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Method in Madness looks at the ways in which nineteenth-century French literature of the fantastic reflected what psychoanalysis would later define as mechanisms of defence. Each chapter of the book is dedicated to a particular mechanism – fetishization, projection, intellectualization, mechanization, and compulsion – and to a representative set of texts which illustrate and embody the process concerned. The book thus systematizes what has remained up to now a rather vague perception of the psychological processes at work in fantastic narrative and of the relationship between the fantastic and the emerging science of psychoanalysis. Although centred on French works, including texts by Gautier, Mérimée, Balzac, George Sand, Maupassant, and Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, the study necessarily deals with the German tradition of the fantastic, notably Hoffmann and Freud. It argues that mechanisms of defence not only take place in fantastic literature, but that the fantastic itself in fact consists in translating defence into the real, thus making clear to the reader the very processes by which defence occurs. The book finds that the defence mechanisms “fail” in the fantastic, because in this literature defence involves adding a real danger to a merely psychic one, thereby intensifying the anxiety and displeasure which the mechanisms of defence are ideally designed to minimize.

Salvator Rosa (1615–1673) was a colorful and controversial Italian painter, talented musician, a notable comic actor, a prolific correspondent, and a successful satirist and poet. His paintings, especially his rugged landscapes and their evocation of the sublime, appealed to Romantic writers, and his work was highly influential on several generations of European writers. James S. Patty analyzes Rosa's tremendous influence on French writers, chiefly those of the nineteenth century, such as Stendhal, Honoré de Balzac, Victor Hugo, George Sand, and Théophile Gautier. Arranged in chronological order, with numerous quotations from French fiction, poetry, drama, art criticism, art history, literary history, and reference works, Salvator Rosa in French Literature forms a narrative account of the reception of Rosa's life and work in the world of French letters.

Enlightenment writers, revolutionaries, and even Napoleon discussed and wrote about France's tiny Jewish population at great length. Why was there so much thinking about Jews when they were a minority of less than one percent and had little economic and virtually no political power? In this unusually wide-ranging study of representations of Jews in eighteenth-century France—both by Gentiles and Jews themselves—Ronald Schechteroffers fresh perspectives on the Enlightenment and French Revolution, on Jewish history, and on the nature of racism and intolerance. Informed by the latest historical scholarship and by the insights of cultural theory, Obstinate Hebrews is a fascinating tale of cultural appropriation cast in the light of modern society's preoccupation with the'other.'Schechter argues that the French paid attention to the Jews because thinking about the Jews helped them reflect on general issues of the day. These included the role of tradition in religion, the perfectibility of human nature, national identity, and the nature of citizenship. In a conclusion comparing and contrasting the'Jewish question'in France with discourses about women, blacks, and Native Americans, Schechter provocatively widens his inquiry, calling for a more historically precise approach to these important questions of difference.

Includes indexes.

Includes indexes.

Writing Marginality in Modern French Literature, first published in 2001, explores how cultural centres require the peripheral, the outlawed and the deviant in order to define and bolster themselves. It analyses the hierarchies of cultural value which inform the work of six modern French writers: the exoticist Pierre Loti; Paul Gauguin, whose Noa Noa enacts European fantasies about Polynesia; Proust, who analyses such exemplary figures of exclusion and inclusion as the homosexual and the xenophobe; Montherlant, who claims to subvert colonialist values in La Rose de sable; Camus, who pleads an alienating detachment from the cultures of both metropolitan France and Algeria; and Jean Genet. Crucially Genet, who was typecast as France's moral pariah, in charting Palestinian statelessness in his last work, Un Captif amoureux (1986), reflects ethically on the dispossession of the Other and the violence inherent in the West's marginalization of cultural difference.

Mimesis has been addressed frequently in terms of literary or visual representation, in which the work of art mirrors, or fails to mirror, life. Most often, mimesis has been critiqued as a simple attempt to bridge the distance between reality and its representations. In Trauma and Its Representations: The Social Life of Mimesis in Post-Revolutionary France, Deborah Jenson argues instead that mimesis not only denotes the representation of reality but is also a crucial concept for understanding the production of social meaning within specific historical contexts. Examining the idea of mimesis in the French Revolution and post-Revolutionary Romanticism, Jenson builds on recent work in trauma studies to develop her own notion of traumatic mimesis. Through innovative readings of museum catalogs, the writings of Benjamin Constant, the novels of George Sand and Gustave Flaubert, and other works, Jenson demonstrates how mimesis functions as a form of symbolic wounding in French Romanticism.

This is a comparative and interdisciplinary book exploring a variety of perspectives on the artistic culture of France, and its neighbours, in the period 1870–1914. Part One centres on France, and assembles essays on the prose, poetry and painting of Symbolism and Decadence, on avant-garde dance and performance, on women's writing and on early cinema. Part Two explores the relations between France and several cultures in which the debt to France was amply and originally repaid, ranging from the Anglo-Celtic'Rhymers'Club'to the Italian'Crepusculari'. The essays consistently point beyond the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth, as they explore the multiple beginnings–as well as the false starts–that characterize the period. All foreign language quotations are translated.

