Texts about paintings, painters and sculptors are obvious test cases for issues of representation. A significant corpus of artist stories is scattered through HonorE de Balzac's ComEdie humaine which, from Marx to LukAcs to Roland Barthes's enormously influential S/Z (1970), has been a key literary work for critical debates around French realism. In a series of close readings, Diana Knight explores Barthes's 'model of painting' -- the metaphorical code of painting and sculpture that underpins realist discourse -- in the context of Balzac's fictional representations of the relation between...

This major new study takes issue both with the traditional critical view that Flaubert's central characters are weak and with the approach adopted by a number of contemporary critics who claim that character is deliberately undermined in the interests of non-representational writing. Rather, Dr Knight explores the relationship between the contents of Flaubert's stories and his practice as a writer, thereby reinstating the functional value of character in his work. She shows that essential aspects of Flaubert's aesthetic - the opaqueness of language, stupidity, fascination and reverie as the...

Barthes and Utopia explores the central role of utopias throughout the work of Roland Barthes, from demystification to structuralism, from textuality and sexual hedonism to his final preoccupation with love and mourning. Drawing on an unusually wide range of texts, Knight goes to the heart of Barthes's imaginative processes, his affective world, and his idiosyncratic value system. But, because utopia is the meeting point of Barthes's lifelong concern with the relationship between history, language, and sexuality, her study also inserts Barthes's work into larger political and theoretical...

"Women, Genre and Circumstance" brings together a series of challenging essays which explore the complex intersections of feminism, narrative and genre. Drawing on a wide range of 19th and 20th century texts novels, short stories and films they interrogate the relationship between womens situation and writing practice, and representations of history, memory, love, old age; they pursue questions of narrative form and its meanings, particularly the distinctive features of the short story. The politics of feminist criticism and careful attention to the operations of narrative combine in a...