Introduction to Nineteenth-Century French Literature

Introduction to Nineteenth-Century French Literature PDF Author: Tim Farrant
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472537645
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Get Book Here

Book Description
Everyone knows something of nineteenth-century France - or do they? "Les Miserables", "The Lady of the Camelias" and "The Three Musketeers", "Balzac" and "Jules Verne" live in the popular consciousness as enduring human documents and cultural icons. Yet, the French nineteenth century was even more dynamic than the stereotype suggests. This exciting new introduction takes the literature of the period both as a window on past and present mindsets and as an object of fascination in its own right. Beginning with history, the century's biggest problem and potential, it looks at narrative responses to historical, political and social experience, before devoting central chapters to poetry, drama and novels - all genres the century radically reinvented. It then explores numerous modernities, ways nineteenth-century writing and mentalities look forward to our own, before turning to marginalities - subjects and voices the canon traditionally forgot. No genre was left unchanged by the nineteenth century. This book will help to discover them anew.

Introduction to Nineteenth-Century French Literature

Introduction to Nineteenth-Century French Literature PDF Author: Tim Farrant
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472537645
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Get Book Here

Book Description
Everyone knows something of nineteenth-century France - or do they? "Les Miserables", "The Lady of the Camelias" and "The Three Musketeers", "Balzac" and "Jules Verne" live in the popular consciousness as enduring human documents and cultural icons. Yet, the French nineteenth century was even more dynamic than the stereotype suggests. This exciting new introduction takes the literature of the period both as a window on past and present mindsets and as an object of fascination in its own right. Beginning with history, the century's biggest problem and potential, it looks at narrative responses to historical, political and social experience, before devoting central chapters to poetry, drama and novels - all genres the century radically reinvented. It then explores numerous modernities, ways nineteenth-century writing and mentalities look forward to our own, before turning to marginalities - subjects and voices the canon traditionally forgot. No genre was left unchanged by the nineteenth century. This book will help to discover them anew.

Nana

Nana PDF Author: Emile Zola
Publisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 0486114805
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 354

Get Book Here

Book Description
French realism's immortal siren crawled from the gutter to the heights of society, devouring men and squandering fortunes along the way. Zola's 1880s classic is among the first modern novels.

Women's Writing in Nineteenth-Century France

Women's Writing in Nineteenth-Century France PDF Author: Alison Finch
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521631860
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 342

Get Book Here

Book Description
This is the most complete critical survey to date of women's literature in nineteenth-century France. Alison Finch's wide-ranging analysis of some 60 writers reflects the rich diversity of a century that begins with Mme de Staël's cosmopolitanism and ends with Rachilde's perverse eroticism. Finch's study brings out the contribution not only of major figures like George Sand but also of many other talented and important writers who have been unjustly rejected, including Flora Tristan, Claire de Duras and Delphine de Girardin. Her account opens new perspectives on the interchange between male and female authors and on women's literary traditions during the period. She discusses popular and serious writing: fiction, verse, drama, memoirs, journalism, feminist polemic, historiography, travelogues, children's tales, religious and political thought - often brave, innovative texts linked to women's social and legal status in an oppressive society. Extensive reference features include bibliographical guides to texts and writers.

The Pen and the Brush

The Pen and the Brush PDF Author: Anka Muhlstein
Publisher: Other Press, LLC
ISBN: 1590518055
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Get Book Here

Book Description
A scintillating glimpse into the lives of acclaimed writers and artists and their inspiring, often surprising convergences, from the author of Monsieur Proust's Library With the wit and penetration well known to readers of Anka Muhlstein’s previous books, The Pen and the Brush revisits the delights of the French novel. This time she focuses on late 19th- and 20th-century writers--Balzac, Zola, Proust, Huysmans, and Maupassant--through the lens of their passionate involvement with the fine arts. She delves into the crucial role that painters play as characters in their novels, which she pairs with an exploration of the profound influence that painting exercised on the novelists' techniques, offering an intimate view of the intertwined worlds of painters and writers at the time. Muhlstein's deftly chosen vignettes bring to life a portrait of the nineteenth century's tight-knit artistic community, where Cézanne and Zola befriended each other as boys and Balzac yearned for the approval of Delacroix. She leads the reader on a journey of spontaneous discovery as she explores how a great painting can open a mind and spark creative fire.

Inventing the Israelite

Inventing the Israelite PDF Author: Maurice Samuels
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804773424
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 336

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this book, Maurice Samuels brings to light little known works of literature produced from 1830 to 1870 by the first generation of Jews born as French citizens. These writers, Samuels asserts, used fiction as a laboratory to experiment with new forms of Jewish identity relevant to the modern world. In their stories and novels, they responded to the stereotypical depictions of Jews in French culture while creatively adapting the forms and genres of the French literary tradition. They also offered innovative solutions to the central dilemmas of Jewish modernity in the French context—including how to reconcile their identities as Jews with the universalizing demands of the French revolutionary tradition. While their solutions ranged from complete assimilation to a modern brand of orthodoxy, these writers collectively illustrate the creativity of a community in the face of unprecedented upheaval.