The Pataphysician's Library is a study of aspects of 1890s French literature, with specific reference to the traditions of Symbolism and Decadence. Its main focus is Alfred Jarry, who has proved, perhaps surprisingly, to be one of the more durable fin-de-siècle authors. The originality of this study lies in its use of the enigmatic list of books termed the livres pairs, which appears in Jarry's 1898 novel Gestes et Opinions du docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien, his best-known prose work. The greatest interest of the livres pairs lies in a group of works by Jarry's friends and contemporaries, primarily Leon Bloy, Georges Darien, Gustave Kahn, Catulle Mendes, Josephin Madan, Rachilde, and Henri de Regnier. Several of these authors feature as the lords of islands visited by the pataphysician Dr Faustroll in his curious voyage around Paris. In conjunction with Jarry's own works, the contemporary livres pairs serve to illustrate the vibrant and experimental atmosphere in which these authors worked.

Moscovici proposes a new understanding of how gender relations were reformulated by both male and female writers in nineteenth-century France. She analyzes the different versions of gendered citizenship elaborated by Friedrich Hegel, George Sand, Honore de Balzac, Auguste Comte and Herculine Barbin revealing a shift from a single dialectical (or male-centered) definition of citizenship to a double dialectical (or bi-gendered) one in which each sex plays an important role in subject-citizenship and is defined as the negation of the other sex. Moscovici further argues that a double dialectical pattern of androgyny endows women with a (relational) cultural identity that secures their paradoxical roles as both representatives and outsiders to subject-citizenship in nineteenth-century French society and culture.

This book addresses the issues of collecting, consuming, classifying and describing the curiosities, antiques and objets d'art that proliferated in French literary texts during the last decades of the nineteenth century. After Balzac made such issues significant in canonical literature, the Goncourt brothers, Huysmans, Mallarmé and Maupassant celebrated their golden age. Flaubert and Zola scorned them. Rachilde and Lorrain perverted them. Proust commemorated their last moments of glory. Focusing on the bibelot (the modern French term for knick-knack, curiosity or other collectible), Janell Watson shows how the sudden prominence given to curiosities and collecting in nineteenth-century literature signals a massive change in attitudes to the world of goods, which in turn restructured the literary text according to the practical logic of daily life, calling into question established scholarly notions of order. Her study makes an important contribution to the literary history of material culture.

In a narrative gracefully combining intellectual and cultural history, Richard Cándida Smith unfolds the legacy of Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898), the poet who fathered the symbolist movement in poetry and art. The symbolists found themselves in the midst of the transition to a world in which new media devoured cultural products and delivered them to an ever-growing public. Their goal was to create and oversee a new elite culture, one that elevated poetry by removing it from a direct relationship to experience. Instead, symbolist poetry was dedicated to exploring discourse itself, and its practitioners to understanding how language shapes consciousness.Cándida Smith investigates the intellectual context in which symbolists came to view artistic practice as a form of knowledge. He relates their work to psychology, especially the ideas of William James, and to language and the emergence of semantics. Through the lens of symbolism, he focuses on a variety of subjects: sexual liberation and the erotic, anarchism, utopianism, labor, and women's creative role. Paradoxically, the symbolists'reconfiguration of elite culture fit effectively into the modern commercial media. After Mallarmé was rescued from obscurity, symbolism became a valuable commodity, exported by France to America and elsewhere in the market-driven turn-of-the-century world. Mallarmé's Children traces not only how poets regarded their poetry and artists their art but also how the public learned to think in new ways about cultural work and to behave differently as a result.

Discourse/Counter-Discourse is situated on the challenging border between cultural history and literary criticism: combining the insights of Marxism and semiotics, it attempts to delineate the culrural function of texts. Focusing on France during a period of remarkable culrural, social, and political transformation, Richard Terdiman examines both the dominant bourgeois discourse—novels, newspapers, and other mass forms of expression—and the effort of intellectuals to devise counter-discourses to combat it. He views the counter-discourses created by such principal figures as Flaubert, Balzac, Daumier, Baudelaire, Mallarme, and Marx not as isolated elements of nineteenth-century culture but, paradoxically, as a vital part of the everyday life of the period. Terdiman maintains that an intricate and continuous interplay of the opposing dynamics of stability and destabilization was at the center of—and gave direction to—historical and culrural change. Incorporating the work of such cultural theoreticians as Bakhtin, Gramsci, Bourdieu, Foucault, and Derrida, Terdiman explores discursive conflict in relations between literarure and the visual arts, the novel and political philosophy, and'elite'literature and popular culrure. He asserts that to understand the complex engagement between the texts of a cultural canon and those of its subversion we must broaden traditional notions of the sign to include not just linguistic but also social difference; the forms of society's work, family structure, gender roles, and educational and political organization, he says, all live and struggle within the signs of which every text is made. Richard Terdiman's model—discourse against counter-discourse—reveals the forces and tensions that shape cultural life. His book will interest not only srudents and scholars of French literarure, but literary theorists, cultural and intellectual historians, and Marxist scholars in a number of disciplines.

