Exotic Subversions in Nineteenth-century French Fiction
Exotic Subversions in Nineteenth-century French Fiction

Author: Jennifer Yee

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 136

ISBN-13: 1351567462

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In the course of the nineteenth century France built up a colonial empire second only to Britain's. The literary tradition in which it dealt with its colonial 'Other' is frequently understood in terms of Edward Said's description of Orientalism as both a Western projection and a 'will to govern' over the Orient. There is, however, a body of works that eludes such a simple categorisation, offering glimpses of colonial resistance, of a critique of imperialist hegemony, or of a blurring of the boundaries between the Self and the Other. Some of the ways in which the imperialist enterprise is subverted in the metropolitan literature of this period are examined in this volume through detailed case studies of key works by Chateaubriand, Hugo, Flaubert and Segalen.

The Documentary Imagination in Twentieth-Century French Literature
The Documentary Imagination in Twentieth-Century French Literature

Author: Alison James

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-09-03

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 0192603485

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The Documentary Imagination in Twentieth-Century French Literature identifies a documentary impulse in French literature that emerges at the end of the nineteenth century and culminates in a proliferation of factual writings in the twenty-first. Focusing on the period bookended by these two moments, it highlights the enduring concern with factual reference in texts that engage either with current events or the historical archive. Specifically, it considers a set of ideas and practices centered on the conceptualization and use of documents. In doing so, it contests the widespread narrative that twentieth-century French literature abandons the realist enterprise, and argues that writers instead renegotiate the realist legacy outside, or at the margins of, the fictional space of the novel. Analyzing works by authors including Gide, Breton, Aragon, Yourcenar, Duras, and Modiano, the book defines a specific documentary mode of literary representation that records, assembles, and investigates material traces of reality. The document is a textual, visual, or material piece of evidence repurposed through its visual insertion, textual transcription, or description within a literary work. It is a fact, but it also becomes a figure, standing for literature's confrontation with the real. The documentary imagination involves a fantasy of direct access to a reality that speaks for itself. At the same time, it gives rise to concrete textual practices that open up new directions for literature, by interrogating the construction and interpretation of facts.

Gut, Brain, and Environment in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Medicine
Gut, Brain, and Environment in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Medicine

Author: Manon Mathias

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-04-30

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 1040022189

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Gut, Brain, and Environment in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Medicine offers a new way of conceptualizing food in literature: not as social or cultural symbol but as an agent within a network of relationships between body and mind and between humans and environment. By analysing gastrointestinal health in medical, literary, and philosophical texts, this volume rethinks the intersections between literature and health in the nineteenth century and triggers new debates about France’s relationship with food. Of relevance to scholars of literature and to historians and sociologists of science, food, and medicine, it will provide ideal reading for students of French Literature and Culture, History, Cultural Studies, and History of Science and Medicine, Literature and Science, Food Studies, and the Medical Humanities. Readers will be introduced to new ways of approaching digestion in this period and will gain appreciation of the powerful resources offered by nineteenth-century French writing in understanding the nature of connections between gut, mind, and environment and the impact of these connections on our status as human beings.

Female Intimacies in Seventeenth-Century French Literature
Female Intimacies in Seventeenth-Century French Literature

Author: Marianne Legault

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-15

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 1317136039

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Examining literary discourses on female friendship and intimacy in seventeenth-century France, this study takes as its premise the view that, unlike men, women have been denied for centuries the possibility of same sex friendship. The author explores the effect of this homosocial and homopriviledged heritage on the deployment and constructions of female friendship and homoerotic relationships as thematic narratives in works by male and female writers in seventeenth-century France. The book consists of three parts: the first surveys the history of male thinkers' denial of female friendship, concluding with a synopsis of the cultural representations of female same-sex practices. The second analyzes female intimacy and homoerotism as imagined, appropriated and finally repudiated by Honoré d'Urfé's pastoral novel, L'Astrée, and Isaac de Benserade's seemingly lesbian-friendly comedy, Iphis et Iante. The third turns to unprecedented depictions of female intimate and homoerotic bonds in Madeleine de Scudéry's novel Mathilde and Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de La Force's fairy tale Plus Belle que Fée. This study reveals a female literary genealogy of intimacies between women in seventeenth-century France, and adds to the research in lesbian and queer studies, fields in which pre-eighteenth-century French literary texts are rare.

