French Studies of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries – Serie

The French Revolution represents a pivotal moment within the history of personhood in France, where gender and national differences provided the foundations of society. As such, these constructs feature as ideological battlegrounds in the search for identity and self-expression within the Romantic literature published between the revolutions of 1789 and 1830. This book considers Germaine de Staël’s and Claire de Duras’s depictions of men’s and women’s shared and diverging lived experiences to offer an innovative transnational perspective on the usually male-focused mal du siècle. Its methodology combines feminist revisions of the novel, situated reading practices, and life writing research with an intersectional approach to gender and nationhood. This framework presents a dialectical relationship between sameness and difference on formal and thematic levels that challenges the construction and enforcement of binaries within early nineteenth-century legislation, discourse, and culture. Beyond Staël’s and Duras’s intertextual relationship, this book promotes the importance of an understudied period in literary scholarship, clarifies women’s role within French Romanticism, and explores the tense relationship between the self and the nation.

Questioning hegemonic masculinity in literature is not novel. In the nineteenth century, under the July Monarchy (1830−1848), several French writers depicted characters who did not conform to gender expectations: hermaphrodites, castrati, homosexuals, effete men and mannish women. This book investigates the historical conditions in which these protagonists were created and their success during the July Monarchy. It analyses novels and novellas by Balzac, Gautier, Latouche, Musset and Sand in order to determine how these literary narratives challenged the traditional representations of masculinity and even redefined genders through their unconventional characters. This book also examines the connections and the disparities between these literary texts and contemporary scientific texts on sexual difference, homosexuality and intersexuality. It thus highlights the July Monarchy as a key period for the redefinition of gender identities.

«In the wake of pioneering scholarship by Sharon Marcus and Juliette Rogers, Giada Alessandroni’s study situates Belle Époque women’s writing in the broader literary and cultural history of friendship, highlighting how representations of female homosociality were used ‘to deconstruct gender and redefine modern femininity’ (p. 24). One of the work’s key strengths lies in its careful navigation of the relationship between subversion and the re-inscription of gender norms in a range of middlebrow works by successful women writers. […] Of particular interest to scholars of women’s writing and the Belle Époque, Alessandroni’s analysis nuances our understanding of female homosociality, reminding us that literature need not be avant-garde to reflect socio-cultural change.» (Helen Craske, French Studies 76.3, July 2022)Second fiddle to love, fleeting and inauthentic, a disguise for sexual rivalry, a practice to be policed or, at most, a social mechanism aptly reinforcing traditional gender norms, female friendship did not always have a good reputation in canonical and didactic literature from nineteenth-century France. But how did French women imagine and represent their relationships in fiction, and to what ends?Situated at the intersection of feminist cultural history and Belle Epoque literary studies, this book explores fictional representations of female homosociality in novels by Daniel Lesueur, Gabrielle Réval, Marcelle Tynaire, and Yver Prost, among others, including women’s writing of the Belle Epoque within the narratives of the literary and cultural history of friendship in the long nineteenth century.Playing with the tension between traditional and modern womanhood and intersecting with topics as diverse as the female body, work, education, marriage, heterosexual love, and the moral regeneration of the French nation, the representation of female homosociality constitutes, in these texts, one of the literary devices through which the figure of the femme moderne comes into being on paper and reflects the authors’ engagement with a form of female modernism that problematizes the dichotomy between «high» and «popular» literature, helping to give shape to women’s experience of modernity.This book was the joint winner of the 2019 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Nineteenth-Century French Studies.

The collector was one of the archetypal figures of the nineteenth-century French cultural imagination. During the July Monarchy (1830-48) a new culture of collecting emerged, which continued to develop over the course of the century and which attracted the attention of a wide range of social commentators and writers. From the sketch-writing of the 1830s to the late nineteenth-century decadent fictions of Jean Lorrain, from Balzac’s Cousin Pons to Proust’s Charles Swann, the literature of the period abounds in examples of men (and occasionally women) afflicted with what the Larousse Grand Dictionnaire called in 1869 ‘la collectionnomanie’.This book examines these representations of the collector. It shows that woven into them are fundamental anxieties generated by the experience of modernity, involving the nature of identity and selfhood, the relentless accumulation of commodities in a capitalist system of production and the (in)ability of language to translate experience accurately.

