Nana


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.




Introduction to Nineteenth-Century French Literature


Book Description

Takes the literature of the period both as a window on various mindsets and as an object of fascination in its own right. Beginning with history, the century's biggest problem and potential, this title looks at narrative responses to historical, political and social experience, before devoting central chapters to poetry, drama and novels.




Popular French Romanticism


Book Description

Focusing on the Paris book world of this period, Allen reveals how the rise of a new popular literature—jolly chansonniers, the roman-feuilletons or serial novels, melodramas, gothic and sentimental novels, dramatic nationalistic histories—by such authors as Dumas, Sand, Lamennais, Ancelot, Desnoyer, and de Kock coincided with remarkable developments in the production, distribution, and consumption of books. Allen's research ranges from a survey of the then-popular romantic titles and authors and the trade catalogs of booksellers and lending libraries, to the police records of their activities, diaries and journals of working people, and military conscript records and ministerial literacy statistics. The result is a remarkable picture of the exchange between elite and popular culture, the interaction between ideas and their material reality, and the relationship between the literature and the history of France in the romantic period.




Women's Writing in Nineteenth-Century France


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


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


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.




Robert Louis Stevenson and Nineteenth Century French Literature


Book Description

A comparative literary history that explores Robert Louis Stevenson and French literature This study looks at French literature from Stevenson's perspective and at Stevenson from a French perspective. Shedding light on how Stevenson's use of French contributes to his distinct style, and how and why the earliest French critics translated, disseminated and interpreted his books, it does so in context of the debates surrounding the development of the novel at the fin de siècle. Readers learn how the artistic debates taking place in France contributed to the evolution of Stevenson's art, but also how Stevenson became a model of literary innovation for French authors and critics who were seeking to renew the French novel. Katherine Ashley teaches French, English and Translation at Acadia University (Nova Scotia, Canada).




The Novel Map


Book Description

Focusing on Stendhal, Gérard de Nerval, George Sand, Émile Zola, and Marcel Proust, The Novel Map: Mapping the Self in Nineteenth-Century French Fiction explores the ways that these writers represent and negotiate the relationship between the self and the world as a function of space in a novel turned map. With the rise of the novel and of autobiography, the literary and cultural contexts of nineteenth-century France reconfigured both the ways literature could represent subjects and the ways subjects related to space. In the first-person works of these authors, maps situate the narrator within the imaginary space of the novel. Yet the time inherent in the text’s narrative unsettles the spatial self drawn by the maps and so creates a novel self, one which is both new and literary. The novel self transcends the rigid confines of a map. In this significant study, Patrick M. Bray charts a new direction in critical theory.




French Romantic Travel Writing


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


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.