The Artist as Animal in Nineteenth-Century French Literature
The Artist as Animal in Nineteenth-Century French Literature

Author: Claire Nettleton

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2019-08-08

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 3030193454

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The Artist as Animal in Nineteenth-Century French Literature traces the evolution of the relationship between artists and animals in fiction from the Second Empire to the fin de siècle. This book examines examples of visual literature, inspired by the struggles of artists such as Edouard Manet and Vincent van Gogh. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt’s Manette Salomon (1867), Émile Zola’s Therèse Raquin (1867), Jules Laforgue’s “At the Berlin Aquarium” (1895) and “Impressionism” (1883), Octave Mirbeau’s In the Sky (1892-1893) and Rachilde’s L’Animale (1893) depict vanguard painters and performers as being like animals, whose unique vision revolted against stifling traditions. Juxtaposing these literary works with contemporary animal theory (McHugh, Deleuze, Guattari and Derrida), zoo studies (Berger, Rothfels and Lippit) and feminism (Donovan, Adams and Haraway), Claire Nettleton explores the extent to which the nineteenth-century dissolution of the human subject contributed to a radical, modern aesthetic. Utilizing these interdisciplinary methodologies, Nettleton argues that while inducing anxiety regarding traditional humanist structures, the “artist-animal,” an embodiment of artistic liberation within an urban setting, is, at the same time, a paradigmatic trope of modernity.

Relations & Relationships in Seventeenth-century French Literature
Relations & Relationships in Seventeenth-century French Literature

Author: Jennifer Robin Perlmutter

Publisher: Gunter Narr Verlag

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 9783823362210

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This volume is devoted to the variety of relationships that defined France and ist citizens. Man's connection with God is explored, the travel raelation and the particular hierarchy that exists between a director and a dramatist, respectively. These themes are further addressed in the articles that follow on relationships of authority, Catholics and Protestants, books and Illustrations, literary genres, travel relations, aesthetics and ethics and family relationships.

Pleasure and Pain in Nineteenth-century French Literature and Culture
Pleasure and Pain in Nineteenth-century French Literature and Culture

Author: David Evans

Publisher: Rodopi

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 9042025026

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From Sade at one end of the nineteenth century to Freud at the other, via many French novelists and poets, pleasure and pain become ever more closely entwined. Whereas the inseparability of these themes has hitherto been studied from isolated perspectives, such as psychoanalysis, sadism and sado-masochism, melancholy, or post-structuralist textualjouissance, the originality of this collaborative volume lies in its exploration of how pleasure and pain function across a broader range of contexts. The essays collected here demonstrate how the complex relationship between pleasure and pain plays a vital role in structuring nineteenth-century thinking in prose fiction (Balzac, Flaubert, Musset, Maupassant, Zola), verse and the memoir as well as socio-cultural studies, medical discourses, aesthetic theory and the visual arts. Featuring an international selection of contributors representing the full range of approaches to scholarship in nineteenth-century French studies – historical, literary, cultural, art historical, philosophical, and sociopolitical – the volume attests to the vitality, coherence and interdisciplinarity of nineteenth-century French studies and will be of interest to a wide cross-section of scholars and students of French literature, society and culture.

Models of Collaboration in Nineteenth-Century French Literature
Models of Collaboration in Nineteenth-Century French Literature

Author: Seth Whidden

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-15

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 1317094840

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Contributing to the current lively discussion of collaboration in French letters, this collection raises fundamental questions about the limits and definition of authorship in the context of the nineteenth century's explosion of collaborative ventures. While the model of the stable single author that prevailed during the Romantic period dominates the beginning of the century, the authority of the speaking subject is increasingly in crisis through the century's political and social upheavals. Chapters consider the breakdown of authorial presence across different constructions of authorship, including the numerous cenacles of the Romantic period; collaborative ventures in poetry through the practice of the "Tombeaux" and as seen in the Album zutique; the interplay of text and image through illustrations for literary works; the collective ventures of literary journals; and multi-author prose works by authors such as the Goncourt brothers and Erckmann-Chatrian. Interdisciplinary in scope, these essays form a cohesive investigation of collaboration that extends beyond literature to include journalism and the relationships and tensions between literature and the arts. The volume will interest scholars of nineteenth-century French literature, and more generally, any scholar interested in what's at stake in redefining the role of the French author

Introduction to Nineteenth-Century French Literature
Introduction to Nineteenth-Century French Literature

Author: Tim Farrant

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2013-11-20

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 1472537637

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Everyone knows something of nineteenth-century France - or do they? "Les Miserables", "The Lady of the Camelias" and "The Three Musketeers", "Balzac" and "Jules Verne" live in the popular consciousness as enduring human documents and cultural icons. Yet, the French nineteenth century was even more dynamic than the stereotype suggests. This exciting new introduction takes the literature of the period both as a window on past and present mindsets and as an object of fascination in its own right. Beginning with history, the century's biggest problem and potential, it looks at narrative responses to historical, political and social experience, before devoting central chapters to poetry, drama and novels - all genres the century radically reinvented. It then explores numerous modernities, ways nineteenth-century writing and mentalities look forward to our own, before turning to marginalities - subjects and voices the canon traditionally forgot. No genre was left unchanged by the nineteenth century. This book will help to discover them anew.