A collection of essays that explores the relationship between art, literature and the stage in France and Belgium in the period 1830-1910. It provides insights into research within this interdisciplinary field.
This book explores the representation of masculinity as a literary concept in Decadent literature to demonstrate how the movement both appropriated and subverted patriarchal assumptions surrounding reading and writing. The book opens up fresh ground for the appraisal and analysis of gender in French studies and beyond.
This selection of essays by Alan Raitt provides a series of cross-readings of nineteenth-century French literary authors and texts, revolving around Flaubert and Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, situating them and their principal works in relation to each other as well as to Balzac, Nerval, Baudelaire, Huysmans and Mallarme.
A belief in progress tells us something about the way a society views itself. Progress speaks of confidence, optimism and dynamism. It assures us of pattern and structure. In the nineteenth century, as the Christian model of development is increasingly challenged and as geological findings expand understanding of history, so progress emerges from the Enlightenment as an ever more acute subject for debate. This book addresses the theme of progress and patterns of progression in the work of Flaubert. Through close textual analysis of his works and particular scrutiny of his narrative structures, this book argues that Flaubert's position in the mid-nineteenth century situates his work at an intriguing historical crossroads, between Romantic faith in progress and assertions of Decadent decline. Flaubert's response to progress is rich and complicated, offering stimulating views of momentum and perfectibility. In this study, actual progression is seen as a metaphor for understanding Flaubert's attitude to historical progress. Each chapter focuses on a particular vehicle or pattern of movement, analysing journeys undertaken by characters in Flaubert's texts as models of disrupted, non-linear progression which provide a counter-current to contemporary ideologies of progress. A closing chapter examines connections between Flaubert and Huysmans, investigating the response to progress in later nineteenth-century literature.
L'auteur montre comment, sous la plume de Jean Lorrain, de Marie Corelli, de Henry Rider-Haggard ou de Renee Vivien, des silhouettes mythologiques, bibliques et historiques invitent a nuancer l'omnipresence de la femme fatale dans le second dix-neuvieme siecle et a interroger la notion meme de fatalite.
The period from the 1850s to the 1890s in Paris marked a key turning point for poets and composers, as they grappled with the new ways in which poetry and music could intersect. Under the particular conditions of the time and place, both art forms underwent significant developments which challenged the status of each form. In both creative and critical work from this era, poets and composers offered tantalising but problematic insights into 'musical' poetry and 'poetic' music. The central issue examined in this book is that of what happens to poetry when it encounters music, especially as song. The author places Baudelaire's famous sonnet 'La Mort des amants' at the heart of the analysis, tracing its transposition into song by a succession of both amateur and professional composers, examining works by Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Serpette, Rollinat, Debussy and Charpentier, as well as an extraordinary parodic song version by Valade and Verlaine. A companion website offers recordings of each of the songs analysed in this book.
This reassessment of Chateaubriand's literary and political achievements, offered as an intellectual biography of the writer, is centred on the concept of change and Chateaubriand's emotional suspicion of change, arising both from mistrust of his own inconstancy and from the personal and collective suffering of the French Revolution. His aversion to change spread beyond politics to religion and literature, but conflicted with his intellectual fascination with historic change in all three areas. The paradox of his fluctuating attitude to change allows a challenge to traditional views of Chateaubriand's status. Was he truly a committed founder of French Romanticism? Was he an unswerving right-wing legitimist? Was he an insincere and 'aesthetic' Christian? The book provides new answers to these questions, presenting a very different Chateaubriand both through an analysis of his preference for the epic literature of Greece and Rome and its Christian heritage in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and by its account of his subtle pleading for constitutional monarchy. Malcolm Scott argues that the failure of Chateaubriand's political aspirations led him, again paradoxically, to the espousal of change and to a final dramatic reversal of his literary and religious standpoint, expressed in the writings of the last few years of his life.
Au seuil de la modernite: Proust, Literature and the Arts
Includes selected papers drawn from the conference held in his memory at the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, University of London, in May 2008, inspired by his work in nineteenth- and twentieth-century French literature.
Loiterature, perhaps Ross Chambers's most famous book, prescribes slow and careful reading practices but also quick-witted analysis. This collection draws together tributes, essays and critical responses to his wide-ranging work from Romanticism to the present, all demonstrating, through practice, the generative value of "loitering".
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