Whereas the centrality of femininity to nineteenth-century French fiction has been the focus of widespread critical attention, masculinity has, until recently, received little sustained treatment in either the literary or socio-historical domains. In this book, Nigel Harkness uses the fiction of George Sand (1804-1876), the pre-eminent woman writer of the period, to explore questions of masculinity as they pertain to the nineteenth-century French novel, and to map out new approaches to the study of literary masculinity. Drawing on contemporary theories of gender and narrative, Harkness...

"Theophile Gautier a envoye avec un feuilleton plus de trois mille personnes dans latelier de M. Ingres," wrote Champfleury in 1848. For artists, critics and readers alike, Gautier was the essential figure in French art journalism in the mid-nineteenth century. During the short-lived but pivotal period of the Second Republic, when the new administration was committed to reforming all the institutions of the fine arts, Gautier deployed the full resources of his brilliant, flexible and authoritative writing to support and direct these developments in ways compatible with his comitment to an...

The turn of the twentieth century was a decisive moment in the institutionalisation of Russia's literary scholarship. This is the first book in the English language to provide an in-depth analysis of the emergence of Russia's literary academia in the pre-Revolutionary era. In particular, Byford examines the rhetoric of self-representation of major academic establishments devoted to literary study, the canonisation of exemplary literary historians and philologists (Buslaev, Grot, Veselovskii, Potebnia, Ovsianiko-Kulikovskii), and attempts by Russian literary academics of this era to define...

This study demonstrates the previously unrecognised significance of discourses of saintliness for constructions of gender and national identity in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Spanish culture. Kathy Bacon's innovative approach to sainthood leads to fresh readings of texts by Spain's three principal realist novelists: La familia de Leon Roch and Nazarin (Benito Perez Galdos, 1878 and 1895), La Regenta (Leopoldo Alas, 1884-85), and Dulce dueno (Emilia Pardo Bazan, 1911). The author challenges the conventional distinction between anti-clerical and spiritual novels by these...

Critical interest in biography and autobiography has never been higher. However, while life-writing flourishes in the UK, in Italy it is a less prominent genre. The twelve essays collected here are written against this backdrop, and address issues in biographical and autobiographical writing in Italy from the later nineteenth century to the present, with a particular emphasis on the interplay between individual lives and life-writing and the wider social and political history of Italy. The majority of essays focus on well-known writers (D'Annunzio, Svevo, Bontempelli, Montale, Levi, Calvino,...

Contemporary fantastic fiction, particularly that written by women, often challenges traditional literary practice. At the same time the predominantly male-authored canon of fantastic literature offers a problematic range of gender stereotypes for female authors to 're-write'. Fantastic tropes, of space in particular, enable three important contemporary Italian female writers (Paola Capriolo, b. 1962; Francesca Duranti, b. 1935 and Rossana Ombres, b. 1931) to encounter and counter anxieties about writing from the female subject position. All three writers begin by exploring the hermetic,...

Since 1975, French literary writing has been marked by an autobiographical turn which has seen authors increasingly often tap into the vein of what the French term ecriture de soi. This coincides, paradoxically, with the 'death of autobiography', as these authors self-consciously distance themselves and their writings from conventional autobiography, founding a 'nouvelle autobiographie' where the very possibility of autobiographical expression is questioned. In the first book-length study in English to address this phenomenon, Claire Boyle sheds a new light on this hostility toward...

'Interdisciplinarity' has dynamized the Modern Humanities like no other recent academic trend. Yet, this presents serious challenges involving both translation and affect: how can we transmit facts and interpretations between disciplines, between different artistic media, between cultures, between the private and the public sphere? Some of the most distinctive voices in criticism from literature, music, the visual arts, psychoanalysis and philosophy, amongst others, show here their commitment to comparative thinking.

The poetic is an abiding yet elusive qualification within the discursive system of twentieth-century French literature. No longer amenable to formal assignment, its recurrences delimit a shifting, multi-layered practice of artistic and intellectual (self-) invention. This study attempts to outline certain durable properties of that practice by confronting it with the complex theoretical and spatial metaphor of utopia. Drawing, in particular, upon the oeuvres of Victor Segalen (1878-1919), Rene Daumal (1908-44) and Yves Bonnefoy (b. 1923), it traces poetic work - work done in support of poetic...

Gabriela Mistral, Cecilia Meireles, and Rosario Castellanos were three of the most important Latin American women writers of the 20th century. Prolific, contentious, and widely read and discussed from Spanish America to Brazil, they pushed the boundaries of what it meant to be women poets from the 1920s to the 1970s. Karen Pena explores how these three writers used poetry to oppose patriarchal discourse on topics ranging from marginalized peoples to issues on gender and sexuality. Poetry was a means for them to redefine their own feminized space, however difficult or odd it could turn out to...