Romanticism and After in France/le Romantisme et Apres en France – serie

En France comme en Grande-Bretagne, la fin du XIXe siècle semble hantée par les formes destructrices ou malveillantes de la féminité, que la figure de Salomé incarne d’une manière omniprésente et contradictoire. La danseuse fatale ne peut pourtant se comprendre que comme l’image inversée d’une féminité bienveillante et édifiante qui favorise, par son aptitude au sacrifice, le passage d’une ère à l’autre.L’auteur montre comment, sous la plume de Jean Lorrain, de Marie Corelli, de Henry Rider-Haggard ou de Renée Vivien, des silhouettes mythologiques, bibliques, typiques ou historiques invitent à nuancer l’omniprésence de la femme fatale dans le second dix-neuvième siècle et à interroger la notion même de fatalité. Alors que le XIXe siècle touche à sa fin, les représentations de la féminité bienveillante sont convoquées pour donner corps à des désirs symétriques, parfois inquiétants de similitude, à ceux incarnés par la hantise saloméenne.Dans cet ouvrage, la Vierge Marie, Ève, Lilith, l’androgyne, la religieuse, Jeanne d’Arc, Marie-Madeleine, Sapho ou encore Hypatie sont étudiées de manière à désenclaver la Décadence de ses ornières thématiques. Au miroir de la féminité bienveillante, la fin de siècle des héritiers de Baudelaire et du Cardinal Newman est ici étudiée comme une période de transition où s’exerce une tension entre fascination pour la chute et rêve de construction.

In late October 2017, the profoundly sad news of Ross Chambers’s passing reached Australia. Friends and colleagues scattered around the globe mourned the loss of a person of great ‘humanity and humility’, one of the most brilliant minds of his generation. This book is a tribute to Chambers’s life and work and to his legacy among scholars in the global French studies, comparative literature and cultural studies communities. It is also rooted in the Australian context he left behind but never really left, a context he indelibly marked and where he still lives on.Loiterature, perhaps Chambers’s most famous book, prescribes slow and careful reading practices but also quick-witted analysis. This collection draws together tributes, essays and critical responses to his wide-ranging work from Romanticism to the present, all demonstrating, through practice, the generative value of ‘loitering’. While melancholy and nostalgia are inescapable themes in this collection, loitering is also about imminent departures. And his work encourages us to explore that unexpected turn, possibly leading us in unforeseeable directions. This book suggests a few ways in which he will travel with us into the future.

Is it really a man’s world? At a time when masculinity is being challenged, this book explores the links between reading and writing and how they have historically been associated with masculine privilege. This book focuses on the representation of masculinity as a literary concept in Decadent literature by Huysmans, Lorrain, Rachilde, and Mirbeau to demonstrate how the movement both appropriated and subverted patriarchal assumptions surrounding reading and writing. The author takes a broad approach towards masculinity and its discontents by uncovering unlikely pretenders to the throne – witches, dandies, and cuckolds – destabilising its validity. By positioning the study against the backdrop of the fi n-de-siècle «crisis» of masculinity, the book undermines previously held assertions about the nature of masculinity then and now, opening up fresh ground for the appraisal and analysis of gender in French studies and beyond.This book was Joint Winner of the 2019 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Nineteenth-Century French Studies.

This collection of essays explores the relationship between art, literature and the stage in France and Belgium in the period 1830-1910. It is the first book to bring together scholarship on this neglected area of study and provides unique insights into current research within this rich interdisciplinary field. The rise in popular theatre, the beginnings of a ‘society of spectacle’, the emergence of the print media and the development of stage direction and set design, along with the crisis in pictorial and literary representation, created a dynamic cultural climate wherein the interface between writing, painting and dramatic representation thrived. The chapters in this volume chart different facets of this phenomenon: from the art of performing assumed by writers and the collaborations between artists and theatre directors to the theatrical motifs that infiltrated visual art and the increasingly ‘dramatized’ relationship between painting and spectator at the end of the century.

