Review of Mannerism and Baroque in Seventeenth-Century French Poetry: The Example of Tristan L’Hermite, by James C. Shepard

Authors

Russell J. Ganim, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow

Date of this Version

December 2003

Comments

Published in Sixteenth Century Journal 34:4 (Winter 2003), pp. 1245–1246. Copyright © 2003 The Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, Inc. Used by permission.

Abstract

Interest in Tristan L’Hermite has not only been sustained, but has grown considerably since 1955, when Amédée Carriat published Tristan ou L’Eloge d’un poète and his Bibliographie des oeuvres de Tristan L’Hermite. Carriat’s work on the Cahiers Tristan L’Hermite, as well as the scholarship of Claude Abraham, Catherine Grisé, and Jean-Pierre Chauveau among others, has laid the groundwork for a number of new inquiries into Tristan’s oeuvre. Colloquia on Tristan have been organized in France and the U.S. in recent years, and the Tristan “revival” reached an apex of sorts in 1999 with Champion’s publication of his Oeuvres complètes under the direction of Roger Guichemerre. It is against this backdrop that specialists would seemingly welcome James C. Shepard’s Mannerism and Baroque in Seventeenth-Century French Poetry: The Example of Tristan L’Hermite. Nonetheless, while Shepard’s monograph does represent an earnest effort, the book is largely unsuccessful because it reads far too much like the 1997 dissertation on which it is based.