Ten years ago, the Harvard New History of French Literature made not one mention of the remarkable Victor Segalen. How wrong that was. It's a big book and progressive almost to a fault in what it chooses to cover; Segalen should have been in it, as a writer and theoriser about both life and literature whose concerns are more timely now than they were when he was expressing them. He's come well and truly out from the shadows in France in recent years and now we have the first book in English to have been devoted to him. It's not the sort of book that's going to be widely read, but it's a start.

LRB 22 March 2001 | PDF Download