The Labour of Literature in Britain and France, 1830-1910

The Labour of Literature in Britain and France, 1830-1910

Author: Marcus Waithe

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-04-20

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 1137552530

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This volume examines the anxieties that caused many nineteenth-century writers to insist on literature as a laboured and labouring enterprise. Following Isaac D’Israeli’s gloss on Jean de La Bruyère, it asks, in particular, whether writing should be ‘called working’. Whereas previous studies have focused on national literatures in isolation, this volume demonstrates the two-way traffic between British and French conceptions of literary labour. It questions assumed areas of affinity and difference, beginning with the labour politics of the early nineteenth century and their common root in the French Revolution. It also scrutinises the received view of France as a source of a ‘leisure ethic’, and of British writers as either rejecting or self-consciously mimicking French models. Individual essays consider examples of how different writers approached their work, while also evoking a broader notion of ‘work ethics’, understood as a humane practice, whereby values, benefits, and responsibilities, are weighed up.


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.


Lucidity

Lucidity

Author: Ian James

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-05-20

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 1134862709

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This collection of essays addresses the question of lucidity as a thematic in literature and film but also as a quality of both expression and insight in literary criticism and critical thought more generally. The essays offer treatments of lucidity in itself and in relation to its opposites, forms of obscurity and darkness. They offer attention to problems of philosophical thought and reason, to questions of literary and poetic form, and of photographic and filmic contemplation. Ranging from engagements with early modern writing through to more recent material the contributions focus in particular on nineteenth- and twentieth-century French prose and poetry, the field which has been the predominant focus of Alison Finch’s critical writing. They are written as tributes to the distinctively lucid insights of her work and to the breadth and clarity of its intellectual engagement.


Gustave Caillebotte as Worker, Collector, Painter

Gustave Caillebotte as Worker, Collector, Painter

Author: Samuel Raybone

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2020-09-17

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1501339966

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Gustave Caillebotte was more than a painter: he collected and researched postage stamps; designed and built yachts; administered and participated in the sport of yachting; collected paintings; cultivated and collected rare orchids; designed and tended his gardens; and engaged in local politics. Gustave Caillebotte as Worker, Collector, Painter presents the first comprehensive account of Caillebotte's manifold activities. It presents a completely new critical interpretation of Caillebotte's broad career that highlights the singular salience of 'work', and which intersects histories and theories of visual culture, ideology, and psychoanalysis. Where the recent art historical 'rediscovery' of Caillebotte offers multiple narratives of his identification with working men, this book goes beyond them towards excavating what his work was in its own terms. Born to an haut bourgeois milieu in which he was never completely comfortable and assailed by traumatic familial bereavements, Caillebotte adopted and adapted the ideologically normative category of work for his own purposes, deconstructing its ostensibly class-determinate parameters in order to bridge the chasm of his social alienation.


The Critique of Work in Modern French Thought

The Critique of Work in Modern French Thought

Author: Alastair Hemmens

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2019-04-26

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 3030125866

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What is work? Why do we do it? Since time immemorial the answer to these questions, from both the left and the right, has been that work is both a natural necessity and, barring exploitation, a social good. One might criticise its management, its compensation and who benefits from it the most, but never work itself, never work as such. In this book, Alastair Hemmens seeks to challenge these received ideas. Drawing on the new ‘critique-of-value’ school of Marxian critical theory, Hemmens demonstrates that capitalism and its final crisis cannot be properly understood except in terms of the historically specific and socially destructive character of labour. It is from this radical perspective that Hemmens turns to an innovative critical analysis of the rich history of radical French thinkers who, over the past two centuries, have challenged the labour form head on: from the utopian-socialist Charles Fourier, who called for the abolition of the separation between work and play, and Marx’s wayward son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, who demanded The Right to Laziness (1880), to the father of Surrealism, André Breton, who inaugurated a ‘war on work’, and, of course, the French Situationist, Guy Debord, author of the famous graffito, ‘never work’. Ultimately, Hemmens considers normative changes in attitudes to work since the 1960s and the future of anti-capitalist social movements today. This book will be a crucial point of reference for contemporary debates about labour and the anti-work tradition in France.


Amateur Musical Societies and Sports Clubs in Provincial France, 1848-1914

Amateur Musical Societies and Sports Clubs in Provincial France, 1848-1914

Author: Alan R. H. Baker

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-09-14

Total Pages: 357

ISBN-13: 3319579932

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This book explores leisure-related voluntary associations in France during the nineteenth century as practical expressions of the Revolutionary concept of fraternité. Using a mass of unpublished sources in provincial and national archives, it analyses the history, geography and cultural significance of amateur musical societies and sports clubs in eleven départements of France between 1848 and 1914. It demonstrates that, although these voluntary associations drew upon and extended the traditional concept of cooperation and community, and the Revolutionary concept of fraternity, they also incorporated the fundamental characteristics of competition and conflict. Although intended to produce social harmony, in practice they reflected the ideological hostilities and cultural tensions that permeated French society in the nineteenth century.


Lycanthropy in German Literature

Lycanthropy in German Literature

Author: Peter Arnds

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2015-10-04

Total Pages: 191

ISBN-13: 1137541636

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Lycanthropy in German Literature argues that as a symbol of both power and parasitism, the human wolf of the Germanic Middle Ages is iconic to the representation of the persecution of undesirables in the German cultural imagination from the early modern age to the post-war literary scene.