perrault one of the foremost literary figures: fairy tales. While most critics who study Perrault's works have the tendency to separate radically these two eras of production, Lewis attempts to show the relationship which intimately ties the author of Barbe Bleue and that of La Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes. This point of intersection resides of course in the culture of visual representation that he extensively evaluates in the first part of the book.

The strength of the study of Philip Lewis resides mainly in its multiplicity of approaches. Refusing all dogma that often weakens intellectual thought through limitation, Lewis proposes clearly developed ideas extracted with the help of several different methods of investigation ranging from deconstruction, literary history, to semiology and psychoanalysis. The argument is convincing and the book makes for a veritable reading pleasure.

DIDIER COURSE Hood College