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. XXXV, no 2 (Winter 2007)
ARTICLES
Susan McCREADY, « The Secret Self: A Reading of Musset's André del Sarto »
The prose drama André del Sarto occupies a transitional position within Musset's dramatic œuvre, crowning the œuvres de jeunessewhile announcing the masterpieces of 1833 and 1834. Situating the playwithin the larger romantic trends of the Restoration, the articlefocuses on the impulses which inform the hero's actions throughout theplay and which finally bring him to suicide. Drawing on the theoreticalwork of Bataille, Girard and psychoanalyst Andras Zempléni, the essayilluminates the hero's romantic obsession with his image of the worldand with his self-image, an obsession shared by Musset throughout hisown life and career. (SM)
Arthur FLANNIGAN, « Alphonse de Lamartine's Toussaint Louverture and the Staging of White Masculinity »
Though ostensibly a play about Haiti and about black masculinity, Lamartine's Toussaint Louvertureputs white masculinity center stage. A reading of the five-act dramainformed by a psychoanalytic theory of hegemonic masculinity revealsthat Toussaint's black body functions in the text as a fetish and thata white masculine anxiety subtends the very notion of a racialdifference grounded in the body. Moreover, a consideration of how thepresumptive nineteenth-century readers understood this text and how the1850 spectators experienced the premiere blackface performance of thedrama suggests further how gender and race intersected within theprevailing ideology of the period. (AFS-A)
Robin MacKENZIE, « Maturity and Modernity in Fromentin's Dominique »
This article examines the thematic tension in Fromentin's Dominique between maturity (the conventional telos of the roman d'apprentissage)and modernity, as described by theorists from Benjamin to Moretti. Thethree principal male figures illustrate this tension in contrastingways. Dominique's much-vaunted achievement of maturity depends on acomplete withdrawal from modern urban existence and is, moreover,questioned by the otherwise uncritical frame narrator. Olivier, whothrives in the modern city, suffers mental collapse and attemptssuicide when he returns to the ancestral estate. Augustin, married andsuccessful by the end of the novel, goes some way to resolving thetension but lacks the emotional and aesthetic sensitivity to act as asatisfactory model of maturity. Dominique, then, supportsFranco Moretti's claim that conventional models of maturity areincompatible with the centrifugal and dissipative energies of modernityand takes its place alongside L'Education sentimentale in the mid-century crisis of the psychological novel. (RM)
Daniel SIPE, « Mallarmé et l'écriture du corps »
This article is an analysis of the representation of the female body inStéphane Mallarmé's first published poem, "Placet" (1862). The authorargues that Mallarmé's use of an anachronistic sonnet form and itsdepiction of a gallant seduction obfuscate a series of underlyingtextual operations which serve to subjugate and expose its femalerecipient. Here the surreptitious blurring of the various "degrees ofvisibility" contained in the poem call into question the commonly heldnotion of Mallarmé's "discreet eroticism." This discussion serves as aspringboard to a more general reconsideration of Mallarméan poetics andthe critical matrices which are frequently used to analyze it. Lookingspecifically at psychoanalytic theory (often employed to explain boththe poet's eroticism and his approach to language), the author contendsthat this model cannot fully account for Mallarmé's representationalproject. The author posits instead a phenomenological reading of his"corporal writing." (In French) (ds)
Morgan GAULIN, « La Théorie du signe d'Hippolyte Taine »
The emergence of an energetic movement of criticism oriented towardsthe status of language brought Hippolyte Taine (1828-1893) to publish De l'Intelligence(1870), his philosophical treatise. In his philosophy of language,Taine adopted Condillac's concept of sign. Images, which are a specifictype of signs, permit us to imagine things that are not immediatelyavailable for experience. Those images, produced by our imagination,help us to understand what Taine called names. Taine defined commonnames as being twofold. They are general in that they aresuited for all the types of objects they refer to (i.e., the name"wheel" stands for all possible wheels). Common names are also abstractin that they designate something universal and, thus, common to all thetypes of objects they refer to. Is it possible, asked Taine, toexperience that universal something, which he defines as being the ideaof a thing ? No, argued Taine, since the general idea of a thing comesfrom the very definition of this thing. (In French) (MG)
Eric Touya de MARENNE, « Poetics and Poetry: Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Poe, and Mallarmé's "Eternal Logic" »
This article explores the extent to which the radical transformation ofmusic envisaged by Wagner in the second half of the nineteenth centuryannounced what Nietzsche later described as the fundamental crisis ofmodernity. It also examines how Mallarmé responded to the musician whowanted to impose limits to the poetic art, and how the French poet'sviews on the subject had in fact been influenced by Poe and Baudelaire.Through the new path he foresaw beyond the crisis of literature andpoetry, Mallarmé conceived of a "logic" that, he suggested, was"eternal," to counter the musician's claims and, along with them,challenge and oppose from a poetic perspective, the philosophicalideals of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. (etm)
Masha BELENKI, « From Transit to Transitoire: The Omnibus and Modernity »
The Parisian omnibus, introduced in 1828, served as a powerful symbolof urban and social change throughout the nineteenth century. The newconveyance heralded a radical transformation of Paris into the "capitalof modernity" in the 1850s and 1860s. This essay considers theambivalent and often contradictory attitudes toward the omnibus in thenineteenth-century cultural imagination by exploring representations ofthe omnibus as a social space in Zola's Au Bonheur des dames (1883) and in Maupassant's "Le Père" (1883). In Au Bonheur des dames,the omnibus embodies anxieties and dangers of modernity. Maupassant's"Le Père" illustrates how the meeting of sexes in the eroticallycharged space of the omnibus engenders social disruption.
