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.
Vol. 35, no 3-4 (printemps-été 2007)
ARTICLES
Henry, Freeman G.
Rue Cuvier, rue Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire, rue Lamarck: Politics and Science in the Streets of Paris
ArticleIn the City of Light the hegemonic right to affix identities is everywhere encoded in the commemorative nomenclature exhibited by streets and squares, statuary and monuments. The Paris city council's belated decision to grant space to a rue Lamarck, opened in 1875 and located far across the great city from the area surrounding the Jardin des Plantes where fellow scientists are memorialized, may be read as political metaphor. Indeed, such reading resurrects the institutional and political history of French science from the founding of the Jardin du Roi in 1635 to the anti-Darwinism of the late-nineteenth century.
Cox, Fiona.
Nightmares of Absence: Hugo and “Le Rouet d’Omphale”
ArticleThis article offers a new reading of an understudied poem from Les Contemplations (1856), 'Le Rouet d'Omphale.' By analysing the poem's rich web of intra- and intertextual allusions, from Ovid and Catullus to Hugo's 'La Pente de la rêverie' (1831), William Shakespeare (1864) and Le Rhin (1845), it becomes clear that Hugo's fascination with the legend of Hercules and Omphale, a legend in which Hercules is humiliated and emasculated, is linked to his own terrors of non-existence that are intimately bound up with his insecurities about the act of creation.
Sicard-Cowan, Hélène.
Désir Colonial et “Conscience Historique Authentique”: “La Belle Dorothée” de Charles Baudelaire
ArticleContemporary critics of Charles Baudelaire's 1863 prose poem "La Belle Dorothée" have interpreted the figure of the liberated female slave Dorothée as a slave of imitation of whiteness. Drawing on colonial history, postcolonial theory, as well as recent developments in Baudelairean criticism, this article focuses on the poem's formal features to argue for a reading of Dorothée as a successful embodiment of emancipation without cultural assimilation. (In French)
Morisi, Eve Célia.
“À une dame créole” de Charles Baudelaire: de l’ambiguïté colonialiste à l’ambiguïté plurielle
ArticleThis essay supplements existing readings of Baudelaire's sonnet "À une dame créole" (1845) by apprehending it not as a univocal piece centered on colonialist ambiguity, but as a locus of semantic plurality where this ambiguity coexists with its self-subversion. I argue that, by conferring polysemous connotations on the sonnet's key terms and by cultivating irony and the paradigms of illusion and representation, Baudelaire bars us from assigning a definite meaning to his composition, establishing it instead as a space of slippage and mobility. Lastly, I read the self-subversion of the text's apparently unquestionable colonialist ambiguity in its dramatic and lyrical intertexts as well as in its inclination for self-reflexivity which paradoxically reveal that the poet further distances himself from a position of detachment and power. (In French)
Earl, Anthony.
Le Réveil helléniste et les goûts culturels bourgeois: Le poème “Vénus de Milo” de Leconte de Lisle et son arrière-pays esthétique
From the eighteenth century, interest in Hellenism had been stimulated by early travel accounts, and by researches into Greek religion. In France, archaeological findings and enthusiasm for Greek literature induced critical speculations which culminated with the placing in the Louvre of the Vénus de Milo. Public fervour extended beyond pictorial and plastic arts into bourgeois tastes. Victor de Laprade's poem "Psyché" based on a theme found in decorative arts expressed this taste. Approaches to phenomena of Hellenic culture were subsumed into poetry about Greek female statues, notably Leconte de Lisle's own "Vénus de Milo" of 1846. Free of the political echoes of the poet's earlier poetry, this poem expresses admiration for the artistic integrity of the statue and converts visual experience into linguistic. Critical discussions, public taste and learned inquiry are transformed into creativity. (In French)
Nematollahy, Ali.
Jules Vallés and the Anarchist Novel
ArticleVallès's anarchism has often been seen in terms of his sensibility, his biography, and particularly his relationship with Proudhon. His writing and his theory of literature, however, have very little to do with Proudhonian aesthetics. Instead, Vallès's writing is best understood in the context of Bakunin's theories on literature and politics, as well as a current of literature in the second half of the nineteenth century that Jacques Dubois termed instantanéisme. Anarchist aesthetics and instantanéisme both reject politics; they are not based on the political commitment of the writer or the work, but rather on rupture and singularity. Vallès's work thus has to be distinguished from the various strands of realism and naturalism in the nineteenth century – from the mimetic tradition in general – and viewed within the much more tenuous current of the anarchist novel in the nineteenth century.
Pies, Stacy.
Rhetorical and Social Geographies in Stéphane Mallarmé’s “Bucolique”
Two themes of Mallarmé's later work – the expansion of poetic language and the changing public role of literature – converge in Stéphane Mallarmé's 1895 poème critiqueArticle [critical poem] "Bucolique." In her reading of the poem, Pies analyzes how the poem's dialogue between the poet's public and private selves and the use of blank space enact the expansion of poetic language that Mallarmé proposes in his later work, especially "La Musique et les lettres." Arguing that "Bucolique," like "Déplacement avantageux," traces a mental journey in which the flight from the city involves a return to the urban center, she suggests that "Bucolique" reveals the city, the site of public life, as a locus of poetry.
