Nineteenth-Century French Studies provides scholars and students with the opportunity to examine new trends, review promising research findings, and become better acquainted with professional developments in the field. Scholarly articles on all aspects of nineteenth-century French literature and criticism are invited. Published articles are peer-reviewed to insure scholarly integrity. The journal has an extensive book review section covering a variety of disciplines.
Volume 32, Number 3-4, Spring-Summer 2004
CONTENTS:
Note:
Ward, Patricia A., 1940- :
Remembering Lois Boe Hyslop
Articles :
Rouillard, Linda Marie :
The Black Galatea: Claire de Duras's Ourika
Abstract: This article considers the ways in which Claire de Duras (1777-1828) rewrites the Pygmalion story in her novella Ourika, privileging now the feminine, African voice of she who is created. In this fictional account of an historical person, de Duras uses an ovidian grid to explore internalized racism as demonstrated by the person of Ourika, a Senegalese child saved from slavery and raised in a French aristocratic family. Ourika's love for her benefactress's grandson, her "passion criminelle," leads to the accusation of "incest," which serves as a mask for miscegenation. The latter is considered against the backdrop of the Code Noir and race relations in colonial France. This intertextual analysis traces Ourika's de-animation: contrary to Pygmalion's statue who evolves from stone to flesh, Ourika seeks refuge among stone ruins. (LMR)
Acquisto, Joseph:
Uprooting the Lyric: Baudelaire in Wagner's Forests
Abstract: This article examines the intertextual relationship between Richard Wagner and Charles Baudelaire, arguing that latter's reworking of Wagner has important implications for the status of lyric poetry reinscribed within an urban context. A network of intertexts, including Wagner's "Lettre sur la musique" and Baudelaire's poems "Correspondances," "Obsession," and "Le Cygne," will suggest that Baudelaire transformed his consideration of music into a prolonged meditation on memory. Baudelaire's essay "Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris" rewrites the nature of esthetic experience in the 1860 s as it sketches the possibility, not of the elimination of the lyric from modern life, but rather of a new role for a lyric poetry of memory. (JA)
Rogers, Nathalie Buchet, 1963- :
La Fanfarlo: la prostituée rend au poète la monnaie de sa pièce
Abstract: La Fanfarlo purports to reveal a novelistic truth that exposes the romantic lies of the failed poet Samuel Cramer. However, in his only attempt at novelistic fiction, Baudelaire is confronted with his own romantic lies and is caught up in the threads of the realist plot meant to ensnare his character. Narrator, author and reader are caught up in the ironic play of desire and seduction. Bodies, gold and texts are exchanged in a dangerous web that exposes an unbearable truth: the prostitute has the final word, and the twin metaphors of poetic creation as prostitution and as counterfeit money that subtend Baudelaire's entire poetic enterprise threaten to unravel. (In French) (NBR)
Décarie, David :
Pariade: poésie et prose chez Rimbaud
Abstract: This article studies the way in which Rimbaud's work is torn between important antinomies: fiction and reality, poetry and prose. In Rimbaud's first prose and poetry, antinomies are hybridized: reality and fiction meet, and poetry - well before Rimbaud gives up versification - becomes impregnated by prose. Une Saison en enfer establishes a kind of equilibrium: fighting a relentless war, reality and fiction, poetry and prose undergo «fission», a word which renders well the release of a large amount of energy generated by the division and opposition of antinomies. The word also stresses the dynamic that opposes Une Saison and Illuminations which will succeed in establishing a fusion of antinomies. (in French) (DD)
Matthey, Cécile :
"Poussière de religions": le culte domestique dans "Un Coeur simple"
Abstract: L'intérêt que Flaubert a invariablement montré pour les récits religieux (légendaires, mythologiques et bibliques), et plus particulièrement pour le motif de la mort des dieux, se manifeste une fois encore dans "Un Coeur simple." Le conte inscrit le souvenir d'une religion domestique romaine morte depuis longtemps, mais néanmoins intériorisés par le personnage de la servante, dont la simplicité permet d'appréhender ce culte primitif. En effet, cette oeuvre présente un monde postérieur à la disparition des religions domestiques mise en scène dans La Tentation de saint Antoine: elle collecte quelques débris de croyances romaines pour couvrir la Normandie moderne de "poussière mythique." (In French) (CM)
Grigorian, Natasha:
The Writings of J.-K. Huysmans and Gustave Moreau's Painting: Affinity or Divergence?
