Ornament, Fantasy, and Desire in Nineteenth-Century French Literature

Ornament, Fantasy, and Desire in Nineteenth-Century French Literature

Author: Rae Beth Gordon

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2014-07-14

Total Pages: 307

ISBN-13: 1400862663

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In this examination of the role of ornament in nineteenth-century French literature, Rae Beth Gordon shows that ornament, far from being a simple accessory, raises problems that are at the very heart of aesthetic experience: limits and their transgression, illusion and seduction, pleasure and tension, harmony and confusion, excess and marginality. After placing texts by Nerval, Gautier, Mallarm, Huysmans, and Rachilde within the context of the history and techniques of the decorative arts, she reveals in these works the powerful role played by decorative figurations of syntax, diction, and composition. Gordon's detailed textual analyses yield spatial parallels with specific ornamental configurations (interlace, arabesque, decorative frame, horror vacui, trompe l'oeil). These patterns are then studied in relation to a dynamics of desire. Ornament, taken as the site of desire and illuminated by the theories of Charcot, Clrambault, Freud, Winnicott, and Lacan, highlights important differences between romanticism, symbolism, and decadence. Not only does the author relate ornament to artistic representations of the sublime, the grotesque, and hysteria, but she also reveals that the function of ornament in literature anticipated psychiatric and aesthetic research on decorative form in the fin de sicle. Originally published in 1992. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.


Ornament

Ornament

Author: James Trilling

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 9780295981482

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This text is a wide-ranging consideration of the cultural and symbolic significance of ornament, its rejection by modernism and its subsequent reinvention. Trilling explains how ornament works, why it has to be explained and why it matters.


The Anxiety of Dispossession

The Anxiety of Dispossession

Author: Masha Belenky

Publisher: Associated University Presse

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 9780838756904

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Focusing on male-authored texts, Belenky demonstrates that this obsession with sexual jealousy conveys both patriarchal anxiety over disempowerment stemming from social upheaval and a male desire for social and sexual control over the female body and mind. Bound up with the male prerogative of ownership, jealousy was assigned an explicitly public role in guarding a man's property and propriety." "This book considers portrayals of jealousy by major authors such as Balzac, Hugo, and Zola alongside a broad range of works by medical writers, journalists, and moralists who wrote for popular audiences."


Photojournalism and the Origins of the French Writer House Museum (1881-1914)

Photojournalism and the Origins of the French Writer House Museum (1881-1914)

Author: Elizabeth Emery

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 1351554263

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Why did writers' private homes become so linked to their work that contemporaries began preserving them as museums? Photojournalism and the Origins of the French Writer House Museum addresses this and other questions by providing an overview of the social forces that brought writers' homes to the forefront of the French imagination at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. This study analyzes representations of the apartments and houses of Corneille, Hugo, Balzac, Dumas, Sand, Zola, Loti, Montesquiou, Mallarm?and Proust, among others, arguing that the writer's home became a contested space and an important part of the French patrimony at this time. This is the first book to emphasize the house museum as an essentially modern construct, and to trace the history of ideas leading to its institutionalization in twentieth-century France. The interdisciplinary study also brings new attention to the importance of photojournalism for fin-de-si?e France - and brings to light fascinating and forgotten examples of 'at home' photography by Dornac and Henri Mairet. Elizabeth Emery provides a fresh and compelling perspective on conjunctions between visual, literary, and material cultures.


Guy de Maupassant's Selected Works (First International Student Edition) (Norton Critical Editions)

Guy de Maupassant's Selected Works (First International Student Edition) (Norton Critical Editions)

Author: Guy de Maupassant

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2016-08-27

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0393623505

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“Smith successfully captures Maupassant’s depiction of nineteenth-century French culture using terminology that allows these wonderful texts to reach a fresh generation of readers. A solid translation of some wonderful short stories.” —Library Journal The Norton Critical Edition includes: - Thirty of Maupassant’s best short stories centering on war, the supernatural, and French life, translated by Sandra Smith. - An introduction and explanatory footnotes by Robert Lethbridge. - Essays, letters, and newspaper articles on the subjects that influenced Maupassant’s writing, including politics, war, love, despair, and the supernatural. - Sixteen critical assessments from Maupassant’s time to our own, including those by Joseph Conrad, David Coward, Mary Donaldson-Evans, Rachel Killick, Roger L. Williams, Ruth A. Hottell, and Katherine C. Kurk. - A Chronology and a Selected Bibliography.