Lintz, Bernadette C.
L’Empereur fardé: Napoléon III des Châtiments à La Débâcle
This article takes as its point of departure the historically controverted detail of the makeup that Napoleon III was said to have worn on the battlefieds of Sedan. Tracing the origin of the Emperor's rouge to Victor Hugo's Les Châtiments (1853), it explores the intertextual connections that tie Zola's La Débacle (1892) to Hugo's historical writings on Napoleon III and the Second Empire (Les Châtiments, Napoléon le Petit, Histoire d'un crime). Reading the cosmetic detail and its figural associations within the discursive context of Hugo's writings, I argue that Zola draws on and recontextualizes Hugolian motifs of theatricality, histrionics, blood, corruption, contamination, and expiation with a view to humanizing, in the context of the defeat at Sedan, the vilified Hugolian figure of the Emperor. Like a palimpsest, the makeup reveals Zola's debt to a body of texts that lie at the foundation of the Rougon-MacquartArticle 's historical poetics. (In French)
El Kettani, Soundouss.
La Dynamique descriptive chez Zola et les Goncourt
La présence nécessaire de personnages observateurs intermédiaires, entre le lecteur et le visible romanesque chez Zola, est la clé d'une dynamique descriptive qui mène tout objet de regard, animé ou non animé, vers une dissolution progressive. C'est là que réside une différence fondamentale entre le chef de file du naturalisme et les Goncourt, ses frères ennemis. Les créateurs de "l'écriture artiste" tournent en dérision, particulièrement dans Manette SalomonArticle , la dictature d'une des techniques les plus célèbres des naturalistes, la délégation du regard descripteur à une instance intradiégétique. Ce faisant, ils inscrivent leurs romans dans une esthétique de l'éternité et de l'absolu qui s'oppose à l'esthétique de la temporalité et de la relativité zolienne.
Emery, Elizabeth (Elizabeth Nicole)
Art as Passion in Anatole France’s Le Lys rouge
At first glance, Anatole France's Le Lys rouge (1894) is a straightforward love story capitalizing on a fin-de-siècle vogue for medieval Italian art. Closer study, however, reveals a mordant satire of contemporaries' aesthetic pronouncements. A regular guest on the salon circuit, France was a privileged witness to contemporary taste and a powerful arbiter of aesthetic trends. Although Le Lys rouge is a work of fiction, his careful descriptions of fin-de-siècle taste and his sly references to real-life writers, artists, and collectors influenced his readers, while providing twenty-first century scholars with a valuable appreciation of late nineteenth-century French attitudes to art.
COMPTES RENDUS
Goetz, Thomas H.
Bibliographie du dix-neuvième siècle, Année 2003, and: Bibliographie du dix-neuvième siècle, Année 2004 (review)
Ayres-Bennett, Wendy.
Dissertation sur les causes de l’universalité de la langue françoise et la durée vraisemblable de son empire with Le Discours de M. de Rivarol (review)
Lee, Susanna.
Holy Tears, Holy Blood: Women, Catholicism, and the Culture of Suffering in France, 1840–1970 (review)
Kadish, Doris Y.
Claims to Memory: Beyond Slavery and Emancipation in the French Caribbean (review)
Kolb, Katherine.
Der romantische Weg im Frühwerk von Hector Berlioz (review)
Dayan, Peter.
Debussy and the Fragment (review)
Maleuvre, Didier.
Architexts of Memory: Literature, Science, and Autobiography (review)
Eldrige, Alana.
L’Oedipe romantique: le jeune homme, le désir et l’histoire en 1830 (review)
Christiansen, Hope.
The Psyche of Feminism: Sand, Colette, Sarraute (review)
Provencher, Denis M.
Sexing the Citizen: Morality and Masculinity in France, 1870–1920 (review)
Hayes, Jarrod.
Creole Echoes: The Francophone Poetry of Nineteenth-Century Louisiana (review)
Falconer, Graham.
Nouvelles et contes I, 1820–1832; II, 1832–1850 (review)
Mazaheri, Homayoun.
Wann-Chlore (review)
Harder, Hollie Markland.
Balzac et la crise des identités (review)
Larsen, Svend Erik.
Balzac et la comédie des signes. Essai sur une expérience de pensée (review)
Brix, Michel.
Character and Meaning in the Novels of Victor Hugo (review)
Berrong, Richard M.
Journal 1868–1878 (review)
Thompson, Clive.
Monsieur Vénus: A Materialist Novel (review)
Beecher, Jonathan.
Ecrits sur Tocqueville (review)
Sourian, Eve.
George Sand and Frederick Chopin in Majorca (review)
Buchet-Ritchey, Nathalie.
Nanon (review)
Coates, Carrol F.
Verlaine poète de l’indécidable. Étude de la versification verlainienne (review)