This reassessment of Chateaubriand’s literary and political achievements, offered as an intellectual biography of the writer, is centred on the concept of change and Chateaubriand’s emotional suspicion of change, arising both from mistrust of his own inconstancy and from the personal and collective suffering of the French Revolution. His aversion to change spread beyond politics to religion and literature, but conflicted with his intellectual fascination with historic change in all three areas. The paradox of his fluctuating attitude to change allows a challenge to traditional views of Chateaubriand’s status. Was he truly a committed founder of French Romanticism? Was he an unswerving right-wing legitimist? Was he an insincere and ‘aesthetic’ Christian? The book provides new answers to these questions, presenting a very different Chateaubriand both through an analysis of his preference for the epic literature of Greece and Rome and its Christian heritage in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and by its account of his subtle pleading for constitutional monarchy. Malcolm Scott argues that the failure of Chateaubriand’s political aspirations led him, again paradoxically, to the espousal of change and to a final dramatic reversal of his literary and religious standpoint, expressed in the writings of the last few years of his life.

Local colour is an undertheorized notion. Although the expression itself is nowadays used in everyday speech in both French and English, its ‘domestication’ only further highlights the need for a clarifying study of this concept, which has come to be crucial in aesthetic debates. From the seventeenth-century rift between ‘Poussinistes’ and ‘Rubénistes’, to the genesis of Romanticist aesthetic theories in early nineteenth-century France, to the North American regionalist prose of the Local colour movement; from Roger de Piles, to Benjamin Constant, Victor Hugo, Prosper Mérimée, and Hamlin Garland, this book sets out to map for the first time couleur locale’s three-hundred-year journey across centuries, languages and genres. In addition to proposing a genealogy of the concept and the paths of its semantic evolution, it also initiates a reflection on the factors that could have prompted the mobility of the term across cultures, art forms and their metalanguages.

The work of French writer and essayist Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003) is without doubt among the most challenging the twentieth century has to offer. Contemporary debate in literature, philosophy, and politics has yet to fully acknowledge its discreet but enduring impact. Arising from a conference that took place in Oxford in 2009, this book sets itself a simple, if daunting, task: that of measuring the impact and responding to the challenge of Blanchot’s work by addressing its engagement with the Romantic legacy, in particular (but not only) that of the Jena Romantics. Drawing upon a wide range of philosophers and poets associated directly or indirectly with German Romanticism (Kant, Fichte, Goethe, Jean Paul, Novalis, the Schlegels, Hölderlin), the authors of this volume explore how Blanchot’s fictional, critical, and fragmentary texts rewrite and rethink the Romantic demand in relation to questions of criticism and reflexivity, irony and subjectivity, narrative and genre, the sublime and the neutre, the Work and the fragment, quotation and translation. Reading Blanchot with or against key twentieth-century thinkers (Benjamin, Foucault, de Man), they also examine Romantic and post-Romantic notions of history, imagination, literary theory, melancholy, affect, love, revolution, community, and other central themes that Blanchot’s writings deploy across the century from Jean-Paul Sartre to Jean-Luc Nancy. This book contains contributions in both English and French.

The period from the 1850s to the 1890s in Paris marked a key turning point for poets and composers, as they grappled with the new ways in which poetry and music could intersect. Under the particular conditions of the time and place, both art forms underwent significant developments which challenged the status of each form. In both creative and critical work from this era, poets and composers offered tantalising but problematic insights into ‘musical’ poetry and ‘poetic’ music.The central issue examined in this book is that of what happens to poetry when it encounters music, especially as song. The author places Baudelaire’s famous sonnet ‘La Mort des amants’ at the heart of the analysis, tracing its transposition into song by a succession of both amateur and professional composers, examining works by Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Serpette, Rollinat, Debussy and Charpentier, as well as an extraordinary parodic song version by Valade and Verlaine.A companion website offers recordings of each of the songs analysed in this book.