La Vengeance dans la litterature d’Ancien Regime (review)

Méchoulan, Eric, ed. La Vengeance dans la littérature d’Ancien Régime. Montréal: Département d’Etudes françaises (Paragraphes), 2000. Pp. 191.

From the time of Medea, vengeance has always been the stuff of stories, and especially of tragedies. The effectiveness of this theme for storytelling is one of the continuous threads tying together the diverse group of essays that make up this fine book. As is often the case with compendia of this type, the quality of the chapters is somewhat uneven. Nevertheless, the volume as a whole is a highly valuable contribution to scholarship on early-modern French literature and culture. The question of the specifically literary functions of vengeance is one of the most fruitful topics taken up by the authors, who examine textual representations of crime and revenge from historical, theological, rhetorical, psychological, medical, economic, and sociological, as well as literary-critical perspectives. The common point of departure for these studies is the question of how vengeance is narrated or, as in the case of classical theater, performed.