Bodies of Art

Marie Lathers is Elizabeth M. and William C. Treuhaft Professor of Humanities and French at Case Western Reserve University. She is the author of The Aesthetics of Artifice: Villiers's L'Eve future.

"In a literary tour-de-force, Lathers examines the ways that French literary realism and naturalism depict the artist's model. . . . Her lively prose tells an untold story in engaging style. Her study drives readers to pick up the novels themselves as windows into the fascinating subjects they depict."—Henry L. Carrigan Jr., Ohioana Quarterly "Bodies of Art furthers our understanding of the evolution and mutation of the artist's model in French literature from the 1830s to the end of the century. Lathers's densely argued, theoretically informed study delineates the birth and 'death' of the model in relation to literary realism, shifting social realities, gender stereotypes, and the advent of photography, and provides illuminating readings of key texts from Balzac to Maupassant. . . . Her fascinating book presents a complex, multilayered narrative of the model as imagined and reinvented in 19th-century literature that enriches our knowledge of the Paris art world and the problematics of gender in 19th-century France."—Women's Art Journal

• Contents - List of Illustrations; Acknowledgments; Introduction1; 1. Paris Qui Pose - The Female Model in Nineteenth-Century France; 2. Chi Era la Fornarina? - Raphael, Balzac, Ingres; 3. Forgotten in a Corner - Modeling in Le Chef-d'oeuvre inconnu and La Cousine Bette; 4. Posing at the Hotel Pimodan - Baudelaire and the Model; 5. Models, Monkeys, and Naturalism - The Goncourt Brothers' Manette Salomon; 6. The Model's Postpartum Belly - Zola's L'Oeuvre; 7. Maupassant, Mauclair, and Villiers - The Aging and Death of the Model; 8. Studies after Nature - The Photographic Model at the Turn of the Century; Conclusion; Notes; Works Cited; Index