Prologue : Poe 1 -- Introduction : Mapping murder -- Archaeologies. Quarries and catacombs : underground crime in Second Empire Romans-feuilletons -- Skulls and bones : paleohistory in Leroux and Leblanc -- Crypts and ghosts : terrains of national trauma in Japrisot and Vargas -- Intersections. Street-name mysteries and private/public violence, 1867-2001 -- Cartographies. Terrains vagues : Gaboriau and the birth of the cartographic mystery -- Mapping the city : Malet's mysteries and Butor's Bleston -- Zéropa-land : Balkanization and the schizocartographies of Dantec and Radoman
During the nineteenth century, words like 'intersex' and 'trans' had not yet been invented to describe individuals whose bodies, or senses of self, conflicted with binary sex. But that does not mean that such people did not exist. In nineteenth-century France, case studies filled medical journals, high-profile trials captured headlines, and doctors staked their reputations on sex determinations only to have them later reversed by colleagues. While medical experts fought over what separated a man from a woman, novelists began to explore debates about binary sex and describe the experiences of gender-ambiguous characters. Anne Linton discusses over 200 newly-uncovered case studies while offering fresh readings of literature by several famous writers of the period, as well as long-overlooked popular fiction. This landmark contribution to the history of sexuality is the first book to examine intersex in both medicine and literature, sensitively relating historical 'hermaphrodism' to contemporary intersex activism and scholarship.
In the late nineteenth century, the first wave of female journalists began writing in the French daily press. Yet, while they undeniably opened doors for the next generations of educated women, sexist hiring practices, assumptions about women’s aptitudes as reporters, and more subtle gender biases continued to saturate the industry in the decades that followed. Gender, Generation, and Journalism in France, 1910–1940 investigates the careers and written work of ten women who regularly reported in the national, Paris-based dailies. Addressing the role of mentorship, family connections, gendered behaviours, reporting styles, and subject matter, Mary Lynn Stewart debunks lingering essentialist notions about women’s entry into journalism. She shows that struggling newspapers, attempting to reverse declining circulation, hired women to cover subjects that expanded to include international relations, colonial conflicts, trials, local politics, and social problems. Through content analysis, deixis, and systematic comparisons of several women and men reporting on the same or different events, she further queries claims about a feminine style, finding more similarities than differences between masculine and feminine reporting. Documenting the persistence of gender discrimination in the hiring, assigning, and assessment of women reporters in the French daily press, Gender, Generation, and Journalism in France, 1910–1940 demonstrates that, through the support of their female colleagues, women managed to succeed despite a variety of challenges.
Complicity in Fin-de-siècle Literature examines late-nineteenth century French understandings of literature as a morally collusive medium, which implicates readers, writers, and critics in risqué or illicit ideas and behaviour. It considers definitions of complicity from the period's evolving legal statutes, critical debates about literary 'bad influence', and modern theories of reader response, in order to achieve a deeper understanding of how cultural production of the period forged relationships of implication and collusion. While focusing on fin-de-siècle French culture, the book's theoretical discussions provide a new terminology and conceptual framework through which to analyse literary influence and reception, applicable to different historical periods and national settings. Interdisciplinary in nature, the study draws on methods associated with close reading, literary history, law and literature studies, cultural studies, and sociology of literature. Each of the book's chapters highlights how particular literary themes or techniques encouraged readers' identification with transgression and facilitated alternative forms of solidarity. The analysis draws on a range of case studies from different media forms, including: Naturalist, Decadent, and psychological novels, biographically revealing fiction ('romans à clefs'), little magazines ('petites revues'), and saucy magazines ('revues légères'). Texts written by well-known literary figures--such as Émile Zola, Octave Mirbeau, and Rachilde--appear alongside previously overlooked periodical and archival sources. The book's varied corpus reveals the widespread appeal of risqué topics and illicit solidarity across the literary spectrum.
This book visits the Romantic legacy that was central to the development of literature and culture from the 1830s onward. Although critical accounts have examined aspects of this long history of indebtedness, this is the first study to survey both Nineteenth and Twentieth century culture. The authors consider the changing notion of Romanticism, looking at the diversity of its writers, the applicability of the term, and the ways in which Romanticism has been reconstituted. The chapters cover relevant historical periods and literary trends, including the Romantic Gothic, the Victorian era, and Modernism as part of a dialectical response to the Romantic legacy. Contributors also examine how Romanticism has been reconstituted within postmodern and postcolonial literature as both a reassessment of the Modernist critique and of the imperial contexts that have throughout this time-frame underpinned the Romantic legacy, bringing into focus the contemporaneity of Romanticism and its political legacy. This collection reveals the diversity and continuing relevance of the genre in new and exciting ways, offering insights into writers such as Browning, Ruskin, Pater, Wilde, Lewis, MacNeice, and Auster.
The greatest work of one of France's greatest writers, Victor Hugo's Les Misérables has captivated readers for a century and a half with its memorable characters, its indictment of injustice, its concern for those suffering in misery, and its unapologetic embrace of revolutionary ideals. The novel's length, multiple narratives, and encyclopedic digressiveness make it a pleasure to read but a challenge to teach, and this volume is designed to address the needs of instructors in a variety of courses that include the novel in excerpts or as a whole. Part 1 of the volume, "Materials," provides guidance on editions in French and in English translation, biographies, criticism, and maps. Part 2, "Approaches," contains essays that discuss the novel's conceptions of misère, sexuality, and the politics of the time and that demonstrate techniques for teaching context including the book's literary market, its adaptations, its place in popular culture, and its relation to other novels of its time.
The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction is a comprehensive introduction to crime fiction and crime fiction scholarship today. Across 45 original chapters, specialists in the field offer innovative approaches to the classics of the genre as well as ground-breaking mappings of emerging themes and trends. The volume is divided into three parts. Part I, Approaches, rearticulates the key theoretical questions posed by the crime genre. Part II, Devices, examines the textual characteristics of crime fiction. Part III, Interfaces investigates the complex ways in which crime fiction engages with the defining issues of its context – from policing and forensic science through war, migration and narcotics to digital media and the environment. Rigorously argued and engagingly written, the volume is indispensable both to students and scholars of crime fiction.
Criminal Moves is a ground-breaking collection of essays that challenges the distinction between literary and popular fiction and proposes that crime fiction is a genre that constantly violates its own boundaries. Reorienting crime fiction studies towards the mobility of the genre, it has profound ramifications for how we read individual crime stories.
In Origins and Legacies of Marcel Duhamel’s Série Noire Alistair Rolls, Clara Sitbon and Marie-Laure Vuaille-Barcan counter the myths and received wisdom that are typically associated with this iconic French crime fiction series, namely: that it was born in Paris on a tide of postwar euphoria; that it initially consisted of translations of American hard-boiled classics by the likes of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler; and that the translations were rushed and rather approximate. Instead, an alternative vision of Duhamel’s translation practice is proposed, one based on a French tradition of auto-, or “original”, translation of “ostensibly” American crime fiction, and one that appropriates the source text in order to create an allegory of the target culture.
