NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRENCH STUDIES最新文献

Abstract:

The nineteenth-century French fantastic can be read as a reaction against a form of determinism exemplified by the work of Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749–1827). The fantastic posits a way of perceiving the world based on an understanding of objects not bound by the rules that science and probability impose on them. It gives voice to a counter-Enlightenment conception of the world, one that allows for unpredictability, faith, emotion, the irrational, and enchantment. In short, the fantastic creates a place for the human in an increasingly deterministic, utilitarian world.

Abstract:

This article offers a comparative study of Huysmans's poetic paraphrase "L'Ouverture de Tannhæuser" (1885) and Mallarmé's sonnet "Hommage" (1886). The texts were commissioned by the editor of the Revue wagnérienne, Édouard Dujardin, following a concert of Wagnerian excerpts the three attended. However, despite that original connection, these two Wagnerian poems have never been analyzed side by side. This essay is the first to juxtapose them in order to uncover commonalities in their attitude toward Wagner and music, a subject in which neither author was formally trained. Ultimately, I argue that the poems as creative and critical texts helped define French Wagnerism as a movement split between its reverence and irreverence of Wagner. They did so by poking fun at the "God Richard Wagner" and his cult-like following, an iconoclastic gesture that paved the way for the questioning of poetic norms among the French avant-garde of the mid–1880s.

Abstract:

I argue that Clotilde can be seen as the main character of Le Docteur Pascal on account her conceiving experience and experiment in ways that challenge dogmatic approaches to scientific method; her approach reflects the experience of reading and interpreting the novel. What Zola identifies as the "point d'interrogation de Clotilde" leads readers to understand the novel as a roman à hypothèse that impels them to enter a process of interpretation of experience that is both modeled and questioned by Clotilde. By maintaining a place for mystery even while her mind is "nourri de science," she calls attention to the fact that Pascal seems to misalign science with its content, or "facts," rather than its method, of which Clotilde emerges as the embodiment, as she tests initial hypotheses against her lived experience in order to accept, reject, or modify them.

Abstract:

This article examines the 1890 trial of young Naturalist writer Lucien Descaves, in which he was charged with, and later acquitted for, "injures à l'armée" and "outrages aux bonnes mœurs" following the publication of his antimilitary novel Sous-Offs (1889). I argue that literary style dominates the trial, not least because one of its key figures was an Idealist novelist with a fervent hatred of Naturalism. The article situates the trial in the context of debates about the social function of literature in the Third Republic and, crucially, anxieties about the reading habits of the peuple. I show that the trial offers a privileged lens for understanding the pressure Naturalism was under at this point in the century, insofar as it brings together, and then stages in the form of debate, the many social and cultural flashpoints touched on by the novel and how they might be represented in fiction.

Abstract:

Sainte-Beuve's literary criticism deserves consideration as part of the tradition of French moralistes and this article concentrates on his treatment of La Rochefoucauld. Their relationship sheds light, first on Sainte-Beuve's coming of age as he rids himself of the hold of both Catholicism and Romanticism, second on his discussion of self-love which is the central theme of the Maximes, and finally on his adoption of a method of skepticism which sidesteps the moral certainties of Christian charity and of Enlightenment progress. (In French)

Abstract:

This article considers the timing of the Académie d'Amiens poetry contest on "L'Abolition de la traite des Nègres" (1819–20), the little-known predecessor to the Académie française prix de poésie on "L'Abolition de la traite des Noirs" (1823). The Amiens concours attempted to offer a timely commemoration of the slave trade's abolition. Close readings of the competition's archival records, including twelve submitted poems and two reports, suggest reasons why a winner was never chosen. The persistence of the clandestine slave trade and pro-slavery arguments blaming abolitionism for the recent events of the Haitian Revolution challenged the possibility and value of the proposed commemoration. The Amiens contest ultimately bears witness to a shift in contemporary perceptions of the slave trade's abolition during the Bourbon Restoration: from the celebration of an event to the realization that its history was far from over.

Abstract:

As the first French periodical directed by people of color, the Revue des Colonies (1834–42) was remarkable for its militant abolitionism, its attention to global Black writers and cultural figures, and its fostering of intellectual and political solidarities across the French colonial world and beyond. By attending to the networks of circulation that enabled the passage of emancipatory ideas across national and linguistic borders, this article argues for the significance of the Revue as a forebear of later iterations of Black internationalism.

Abstract:

This article highlights feminist thought on hospitality in order to stress the implicit cultural connection between the salon and the hostess in Armance. Furthermore, it argues that theories of hospitality can reopen the debate about impotence in the novel by raising questions of self-mastery and the power to act. Drawing on Derrida's contention that hospitality is a necessary condition for recognisable selfhood, the article suggests that Octave's dilemma of impotence is encapsulated by his fantasy, early in the novel, of owning a salon which no-one else would enter. Considering the potential unruliness of both phallus and hostess, it asks to what extent Armance shows us Stendhal reflecting on the illusory nature of masculine self-sufficiency. By suggesting that potency in the novel can be understood in terms of mastery over detail, moreover, the article connects Octave's preoccupation with his private salon to Stendhal's own concerns with achieving a succinct literary style.

Abstract:

This article analyzes the function of coal in a selection of novels by Jules Verne. Certain novels in the Voyages extraordinaires series depict successful, if utopian, coal-based electrical technologies as well as an efficiently run global travel and trade system powered by coal; other works in the series, however, engage contemporary nineteenth-century discourses about future coal scarcity. Still others deploy a lack of coal to create narrative tension before an alternative energy source—walrus oil, wood, geothermal energy—arrives as a temporary fix. These literary approaches to coal in Verne's narratives testify to both the possibilities and anxieties surrounding fuel in the late nineteenth century and show that if Verne is cognizant of debates about impending coal shortages, he ultimately reinforces the promises—and delusions—of a nascent fossil fuel economy.