Following on from « Ce Salon à quoi tout se ramène »: Le Salon de peinture et de sculpture, 1791–1890, published in 2010 as an earlier volume in this series, this volume contains a selection of the papers given at the first major international conference to be held on the post-1789 Paris Fine Art Salon. Hosted by the University of Exeter in September 2013, the conference had its origins in the research project entitled Painting for the Salon? The French State, Artists and Academy, 1830–1852, funded in 2010–2012 by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council, and its purpose was to situate findings of this research within the wider framework of the Salon’s nineteenth-century history. In this collection of twenty-three papers, fourteen in English, nine in French, established and new scholars of French art history examine the national and international artistic, political and cultural dimensions of the most important regular exhibition of contemporary art in the nineteenth-century world.

This collection of essays investigates the darker aspects of Diderot, writer, art critic, philosopher and encyclopdiste. The chapters focus on the schism between positive images of the Enlightenment and an undercurrent of disorder, transgression and clandestine intellectual and social practices. Diderots role in this fissure is critically scrutinised through an analysis of the interface between Enlightenment and its dark side. In his reticence before authority and censorship, in the richness and complexity of his literary and philosophical works, in the emotional conflict of his theatre, or in his innovative aesthetic vision, Diderot consistently evokes the darker side of the Enlightenment. Cet ouvrage interroge laspect plus sombre de Diderot, crivain, critique dart, philosophe et encyclopdiste. Les contributeurs traitent du clivage entre dun ct, les images positives des Lumires et, de lautre, le dsordre, la rvolte, la transgression, les pratiques sociales et intellectuelles clandestines qui en constituent son corollaire parfois sous-jacent. Le rle de Diderot au cur de ce clivage sera analys dans le cadre dune interrogation plus large du couple Ombres/Lumires. Diderot incarne dans ses rticences devant les autorits et la censure, dans la richesse et la complexit de ses ouvrages littraires et philosophiques, dans les conflits affectifs de son thtre, ou encore dans sa vision esthtique innovatrice une alternative, plus sombre, la marche des Lumires triomphantes.

The military man has long been one of literature’s archetypal figures. Using a comparative framework, this book traces the transformation of the military man in eighteenth-century British and French literature as this figure moved from noble warrior to nationalised professional in response to changes within the military structure, the role of empire and the impact of an expanding middle class. The author examines the way in which the masculinity of the military man was reimagined at a time when older models of military service persisted alongside emerging models of patriotic nationalism, inspired by bourgeois morality, the cult of sensibility and a new understanding of the role of violence in both public and private domains. Through a corpus of canonical and lesser-known literature, the book explores the military man’s relationship to the state and to his fellow citizens, even in the domestic setting. With the role of the «nobleman» in decline, the military man, not a «civilian» and no longer associated with the ‘aristocrat’, became a separate class of man.

This book analyses one of the many levels of complexity not readily apparent to the reader of Zola’s fiction: the question of the author’s family secrets. The novels addressed here present a variety of sub-textual issues highlighting Zola’s sexual insecurity and anxiety. Their analysis reveals a mystery related to female sexuality that pervades the narratives of Thérèse Raquin and La Fortune des Rougon, and that is silently transmitted in Madeleine Férat, La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret, La Bête humaine, La Curée, Nana, Le Docteur Pascal and Vérité. The novels are explored from the standpoint of psychoanalytical criticism, a tool particularly appropriate for examining Zola’s language and illuminating the recurrent theme of «the Return of the repressed». Four psychoanalytical theories are adopted: Nicolas Abraham’s and Maria Toroks’ theories of psychic development (presenting the concept of the phantom) and Sigmund Freud’s and Jacques Lacan’s theories of infantile sexuality.

Violence is one of the main themes in the novels of Honoré de Balzac. Executions, murders, savagery and death accompany the conspiracies and the turbulence that characterise his post-Revolutionary times, from the Terror to the Napoleonic campaigns and then to the upheavals of 1830 and 1848. Despite the importance of violence in Balzac, this is the first book-length study of the topic. The book begins by tracing the links between violence and Balzac’s approach to the novel, not merely in terms of violent content, but, equally importantly, in terms of the form associated with that content. Form and content combine to perpetuate and naturalise violence and suffering. After charting examples of this combination in one of Balzac’s earliest fictions, the book moves on to the links between violence and history (Catherine de Médicis; the Terror), between violence and place (from his native Touraine to sickness in Paris), and between violence and gender/sexuality. It also examines the representation of violence in the form of spoken or written death. Throughout the analysis, the book asks the following question: do Balzac’s novels reinforce or counteract the literary text’s apparent love-affair with violence?