Offering a radical approach to family and textuality in the field of cultural and literary studies, the author argues that the new print culture - from domestic manuals to public health reports and, most notably, prose fiction - promoted new norms of behaviour and selfhood not through narratives of idealized family life, but instead by means of a rhetoric of danger and pathology. Through analyses of novels by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Sue, Balzac, Sand, Zola and Gide, the author demonstrates that the peculiar force of the French novel resided in its power to reach wide, newly literate...