Books in the French Studies of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries series

Les essais contenus dans ce volume poursuivent les réflexions entamées dans George Sand : Intertexualité et Polyphonie I. Là où le premier volume a mis en valeur la polysémie intertextuelle du roman sandien, les articles réunis dans ce volume soulignent la centralité du dialogue et du dialogisme, de l¿interdiscursivité, de la voix, de la musique et des arts visuels dans une écriture sandienne caractérisée par la pluralité. Si les connotations musicales de la polyphonie s¿avèrent particulièrement pertinentes pour une lecture de l¿¿uvre sandienne, le concept souligne aussi l¿importance de la voix, de l¿échange et du dialogue. En effet, le dialogue se révèle être un élément-clé : pour Sand, l¿écriture est toujours une réécriture impliquant un engagement avec l¿autre ; l¿oralité n¿est pas uniquement une caractéristique de ses romans champêtres, qui participent à la tradition du conte oral, mais elle sous-tend la totalité d¿une ¿uvre où la question ¿qui parle ?¿ ne peut jamais être négligée ; et le concept de l¿échange n¿est pas limité au domaine de la politique, mais se manifeste aussi dans l¿¿uvre fictive où le théâtre, la musique et les arts visuels occupent une position prééminente. Dans les dix-neuf articles sélectionnés ici ¿ dont six en anglais ¿ des spécialistes internationaux de George Sand analysent et répondent à ces questions en prenant en compte la diversité de l¿¿uvre sandienne (romans, autobiographie, théâtre et correspondance).

L¿¿uvre littéraire de George Sand entretient un dialogue multiple, manifeste et soutenu avec d¿autres auteurs et d¿autres textes. Ce dialogue, engagé surtout avec des prédécesseurs et des contemporains tels que Rousseau, Shakespeare, Goethe, Mme de Genlis, Balzac et Flaubert, n¿est pas uniquement textuel ; il est aussi idéologique. Comme le soulignent les études réunies dans ce volume, la pratique sandienne d¿une intertextualité littéraire suggère une conception démocratique du champ littéraire, dans laquelle les hiérarchies verticales sont abolies, et des concepts tels que l¿imitation et l¿influence sont marginalisés dans une pratique de l¿écriture qui intègre une pluralité de voix et dans laquelle les ouvrages de ses prédécesseurs et de ses contemporains sont remémorés, absorbés, cités, contestés, retravaillés, transformés ou parodiés. Intégrer les voix d¿autrui dans le tissu du roman émerge ainsi comme un principe fondamental de l¿écriture sandienne.

The French Revolution represents a pivotal moment within the history of personhood in France, where gender and national differences provided the foundations of society. This book considers Germaine de Stael's and Claire de Duras's depictions of men's and women's shared and diverging lived experiences to offer a new perspective on the period.

This volume investigates the darker aspects of the work of Diderot, writer, art critic, philosopher and encyclopediste, by focusing on the uneasy schism that emerges in his work between positive images of the Enlightenment and a residual, shadowy undercurrent of disorder, transgression and clandestine intellectual and social practices.

This book analyses Zola's fiction from a psychoanalytical standpoint, focusing in particular on the author's family secret. The study scans for sub-textual issues of sexual insecurity and anxiety, which are analysed through the psychoanalytical theories of Abraham, Toroks, Freud and Lacan.

Polemical stupidity ¿ a critical concept drawn from Bakhtin ¿ denotes the strategic refusal to understand. It appears most familiarly in the character of the Fool (like Candide), who genuinely does not understand the world, thus unmasking its incoherence. But in literature it can cover too the stance of the narrator or author (who pretends to misunderstand). It also functions at the levels of genre and style, embracing parody and rewriting in general. It is a dialogic or open form of critical engagement. Though it can be found throughout Western literature, polemical stupidity is most richly characteristic of the writing of the French Enlightenment. This book suggests why, and traces its rise and fall as a discursive practice in the century from Pascal to Rousseau. Early chapters consider the concept itself, its emergence in Pascal¿s Lettres provinciales, worldliness and unworldliness, and the new writing of 1660-1700 (critical history to fairy tales). The main part of the book, on the age of Enlightenment itself, contains successive chapters on Regency theatre, Montesquieüs Lettres persanes, Marivaux, Voltaire, Diderot, and finally Rousseau who will not play.