Abstract: The article considers anew the role played by Moreau's painting in Huysmans's novels À rebours (1884) and En rade (1887), as well as art criticism. While the evident affinities between the two artists have mislead most critics, this article uncovers key divergences between them. An analysis of Huysmans's decadent slant on Moreau's work illuminates the way inter-art relationships contribute to a paradoxical interplay of classical and modernist tendencies in fin de siècle French and European culture. The divergence between Huysmans and Moreau exemplifies the pivotal conflict between l'amour du difforme and l'amour du beau in this context. However, deeper spiritual and moral affinities that ultimately emerge between the two artists dialectically link the two conflicting attitudes. (NG-S)
Singletary, Suzanne M:
Jacob Wrestling with the Angel: A Theme in Symbolist Art
Abstract: Until Eugène Delacroix treated the subject in the Church of Saint-Sulpice (1861), the story of Jacob Wrestling with the Angel was rarely depicted in art. Acknowledging a profound debt to Delacroix, several Symbolist artists interpreted the theme, notably Gustave Moreau, Paul Gauguin, and Odilon Redon. Moreover the Jacob narrative is reflective of the prevailing philosophical and artistic discourses that valorized struggle as a prerequisite of redemption, prominent in Hegelian idealism, Wagner's music-dramas, Swedenborg's biblical exegeses, and Baudelaire's criticism. For the Symbolist generation Jacob's encounter summoned a multiplicity of meanings, offering an elasticity that each artist could make his own. (SS)
Silverman, Willa Z., 1959- :
Unpacking His Library: Robert de Montesquiou and the Esthetics of the Book in Fin-de-siècle France
Abstract: The sale of the personal library of Robert de Montesquiou is a valuable document for a study of the esthetics of the book and the history of reading in fin-de-siècle France. The catalog and related documents reveal that the value Montesquiou attached to books varied according to their author, provenance, and usefulness to him for his own writings. Above all, in line with the esthetics of Symbolism, Montesquiou valued books as decorative objects, capable of stimulating the imagination, especially when encased in highly suggestive bindings, as the example of the publication of his 1892 work, Les Chauves-Souris, makes clear. (WZS)
Lloyd, Rosemary:
Unpacking a Provençal Library
Abstract: The recent acquisition of the library of the Aubanel family, whose best-known member was the poet, Théodore Aubanel, allows a study of the Félibrige movement, its friends, and its critics, through an analysis of the manuscript inscriptions. Of the library's 1,300 books and ten boxes of pamphlets, peri-odicals, newspapers, and academic bulletins, there are some six hundred inscriptions and manuscript insertions written in French, Provençal, Catalan, Italian, English, and Esperanto. Ranging form brief definitions to sonnets, from praise to provocation, they shed an unaccustomed light on the writers, presses, and preoccupations of nineteenth-century Provence. (RL)
Pierssens, Michel :
Vae Victis! Adolphe Retté
Abstract: The recounting of literary history has always been staged from the winners' camp. Despite the work done by historians who seek to restore a counter-history to the literary canon, it is instead necessary to consider the same History from the point of view of literature's peripheral figures. During the nineteenth century a vast majority of poets and novelists, including poet Adolphe Retté, fell into this category: the young genius aspiring to literary glory in the capital who is left with only his lost illusions. This phenomenon can be explained in part by the increased circulation of the press, the proliferation of reviews, and the con-sensus of an informed public. It is significant however that the circle of one of literature's most elusive poets, Mallarmé, decided the literary fate of Retté. In Retté's vigorous critique of Mallarmé's poetry, he sealed his own artistic demise. However, it was Retté's self-imposed exclusion from the literary domain, his voluntary move to the losers' camp, that places into the question the fragile edifice upon which the literary canon stands. If literary history has been polarized between the winners' camp and the losers' camp, of which the former represents the authoritative voice of official literary history, what then of those exiled figures who place themselves in the latter camp so as to ensure their effacement from the literary canon? (in French)