French Romantic Travel Writing

French Romantic Travel Writing PDF Author: Christopher W. Thompson
Publisher: Oxford University Press (UK)
ISBN: 0199233543
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 466

Get Book Here

Book Description
A pioneering overview of the travel books produced by fourteen French Romantic writers - including Chateaubriand, Staël, Stendhal, Hugo, Nerval, Sand, Mérimée, Dumas, and Tristan - whose journeys ranged from Peru to Russia and from North America to North Africa and the Near East.

Models of Collaboration in Nineteenth-century French Literature

Models of Collaboration in Nineteenth-century French Literature PDF Author: Seth Adam Whidden
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754666431
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Get Book Here

Book Description
Contributing to the current lively discussion of collaboration in French letters, this collection of essays raises fundamental questions about the limits and definition of authorship in the context of the nineteenth century's explosion of collaborative ventures. The volume will interest scholars of nineteenth-century French literature, and more generally, any scholar interested in what's at stake in redefining the role of the French author.

Before Trans

Before Trans PDF Author: Rachel Mesch
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 150361235X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 421

Get Book Here

Book Description
“This thoughtful academic treatise . . . explores the lives of three famous gender nonconformists in fin-de-siècle Paris.” —Publishers Weekly Before the term “transgender” existed, there were those who experienced their gender in complex ways. Before Trans examines the lives and writings of Jane Dieulafoy (1850–1916), Rachilde (1860–1953), and Marc de Montifaud (1845–1912), three French writers whose gender expression did not conform to nineteenth-century notions of femininity. Dieulafoy fought alongside her husband in the Franco-Prussian War; later she wrote novels about girls becoming boys and enjoyed being photographed in her signature men's suits. Rachilde became famous in the 1880s for her controversial gender-bending novel Monsieur Vénus, published around the same time that she started using a calling card that read “Rachilde, Man of Letters.” Montifaud turned to erotic writings, for which she was repeatedly charged with "offense to public decency"; she wore tailored men's suits and a short haircut and went by masculine pronouns among certain friends. Dieulafoy, Rachilde, and Montifaud established themselves as fixtures in the literary world of fin-de-siècle Paris at the same time as French writers, scientists, and doctors were becoming fascinated with sexuality and sexual difference. Even so, the concept of gender identity as separate from sexual identity did not yet exist. Before Trans explores these three figures' efforts to articulate a sense of selfhood that did not align with the conventional gender roles of their day. Their personal stories provide vital historical context for our own efforts to understand the nature of gender identity. “A fresh and original take on trans history.” —Jack Halberstam, author of The Queer Art of Failure

Paris and the Nineteenth Century

Paris and the Nineteenth Century PDF Author: Christopher Prendergast
Publisher: Blackwell Publishing
ISBN: 9780631196945
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 283

Get Book Here

Book Description
Paris and the Nineteenth Century moves between social and cultural history, literature, painting and photography. At its heart lies a series of readings of major nineteenth century texts - by Balzac, Hugo, Baudelaire, Michelet, Flaubert, Zola, Valles, Laforgue and others. In each of these texts the city becomes a matter for and problem of representation. Prendergast concludes by sketching some perspectives which join the pre-modern Paris of the nineteenth century to the postmodern city of the late twentieth century.

Victims of the Book

Victims of the Book PDF Author: Francois Proulx
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487532180
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 403

Get Book Here

Book Description
Victims of the Book uncovers a long-neglected but once widespread subgenre: the fin-de-siècle novel of formation in France. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, social commentators insistently characterized excessive reading as an emasculating illness that afflicted French youth. Novels about and geared toward adolescent male readers were imbued with a deep worry over young Frenchmen’s masculinity, as evidenced by titles like Crise de jeunesse (Youth in Crisis, 1897), La Crise virile (Crisis of Virility, 1898), La Vie stérile (A Sterile Life, 1892), and La Mortelle Impuissance (Deadly Impotence, 1903). In this book, François Proulx examines a wide panorama of these novels, as well as polemical essays, pedagogical articles, and medical treatises on the perceived threats posed by young Frenchmen’s reading habits. Fin-de-siècle writers responded to this pathologization of reading with a profusion of novels addressed to young male readers, paradoxically proposing their own novels as potential cures. In the early twentieth century, this corpus was critically revisited by a new generation of writers. Victims of the Book shows how André Gide and Marcel Proust in particular reworked the fin-de-siècle paradox to subvert cultural norms about literature and masculinity, proposing instead a queer pact between writer and reader.