Peter Michael WETHERILL, « Visions de Paris: Béraud et Zola – confrontations »
Writing and painting offer incompatible perspectives. This fact isstill widely ignored. Literally or otherwise, they have no acceptablecommon vocabulary. The present article explores this by comparing ascene by Jean Béraud (1849-1935) with an "identical" situation at thebeginning of Nana. The same topography produces very differentmessages, diegesis being virtually excluded from painting (except whena specific anecdote or myth is referred to). The latter is in fact aspace to be completely filled in with detail whilst literary narrative,naming things and defining their dynamic status in time, is inevitablyfull of holes. Painting is passive and immobile, spatially confined,and, beyond the precision of visual detail, inevitably opaque. Thespectator must try to fill in the gaps. This is far from literature'sapproach : never a direct visual equivalent of the original scene.Different forms of theatrality result : Béraud's sociallyrepresentative group invites us to all sorts of guessing games, whereasZola's text is full of precise explanation: values and behaviour aremeticulously explored, extending beyond the novel's text to the Rougon-Macquart cycle as a whole. (In French) (PMW)
Robert ZIEGLER, « The Uncreated Artwork in Mirbeau's Dans le ciel »
Serially published in L'Echo de Paris between September 1892 and May 1893, Octave Mirbeau's unfinished novel Dans le cieloffers the author's clearest reflection on artistic expression as animpossible ideal. The novel shows that beauty untranslated into imageryis located in the creative process itself: in the moment of inspirationor in the suffering of the artist incapable of giving form to hisvision.
Referred to in the title, the sky is a topological representation ofthe artist's brain, blue space seething with inchoate ideas, vaporouscloud-things shredding into evanescent shapes that break apart in theair. The journey traced in Mirbeau's novel maps the broken passage fromconception to expression – from an artist's idea to the objectembodying it. Between head and hand – between heaven and earth – thetransmission of beauty involves disconnection and loss. A panoramicdisplay of fantastic potential unconcretized in images and unbounded byframes, the sky is a painting of the dynamics of change. (RZ)
REVIEWS
Art Historical Studies
Gabriel P. WEISBER, The Invention of the Model: Artists and Models in Paris, 1830-1870title
Waller, Susan, 1948- Invention of the model: artists and models in Paris, 1830-1870.
Artists' models -- France -- History -- 19th century.
Katherine FOSHKO, Paris in Despair: Art and Everyday Life under Siege (1870–1871)title
Clayson, Hollis, 1946- Paris in despair: art and everyday life under siege (1870-71).
Art, French -- France -- Paris -- 19th century.
Cultural Studies
Stephen M. STIGLER, Dice, Cards, Wheels: A Different History of French Culturetitle
Kavanagh, Thomas M. Dice, cards, wheels: a different history of French culture.
Gambling -- France -- History.
Theresa LEVITT, Chemistry, Pharmacy and Revolution in France, 1777-1809
Simon, Jonathan, 1964- Chemistry, pharmacy and revolution in France, 1777-1809.
Pharmacy -- France -- History -- 18th century.
Timothy Bell RASER, Fonction de l'image dans l'appareil psychique
titleMasson, Céline. Fonction de l'image dans l'appareil psychique: construction d'un appareil optique.
ReviewImagery (Psychology)
Colonialism
Edward Joseph HUGHES, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, Historytitle
Cooper, Frederick, 1947- Colonialism in question: theory, knowledge, history.
Africa -- Colonization -- Historiography.
Deborah JENSON, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804title
Dubois, Laurent, 1971- Colony of citizens: revolution & slave emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804.
West Indies, French -- History.
Metropolitan Studies
Jean-François, BRIÈRE, The Abbé Grégoire and the French Revolution: The Making of Modern Universalism
titleSepinwall, Alyssa Goldstein, 1970- Abbé Grégoire and the French Revolution: the making of modern universalism.
Grégoire, Henri, 1750-1831 -- Political and social views.
Masha BELENKI, The Family and the Nation: Gender and Citizenship in Revolutionary France, 1789-1830title
Heuer, Jennifer, 1969- Family and the nation: gender and citizenship in revolutionary France, 1789-1830.
France -- History -- 1789-1815.