One of the most remarkable features of Diderot¿s work is the refusal of closure in a large number of his texts which appears to leave philosophical, aesthetic or even narrative issues unresolved, and consequently invites a more active participation from the reader than more conventional works. Since it is in the nature of critical discourse to wish to answer questions, this aspect of the works has remained relatively unexplored, with some critics even choosing to ignore the questions asked by the endings in their efforts to give a specific and unambiguous meaning to texts that, in reality, seek to blur their meaning or even to avoid having one. This study addresses the problems posed by Diderot¿s endings directly, seeking through them to illuminate readings of the works as a whole. Hence it looks not just at the endings, but at what the endings can tell us about the complete texts, and how they are characteristic (or not) of the rest of the works.

The military man has long been one of literature's archetypal figures. Using a comparative framework, this book traces the transformation of the military man in eighteenth-century British and French literature as this figure moved from noble warrior to nationalised professional in response to changes within the military structure, the role of empire and the impact of an expanding middle class. The author examines the way in which the masculinity of the military man was reimagined at a time when older models of military service persisted alongside emerging models of patriotic nationalism, inspired by bourgeois morality, the cult of sensibility and a new understanding of the role of violence in both public and private domains. Through a corpus of canonical and lesser-known literature, the book explores the military man's relationship to the state and to his fellow citizens, even in the domestic setting. With the role of the nobleman in decline, the military man, not a civilian and no longer associated with the 'aristocrat', became a separate class of man.

Though famed for his vivid depictions of nineteenth-century Paris, Honoré de Balzac devoted as much of his creative energy to the provinces. This book examines the way in which he combined a theatrical tradition of anti-provincial satire with a more open celebration of French provincial life in the post-Revolutionary period. Ranging widely over texts from both within and outside La Comédie humaine, the author analyses Balzac¿s determination to invest the Rousseauist nostalgia for country over city with an updated rationale. A champion of central authority and absolutist government, Balzac is seen here in an unfamiliar role as the guardian of regional culture, a novelist who sought to record the diversity of France¿s small towns and villages before they were lost to industrialization and the railway age. Equally, the study reveals new aspects of his political engagement with questions impacting upon the provinces during the Restoration and July Monarchy, from broad issues such as agriculture and landownership, to more isolated grievances such as the implications of the 1827 Forest Code. The whole offers a fresh insight into Balzac¿s thought and literary aesthetic, and an assessment of his hitherto-neglected role in supporting the emergence of the regionalist novel, or roman du terroir, in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Drawing from a range of critical perspectives, in particular postcolonial, this book examines the relationship between perceptions of Russia and of Eastern Europe and the making of a ¿Western¿ identity. It explores the ways in which the perception of certain characteristics of Russia and Eastern Europe, whether real or attributed, was shaped by (and used for) the construction of a liberal narrative of the West, which eventually became dominant. The focus of this inquiry is French culture, from the beginning of the debate about Russia among the philosophes (c.1740) to the consolidation of a professional field of Slavic studies (c.1880). A wide range of writing ¿ literature, travel accounts, histories, political tracts, scientific journals, and parliamentary debates ¿ is examined through the work of major authors (from Montesquieu, Diderot and Rousseau to Tocqueville, de Maistre and Guizot, from Mme. de Staël, Hugo and Balzac to Dumas, Michelet and Comte), as well as that of many less well known figures. The book also explores possible continuities between those first academic accounts of Russia and Eastern Europe and present-day scholarship in Europe and the USA, to show that the liberal ideological accounts constructed in the nineteenth century still to a great extent inform contemporary academic studies.

This volume contains papers from the first major conference on the post-1789 Paris Fine Art Salon (University of Exeter, September 2013), originating from research project Painting for the Salon? The French State, Artists and Academy, 1830-1852. It examines the national and international artistic, political and cultural dimensions of the Salon.

The collector was one of the archetypal figures of the nineteenth-century French cultural imagination. During the July Monarchy (1830-48) a new culture of collecting emerged, which continued to develop over the course of the century and which attracted the attention of a wide range of social commentators and writers. From the sketch-writing of the 1830s to the late nineteenth-century decadent fictions of Jean Lorrain, from Balzac's Cousin Pons to Proust's Charles Swann, the literature of the period abounds in examples of men (and occasionally women) afflicted with what the Larousse Grand Dictionnaire called in 1869 'la collectionnomanie'. This book examines these representations of the collector. It shows that woven into them are fundamental anxieties generated by the experience of modernity, involving the nature of identity and selfhood, the relentless accumulation of commodities in a capitalist system of production and the (in)ability of language to translate experience accurately.