Nineteenth-Century French Studies provides scholars and studentswith the opportunity to examine new trends, review promising researchfindings, and become better acquainted with professional developmentsin the field. Scholarly articles on all aspects of nineteenth-centuryFrench literature and criticism are invited. Published articles arepeer-reviewed to insure scholarly integrity. The journal has anextensive book review section covering a variety of disciplines.
Vol. 37, no 1-2 (automne-hiver 2008)
Lise Schreier
Invisible, illisible, endeuillée: Madame de Lamartine en voyage en Orient
Joseph Acquisto
Digesting Les Fleurs du Mal: Imaginative Spaces and Liquid Modernity in Baudelaire
The 1857 edition of Les Fleurs du Mal constructs images ofconsumption and digestion in ways that introduce questions ofmetaphysical or theological significance through the body, whichmediates between the poetic word and transcendent reality. The physicalact of internalizing matter becomes a vehicle for rethinkingBaudelaire's relationship to the body and the transcendent world.Zygmunt Bauman's concept of "liquid modernity" illuminates the notionof fluidity, strongly present in the "pre-urban" 1857 Fleurs,where poetry freely circulates between inside and outside spaces andthus succeeds in mediating between the physical and the metaphysicalthrough its negotiation of the quotidian and cosmological.
Ross Chambers
Heightening the Lowly (Baudelaire: "Je n'ai pas oublié . . ." and "A une passante")
Framed by a concept of fetish æsthetics that linksBaudelaire and Proust's fictional painter, Elstir, the article examinesthe evolution of Baudelaire's fetishizing understanding of "modernbeauty." It does so by asking the question: why was "Je n'ai pas oublié. . ." moved in 1861 to the new "Tableaux Parisiens" section of theFleurs du Mal? and by proposing that the proximity of "Je n'ai pasoublié . . ." to "A une passante" figures the disharmony introducedinto Baudelaire's fetishizing metaphysics by the events of 1848–51.Thus, the latter poem is itself an allegory of history as thedevestatingly preteritional "passing by" that permits a glimpse ofeternity as the manifestation of le mal. The statues of "Je n'ai pasoublié . . ." ("cachant leurs membres nus") and the statuesque woman of"A une passante" ("avec sa jambe de statue") together motivate anexamination of the statue as fetish figure in post-1851 Baudelaire andof the "noisy chiasmus" as his new figure of a world awry – oneconstructed fetishistically as an x-like meeting-place where anencounter with the not-known can result only in alienated knowledge.
Alain Toumayan
Violence and Civilization in Flaubert's Salammbô
This essay argues that in Salammbô Flaubert marks a rigorouscultural distinction between the civilized Carthaginians and thebarbarous mercenaries that is based on particular practices of violencespecific to each one. In drawing this distinction, in maintaining anequivalency in the capacity of each for atrocity, excess, anddepravity, and in conferring emblematic status to this conflict,Flaubert disallows any privileging of one cultural order over theother. In this way, Flaubert undermines the principles, tools, andstrategies of historical analysis or understanding and figures theevents of the story in such a way as to maintain their essentialotherness and to situate them at the limits of our conceptual horizon.
Margot Irvine
Spousal Collaborations in Naturalist Fiction and in Practice
Artistic collaborations between spouses were becoming more frequent inthe early years of the Third Republic. Literary representations of suchcollaborations are found in the fiction of Émile Zola ("Madame Sourdis"1880), Guy de Maupassant (Bel-Ami 1885) and Alphonse Daudet (Femmes d'artistes, 1878), with disastrous results in each case. They were shown in a more positive light in the women's magazine, Femina,and provided a way for women, like Daudet's own wife and collaborator,Julia A. Daudet (1844–1940), to launch literary careers of their own.The polemics that spousal collaborations inspired reflect changingnotions of authorship and gender roles in the late nineteenth century.
Marie-Sophie Armstrong
"Le chapitre de Jenlain," ou la mise en abyme fantasmatique de Germinal
Fait remarquable dans Germinal, le "chapitre de Jenlain"(chapitre 6, quatrième partie) se désinteresse au plus haut point de laquestion sociale, substituant à l'évocation de la grève des mineurs etde ses enjeux des pages pleines de ludisme et de fantaisie (méfaits degamins, partie de crosse). L'on aurait toutefois tort de sedésintéresser de ces épisodes d'aspect anodin. C'est que le messagepolitique et social du roman fait place à un message qui engagel'oeuvre en profondeur. L'espace de quelques pages en effet, le soufflede l'inconscient remplace celui de la révolte tandis que la fantaisie,comme dans l'univers onirique, recouvre le fantasme. Pierre d'angle duroman, le chapitre de Jeanlin se révèle comme le garant de la cohérencepsychique de Germinal, sinon même, de la série.
Marc Smeets
Osmazômes (Huysmans)
Scholars of Rachilde have rarely taken into consideration her novelspublished after 1900 because of their sentimentality. For instance, La Femme Dieu is a conventional remake of La Princesse des ténèbres, which is conversely an unsentimental response to Émile Zola's The Rêve. On the other hand, L'Homme aux bras de feu subverts the traditional romanceby eluding the popular reading codes. Nevertheless, the sentimentalplots and characters in the Rachilde's works are the standard (orironical) narrative borderline which puts an end to the underlyinganarchic or colonial discourse of her unsentimental novels writtenbetween 1890 and 1940.
Dominique Laporte
Une Négociation stratégique du discours littéraire et du discourssocial: Le Dévoilement des dessous (in) humains dans l'oeuvre romanesquede Rachilde
Barbara Pauk
Contesting National and Gender Boundaries: Flora Tristan's Promenades dans Londres
This article shows how the French feminist and socialist Flora Tristanuses discourses on nationality and ideas of foreignness and exclusionto challenge contemporary gender ideologies in Promenades dans Londres(1840). She casts herself in the role of a disinterested and invisibleobserver and knowledgeable narrator who describes another nation,England, whose population is marked as "other" and inferior,particularly in her description of her visit to the houses ofParliament. Tristan aligns herself with English travellers such as LadyMary Wortley Montagu and orientalises the houses of Parliament, therebysimultaneously endorsing and overturning notions of civilisation andsuperiority, the basis of Western patriarchy. At the same time, byadopting the role of a victim and accusing the members of Parliament ofinappropriate behaviour and disrespect, Tristan conceals her owntransgressions and establishes an alternative set of social rules. Thisstrategy is repeatedly adopted in her work.