Review
Sarah Ann CURTIS, France and the Cult of the Sacred Heart: An Epic Tale for Modern Times, and: The Tragic Tale of Claire Ferchaud and the Great Wartitle
titleJonas, Raymond Anthony. France and the cult of the Sacred Heart: an epic tale for modern times.
Jonas, Raymond Anthony. Tragic tale of Claire Ferchaud and the Great War.
Sacred Heart, Devotion to -- History of doctrines.
Ferchaud, Claire, 1896-1972.
Kieran MURPHY, Beyond Enlightenment -- Occultism and Politics in Modern Francetitle
Harvey, David Allen, 1971- Beyond enlightenment: occultism and politics in modern France.
Occultism -- France.
Literary Pedagogy and Linguistics
Mark BURDE, Gaston Paris et la philologie romane
titleauthorBähler, Ursula. Gaston Paris et la philologie romane.
Paris, Gaston Bruno Paulin, 1839-1903.
Marvin RICHARDS, Modern French Literary Studies in the Classroom: Pedagogical Strategiestitle
Stivale, Charles J., ed. Modern French literary studies in the classroom: pedagogical strategies.
French literature -- Study and teaching.
Literary Movements
Aimeé BOUTIN, Un autre mal du siècle. Le Romantisme des romancières 1800-1846title
Bertrand Jennings, Chantal. Autre mal du siècle: le romantisme des romancières, 1800-1846.
French fiction -- Women authors -- History and criticism.
Paul ROWE, Les Opérations financières dans le roman réaliste: Lectures de Balzac et de Zolatitle
Gomart, Hélène. Opérations financières dans le roman réaliste: lectures de Balzac et de Zola.
Balzac, Honoré de, 1799-1850 -- Criticism and interpretation.
Tullio PAGANO, Le Grand Transit moderne: Mobility, Modernity, and French Naturalist Fictiontitle
Duffy, Larry. Grand transit moderne: mobility, modernity and French naturalist fiction.
French literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism.Review
Arthur McCALLA, A World Abandoned by God: Narrative and Secularismtitle
Lee, Susanna, 1970- World abandoned by God: narrative and secularism.
French fiction -- 19th century -- History and criticism.
Balzac Studies
James P. GILROY, Balzac et le temps: littérature, histoire et psychanalysetitle
Mozet, Nicole. Balzac et le temps: littérature, histoire et psychanalyse.
Balzac, Honoré de, 1799-1850 -- Criticism and interpretation.
Alain-Philippe DURAND, Balzac, suite et fintitle
Schuerewegen, Franc. Balzac, suite et fin.
Balzac, Honoré de, 1799-1850 -- Criticism and interpretation.
Baudelaire Studies
Scott CARPENTER, Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris: Shifting Perspectivestitle
titleScott, Maria C., 1972- Baudelaire's Le spleen de Paris: shifting perspectives.
Baudelaire, Charles, 1821-1867. Spleen de Paris.
Hugo Studies
Isabel K. ROCHE, Victor Hugo, le quoi et le pourquoititle
Pich, Edgard. Victor Hugo: le quoi et le pourquoi.
Hugo, Victor, 1802-1885 -- Criticism and interpretation.
Huysmans Studies
Marc SMEETS, Le Drageoir aux épices, suivi de textes inéditstitle
Huysmans, J.-K. (Joris-Karl), 1848-1907. Drageoir aux épices: suivi de textes inédits.
Locmant, Patrice, ed.
French fiction.
Lamartine Studies
Ceri CROSSLEY, L'Harmonie selon Lamartine. Utopie d'un lieu communtitle
Loiseleur, Aurélie. Harmonie selon Lamartine: utopie d'un lieu commun.
Lamartine, Alphonse de, 1790-1869 -- Criticism and interpretation.
Nerval Studies
Beryl SCHLOSSMAN, L'Ecriture nervalienne du temps: L'Expérience de la temporalité dans l'oeuvre de Gérard de Nervaltitle
Destruel, Philippe. Écriture nervalienne du temps: l'expérience de la temporalité dans l'œuvre de Gérard de Nerval.
Nerval, Gérard de, 1808-1855 -- Criticism and interpretation.
Proust Studies
Lynne HUFFER, Imaginaire et écriture de la mort dans l'oeuvre de Marcel Prousttitle
Quinet, Edgar, 1803-1875. Lettres à sa mère.
Bernard-Griffiths, S. (Simone), ed.
Peylet, Gérard, ed.
Quinet, Edgar, 1803-1875 -- Correspondence.
Stendhal Studies
Benjamin McRae AMOSS, Figures du destin stendhalientitle
Kliebenstein, Georges. Figures du destin stendhalien.
Stendhal, 1783-1842 -- Themes, motives.
Verne Studies
William BUTCHER, Jules Verne, and: Jules Verne, en mer et contre tous, and: Jules Verne: La Face cachée
titleDusseau, Joëlle. Jules Verne.
titleValetoux, Philippe, 1954-, ed. Jules Verne, en mer et contre tous.
Maudhuy, Roger, 1960- Jules Verne: la face cachée.
Verne, Jules, 1828-1905.