Fashioned Texts and Painted Books examines the folding fan's
multiple roles in fin-de-siecle and early twentieth-century French
literature. Focusing on the fan's identity as a symbol of feminine
sexuality, as a collectible art object, and, especially, as an
alternative book form well suited to the reception of poetic texts,
the study highlights the fan's suitability as a substrate for
verse, deriving from its myriad associations with coquetry and sex,
flight, air, and breath. Close readings of Stephane Mallarme's
eventails of the 1880s and 1890s and Paul Claudel's
Cent
phrases pour eventails (1927) consider both text and paratext
as they underscore the significant visual interest of this
poetry.
Works in prose and in verse by Octave Uzanne, Guy de Maupassant,
and Marcel Proust, along with fan leaves by Edgar Degas, Edouard
Manet, Berthe Morisot, and Paul Gauguin, serve as points of
comparison that deepen our understanding of the complex interplay
of text and image that characterizes this occasional subgenre.
Through its interrogation of the correspondences between form and
content in fan poetry, this study demonstrates that the fan was, in
addition to being a ubiquitous fashion accessory, a significant
literary and art historical object straddling the boundary between
East and West, past and present, and high and low art.