Guy de Maupassant's Selected Works (Norton Critical Editions)

Guy de Maupassant's Selected Works (Norton Critical Editions)

Author: Guy de Maupassant

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2016-08-27

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0393523101

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“Smith successfully captures Maupassant’s depiction of nineteenth-century French culture using terminology that allows these wonderful texts to reach a fresh generation of readers. A solid translation of some wonderful short stories.” —Library Journal The Norton Critical Edition includes: - Thirty of Maupassant’s best short stories centering on war, the supernatural, and French life, translated by Sandra Smith. - An introduction and explanatory footnotes by Robert Lethbridge. - Essays, letters, and newspaper articles on the subjects that influenced Maupassant’s writing, including politics, war, love, despair, and the supernatural. - Sixteen critical assessments from Maupassant’s time to our own, including those by Joseph Conrad, David Coward, Mary Donaldson-Evans, Rachel Killick, Roger L. Williams, Ruth A. Hottell, and Katherine C. Kurk. - A Chronology and a Selected Bibliography.


The Shape of Fear

The Shape of Fear

Author: Susan Jennifer Navarette

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2021-05-11

Total Pages: 474

ISBN-13: 0813182662

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During the last decades of the nineteenth century, Charles Darwin, Thomas Henry Huxley, Walter Pater and others changed the nature of thought concerning the human body and the physical environment that had shaped it. In response, the 1890s saw the publication of a series of remarkable literary works that had their genesis in the intense scientific and aesthetic activity of those preceding decades—texts that emphasized themes of degeneration and were themselves stylistically decompositive, with language both a surrogate for physical deformity and a source of anxiety. Susan J. Navarette examines the ways in which scientific and cultural concerns of late nineteenth-century England are coded in the horror literature of the period. By contextualizing the structural, stylistic, and thematic systems developed by writers seeking to reenact textually the entropic forces they perceived in the natural world, Navarette reconstructs the late Victorian mentalité. She analyzes aesthetic responses to trends in contemporary science and explores horror writers' use of scientific methodologies to support their perception that a long-awaited period of cultural decline had begun. In her analysis of the classics Turn of the Screw and Heart of Darkness, Navarette shows how James and Conrad made artistic use of earlier "scientific" readings of the body. She also considers works by lesser-known authors Walter de la Mare, Vernon Lee, and Arthur Machen, who produced fin de siècle stories that took the form of "hybrid literary monstrosities." To underscore the fascination with bodily decay and deformation that these writers explored, The Shape of Fear is enhanced with prints and line drawings by Victor Hugo, James Ensor, and other artists of the day. This elegantly written book formulates a new canon of late Victorian fiction that will intrigue scholars of literature and cultural history.


Taboo

Taboo

Author: Hannah Thompson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 1351547208

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French realist texts are driven by representations of the body and depend on corporeality to generate narrative intrigue. But anxieties around bodily representation undermine realist claims of objectivity and transparency. Aspects of bodily reality which threaten les bonnes moeurs - gender confusion, sexual appetite, disability, torture, murder, child abuse and disease - rarely occupy the foreground and are instead spurned or only partially alluded to by writers and critics. This wide-ranging study uses the notion of the taboo as a powerful means of interpreting representations of the body. The hidden bodies of realist texts reveal their secrets in unexpected ways. Thompson reads texts by Sand, Rachilde, Maupassant, Hugo, Barbey d'Aurevilly, Mirbeau and Zola alongside modern theorists of the body to show how the figure of the taboo plots an alternative model of author-reader relations based on the struggle to speak the unspeakable. Dr Hannah Thompson is a Senior Lecturer in French at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her first book, Naturalism Redressed: Identity and Clothing in the Novels of Emile Zola, was published by Legenda in 2004.


Monsieur Vénus

Monsieur Vénus

Author: Rachilde

Publisher: Modern Language Association

Published: 2015-05-01

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 1603292551

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When the rich and well-connected Raoule de Vénérande becomes enamored of Jacques Silvert, a poor young man who makes artificial flowers for a living, she turns him into her mistress and eventually into her wife. Raoule's suitor, a cigar-smoking former hussar officer, becomes an accomplice in the complications that ensue.


Romancing the Cathedral

Romancing the Cathedral

Author: Elizabeth Emery

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 2001-09-27

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 9780791451236

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Through an analysis of political, art historical, and literary discourse, this book considers French fascination with the Gothic cathedral.