Reviewed by:

• Victims of the Book. Reading and Masculinity in Fin-de-Siècle France by François Proulx
• Diana Holmes

The moral and social dangers of reading, especially novel reading, have most commonly been raised in relation to women: bovarysme was a familiar male anxiety in (and well beyond) the patriarchal culture of nineteenth-century France. The originality of this book is to identify and study a different, if not unrelated, set of fears about the effects of reading on gendered identity. As the Third Republic sought to establish itself as a modernising, productive and stable regime after France's humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, the socially conservative majority of France's new ruling class soon began to fear new dangers to the nation's moral and political health. Free, compulsory State education produced mass literacy, which led to an economically buoyant publishing industry, but also to an increase in social mobility that threatened the stability of the class system. The birth rate was declining, suggesting that young people were failing in their duty to form families and reproduce. Anxiety crystallised in part around the effects on young men of excessive reading, and François Proulx uncovers the paradoxical sub-genre of [End Page 257] cautionary texts about reading itself, or in other words novels that invite their (male) readers not to read fiction.

Proulx's methodology is interesting and effective. His corpus extends beyond even marginally canonical works to novels long out of print and forgotten: to these in particular he applies a combination of the "distant reading" recommended by Franco Moretti to gain a broad overview of a period's literary output and the close textual reading more commonly applied to canonical texts. Thus, he makes a persuasive case for the extensive presence of what he calls the "novel of formation" within fin-de-siècle publishing, but also finds illuminating contradictions, cases of self-irony, and queer sub-texts not only in texts by well-known authors but also in those whose shelf-life was decidedly ephemeral. Queerness is entirely relevant to his argument, for if demographic decline triggered such concern, this was in part because it seemed to throw doubt on the virility perceived as essential to national defence, and indeed to national identity. Indulging in solitary reading rather than manly pursuits was implicitly likened to masturbation and seen as leading to other "unnatural" desires. The artistic fashion for Decadence, with its provocative disdain for all things "natural" including the heterosexual family, no doubt fuelled the pervasive sense that reading posed a threat to the nation's advancement.

The more prominent authors of "novels of formation" are thus seen to form part of a wider current of literary production, and of a pervasive unease about reading and male sexuality equally evident in press debates and causes célèbres. Novelists Bourget, Barrès, Vallès, the early Martin du Gard are all shown to have contributed to the era's admonitory discourse on the perils of reading (especially) novels. Proulx traces Bourget's strategic trajectory from the bestselling author of novels of adultery set among the upper classes to the conservative, Catholic author who lambasted the influence of excessive reading in Le Disciple (1889). A friend of Oscar Wilde in the 1880s, and very possibly homo-or bi-sexual himself, Bourget's conversion to right-wing respectability took him to the Academy in the same year that Wilde was tried and jailed for gross indecency. Both Bourget and Barrès were profoundly influenced by Balzac and Stendhal, but presented these authors' most memorable fictional heroes (notably Rastignac and Julien Sorel) as harmful influences on fin-de-siècle youth. In line with the underlying premise of all the "novels of formation," these influential writers diagnosed the dangers of reading for young men: energy spent on the imaginary world detracted from the sum of energy available for productive, patriotic endeavours; fiction came to seem superior to mere reality and thus induced demoralisation, the fashionable malaise of neurasthenia, and...

审核人：

• 这本书的受害者。法国Fin-de-Siècle的读书与男性气质FrançoisProulx
• 戴安娜·福尔摩斯（Diana Holmes）

阅读，特别是小说阅读的道德和社会危险，最普遍地是与女性有关的：bovarysme在十九世纪法国的父权制文化中（以及远远超出）是一种常见的男性焦虑症。本书的独创性在于识别和研究关于阅读对性别认同的影响的一系列不同（即使不是无关紧要的）恐惧。在法国在1870年的普法战争中屈辱失败后，第三共和国寻求建立一个现代化，生产性和稳定的政权时，法国新统治阶级中对社会保守的多数很快开始担心对该国的道德和政治构成新的危险健康。免费的，强制性的国家教育产生了大众素养，这导致了出版业的经济蓬勃发展，但也导致了社会流动性的增加，从而威胁到阶级制度的稳定性。出生率正在下降，这表明年轻人没有履行其建立家庭和繁殖的职责。焦虑在一定程度上围绕过度阅读对年轻人的影响而结晶，弗朗索瓦·普罗克斯（FrançoisProulx）发现了自相矛盾的亚流派[结束页257]关于阅读本身的警告性文字，或者说是小说，邀请他们的（男性）读者不要阅读小说。

Proulx的方法有趣而有效。他的语料库甚至超出了很少的经典著作，甚至超出了绝版和被遗忘的小说的范围：特别是，他运用了佛朗哥·莫雷蒂（Franco Moretti）推荐的“远距离阅读”的组合，以广泛地了解该时期的文学作品和近距离的文本阅读。更常用于规范文本。因此，他有说服力地证明了所谓的“形式的新颖性”在fin-de-siècle出版中的广泛存在，但他也发现了启发性的矛盾，自我讽刺和奇怪的亚文本，不仅存在于文本中知名作者的作品，以及那些保质期都是短暂的作品的作者。奇怪与他的论点完全相关，因为如果人口下降引发了这种担忧，之所以如此，部分原因是它似乎使人们怀疑对国防乃至民族认同至关重要的男子气概。沉迷于孤独的阅读而不是沉迷于男性的追求被隐喻为手淫，并被认为导致了其他“非自然”的欲望。ad废的艺术时尚，对包括异性恋家庭在内的所有“自然”事物都极具挑衅性，这无疑激起了一种普遍的观念，即读书对国家的进步构成了威胁。

因此，“形成的小说”的更杰出的作者被认为构成了文学创作的更广泛潮流的一部分，以及在阅读辩论和男性性行为中普遍存在的不安情绪，这在新闻界的辩论中同样明显，并导致塞勒斯。小说家布尔吉，巴雷斯，瓦莱兹，早期的马丁·杜·加德都被证明为该时代关于阅读（尤其是）小说的危险的劝告性话语做出了贡献。普罗克斯（Proulx）追踪布尔吉（Bourget）的战略轨迹，从上层阶级中最畅销的通奸小说作家到保守的天主教作家，后者抨击了勒门徒过度阅读的影响（1889）。布尔热（Bourget）于1880年代是奥斯卡·王尔德（Oscar Wilde）的朋友，他本人很可能是同性恋或双性恋者，他Wild依右翼的举止在同年因严重in亵而入狱并被判入狱。布尔热（Bourget）和巴尔（Barrès）都深受巴尔扎克（Balzac）和史丹达尔（Stendhal）的影响，但认为这些作者最难忘的虚构英雄（特别是拉斯蒂尼亚克（Rastignac）和朱利安·索雷尔（Julien Sorel））对鳍鳍青年有不利影响。这些有影响力的作家根据所有“形成形式的小说”的基本前提，诊断出年轻人读书的危险：在想象世界上花费的精力减损了可用于生产性，爱国主义努力的精力的总和；小说似乎超越了单纯的现实，因此引起了士气低落，神经衰弱的时尚不适，以及...