In this reading of Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris Margery Evans proposes that Baudelaire's text serves to question the conventions of prose forms such as the novel and the moral fable. She shows how the text probes the fundamental tension between individuality and conformity, powerfully symbolized by the giant metropolis. Dr. Evans explores the interconnections among the prose poems that make up Le Spleen de Paris and their intertextual relations with other, mostly prose, works, and argues that this anomalous, hybrid work raises far-reaching questions of relevance to narratology and to...
In this reading of Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris Margery Evans proposes that Baudelaire's text serves to question the conventions of prose forms suc...
In this interdisciplinary study of sentimental discourse of the late eighteenth century, David J. Denby sheds new light on Enlightenment thought and sensibility. He situates sentimental subliterature in its social and political context, analyzing how its formal structures are reflected in contemporary theories and texts concerning society, morality, politics, and history. Denby argues that sentimentalism is central to the culture of late-eighteenth-century France. Texts discussed include works by Rousseau and de Stael.
In this interdisciplinary study of sentimental discourse of the late eighteenth century, David J. Denby sheds new light on Enlightenment thought and s...
Hughes explores how cultural centers require the peripheral, the outlawed, and the deviant in order to define and bolster themselves. He analyzes the hierarchies of cultural value that inform the work of six modern French writers: the exoticist Pierre Loti; Paul Gauguin, whose Noa Noa enacts European fantasies about Polynesia; Proust, who analyzes such exemplary figures of exclusion and inclusion as the homosexual and the xenophobe; Montherlant; Camus, who pleads an alienating detachment from the cultures of both metropolitan France and Algeria; and Jean Genet.
Hughes explores how cultural centers require the peripheral, the outlawed, and the deviant in order to define and bolster themselves. He analyzes the ...
The Family in Crisis in Late Nineteenth-Century French Fiction examines how novels represent the problems of family life at a key moment in modern social history. Nicholas White provides close readings of texts by popular novelists such as Zola and Maupassant as well as by hitherto neglected figures including Huysmans, Bourget and Armand Charpentier. His analysis, informed by a wider cultural perspective, shows how tales of adultery, illegitimacy, incest and divorce exemplify and interrogate the crisis in "family values" of late nineteenth-century France.
The Family in Crisis in Late Nineteenth-Century French Fiction examines how novels represent the problems of family life at a key moment in modern soc...
Nathalie Sarraute, initially hailed as a leading theorist and exemplar of the nouveau roman, is now regarded as a major French novelist in her own right. Ann Jefferson offers a new perspective on Sarraute's entire oeuvre--her fiction, her outstanding autobiography Enfance and her influential critical writings--by focusing on the crucial issue of difference that emerges as one of her central preoccupations. Jefferson explores Sarraute's fundamental ambivalence to differences of various kinds, including questions of gender and genre.
Nathalie Sarraute, initially hailed as a leading theorist and exemplar of the nouveau roman, is now regarded as a major French novelist in her own rig...
Michael Finn examines the vogue for nervous afflictions in France in the late nineteenth century, and compares Proust's anxieties about writing In Search of Lost Time to the concerns of earlier writers suffering from nervous conditions, including Flaubert, Baudelaire, Nerval and the Goncourt brothers. Once Proust cast off his fear of being a nervous weakling, he was able to make fun of the supposed purity of the novel form. The author shows how hysteria becomes a key to Proustian narrative, and discusses how together with Proust's use of pastiche, narrative pranks and games, it unlocks a...
Michael Finn examines the vogue for nervous afflictions in France in the late nineteenth century, and compares Proust's anxieties about writing In Sea...
This new study of the nineteenth-century French realist novel focuses on the fundamental incompatibility between the narrative and the descriptive modes of discourse. It shows how major novelists including Balzac, Flaubert and Zola, like some of their twentieth-century successors, grappled with their belief or fear that their stories lied in their representation of time and history, or that their descriptions forgot the reality of their socio-historical world, highlighting their use of irony and allegory in the struggle against the deceitfulness of their own texts.
This new study of the nineteenth-century French realist novel focuses on the fundamental incompatibility between the narrative and the descriptive mod...
A study of the place and nature of the ideal of politeness in seventeenth and eighteenth-century writing in France, Britain and Russia. This ideal covered not just polite manners, but all the "civilized" norms of society and culture, as opposed to elements considered childish, irrational, savage or vulgar. Professor France shows how interpenetration and compromise between polite and rude, tame and wild, are central features of classical writings, arguing that polite society needed and desired its opposite.
A study of the place and nature of the ideal of politeness in seventeenth and eighteenth-century writing in France, Britain and Russia. This ideal cov...
