D. Evans, K. Griffiths (dir.), Pleasure and Pain in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Culture

EVANS, David et Kate GRIFFITH (dir.), Pleasure and Pain in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Culture, Amsterdam / New York, Rodopi coll. "Faux Titre" n°324, 2008, 286 p.

• ISBN 978-90-420-2502-8

RÉSUMÉ

From Sade at one end of the nineteenth century to Freud at the other, via many French novelists and poets, pleasure and pain become ever more closely entwined. Whereas the inseparability of these themes has hitherto been studied from isolated perspectives, such as psychoanalysis, sadism and sado-masochism, melancholy, or post-structuralist textual jouissance, the originality of this collaborative volume lies in its exploration of how pleasure and pain function across a broader range of contexts. The essays collected here demonstrate how the complex relationship between pleasure and pain plays a vital role in structuring nineteenth-century thinking in prose fiction (Balzac, Flaubert, Musset, Maupassant, Zola), verse and the memoir as well as socio-cultural studies, medical discourses, aesthetic theory and the visual arts. Featuring an international selection of contributors representing the full range of approaches to scholarship in nineteenth-century French studies – historical, literary, cultural, art historical, philosophical, and sociopolitical – the volume attests to the vitality, coherence and interdisciplinarity of nineteenth-century French studies and will be of interest to a wide cross-section of scholars and students of French literature, society and culture.

TABLE DES MATIÈRES

List of Illustrations
David EVANS and Kate GRIFFITHS: Introduction
Part I: The Novel
Henri MITTERAND : Jouir / souffrir: le sensible et la fiction
Michael TILBY: Balzac's Convivial Narrations: Intoxication and its Discourse in ‘La Comédie humaine'
Francesco MANZINI: The Zero-Sum Game of Providential Pain: Balzac's L'Envers de l'histoire contemporaine
Part II: Crime and Punishment
Anne-Emmanuelle DEMARTINI : L'Affaire Lacenaire ou les jouissances de l'exhibitionnisme criminel au temps du romantisme
Loïc GUYON : Le sex-appeal de la Veuve: guillotine et fantasmes romantiques
Natalia LECLERC : Le ‘bonheur dans le crime': le plaisir de perdre et de se perdre chez Barbey d'Aurevilly
Part III: Écritures féminines
Anna NORRIS : Marie Cappelle Lafarge ou l'écriture de la douleur
Sara JAMES: Malvina Blanchecotte and ‘la douleur chantée': the Creation of a Female Poetic Self
Rachel MESCH: Sexual Healing: Power and Pleasure in Fin-de-siècle Women's Writing
Part IV: Defining Sexual Experience
Gretchen SCHULTZ : La Rage du plaisir et la rage de la douleur: Lesbian Pleasure and Suffering in Fin-de-siècle French Literature and Sexology
Alison MOORE: Pathologizing Female Sexual Frigidity in Fin-de-siècle France, or How Absence Was Made into a Thing
Elizabeth STEPHENS: Redefining Sexual Excess as a Medical Disorder: Fin-de-siècle Representations of Hysteria and Spermatorrhoea
Part V: Aesthetics, Beauty and the Visual Arts
Rae Beth GORDON: What is Ugly? Taine, Allen, Moreau
Carol RIFELJ : ‘Il faut souffrir pour être belle': Pain and Beauty in Prose Fiction
Claire MORAN: Creative Crucifixions: The Artist as Christ in Nineteenth-Century France and Belgium
Notes on Contributors
Index

BIOGRAPHIE

David Evans is Lecturer in French at the University of St Andrews. His publications include Rhythm, Illusion and the Poetic Idea: Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé (Rodopi, 2004) and articles on nineteenth and twentieth-century French poetry, in particular Théodore de Banville and Michel Houellebecq.
Kate Griffiths is Lecturer in French at Swansea University. She has published widely on the questions of adaptation, citation and borrowing in nineteenth-century contexts and recently completed an AHRC-supported monograph: Emile Zola: Authorship and Adaptation.