This book, a companion to the author's Pierrot: A Critical History of a Mask (Princeton, 1978), provides a detailed history of nineteenth-century French pantomime, from the feeries of Jean-Gaspard Deburau at the Theatre des Funambules to the cabaret entertainments of Georges Wague at the height of la Belle Epoque.Originally published in 1985.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

In this study of modernist aesthetics, Beryl Schlossman reveals how for such writers as Marcel Proust, Gustave Flaubert, and Charles Baudelaire, the Orient came to symbolize the highest aspirations of literary representation. She demonstrates that through allegory, modernism became a style itself, a style that married the ancient and the modern and that emerged as both a cause and an effect, both an ideal construct and an textual materiality, all symbolized by the Orient—land of style, place of plurality, and site of the coexistence of holy lands.Toward the end of Remembrance of Things Past, the narrator describes the act of creating a work of art as a conversion of sensation into a spiritual equivalent. By means of such allegories of “conversion,” Schlossman shows, the modernist artist disappeared within the work of art and left behind the trace of his sublime vocation, a vocation in which he was transformed, in Schlossman's words, “into a kind of priest kneeling at the altar of beauty before the masked divinity of representation.”The author shows how allegory—the representation of the symbolic as something real—was adapted by modernist writers to reflect subjectivity while masking an authorial origin. She reveals how modernist allegory arose, as Walter Benjamin suggests, at the crossroads of history, sociology, economics, urban architecture, and art—providing a kind of map of capitalism—and was produced through the eyes of a melancholic gazing at a “monument of absence.”

A new, revised, and expanded edition of a translation studies classic Translating Slavery explores the complex interrelationships that exist between translation, gender, and race by focusing on antislavery writing by or about French women in the French revolutionary period. Now in a two-volume collection, Translating Slavery closely examines what happens when translators translate and when writers treat issues of gender and race. The volumes explore the theoretical, linguistic, and literary complexities involved when white writers, especially women, took up their pens to denounce the injustices to which blacks were subjected under slavery. Volume 1, Gender and Race in French Abolitionist Writing, 1780–1830, highlights key issues in the theory and practice of translation by providing essays on the factors involved in translating gender and race, as well as works in translation. A section on abolitionist narrative, poetry, and theater has been added with a number of new translations, excerpts, and essays, in addition to an interview with the new member of the translating team, Norman R. Shapiro. This revised and expanded edition of Translating Slavery will appeal to readers and students interested in women's studies, African American studies, French literature and history, comparative literature, and translation studies.

This is a study that traces the influence of drugs on French literature. The first three chapters acquaint the reader with various aspects of the use and effect of opium and hashish. Later chapters analyze the influence on the works of various writers of the period, particularly Baudelaire.

Paulson examines literary, philosophical, and pedagogical writing on blindness in France from the Enlightenment, when philosophical speculation and surgical cures for cataracts demystified the difference between the blind and the sighted, to the nineteenth century, when the literary figure of the blind bard or seer linked blindness with genius, madness, and narrative art. A major theme of the book is the effect of blindness on the use of language and sign systems: the philosophes were concerned at first with understanding the doctrine of innate ideas, rather than with understanding blindness as such.Originally published in 1987.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Viewing thematic writing as the differentiation and elaboration of cultural knowledge, P. M. Cryle applies this new kind of thematics to the commitment'most often mentioned by literary critics in connection with existentialist literature.Originally published in 1985.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

In this examination of the role of ornament in nineteenth-century French literature, Rae Beth Gordon shows that ornament, far from being a simple accessory, raises problems that are at the very heart of aesthetic experience: limits and their transgression, illusion and seduction, pleasure and tension, harmony and confusion, excess and marginality. After placing texts by Nerval, Gautier, Mallarm, Huysmans, and Rachilde within the context of the history and techniques of the decorative arts, she reveals in these works the powerful role played by decorative figurations of syntax, diction, and composition. Gordon's detailed textual analyses yield spatial parallels with specific ornamental configurations (interlace, arabesque, decorative frame, horror vacui, trompe l'oeil). These patterns are then studied in relation to a dynamics of desire. Ornament, taken as the site of desire and illuminated by the theories of Charcot, Clrambault, Freud, Winnicott, and Lacan, highlights important differences between romanticism, symbolism, and decadence. Not only does the author relate ornament to artistic representations of the sublime, the grotesque, and hysteria, but she also reveals that the function of ornament in literature anticipated psychiatric and aesthetic research on decorative form in the fin de sicle.Originally published in 1992.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The end of the eighteenth century, an age of political and cultural crisis particularly in France, saw a shift in the meaning of belief. Simply put, a break in continuity occurred between the old, religious and a new, literary reading of Scripture. Michel Despland selects five writers who were caught up in this new reading of the old religious text and who came to write about religion in innovative ways: Jean-Jacques Roussean, François-René de Chateaubriand, Charles Nodier, Alfred de Vigny, and Gérard de Nerval. Their use of the autobiographical voice, and of a range of literary devices that encouraged the distanciation of readers from what they read, brought about a profound transmutation of religious writing. The old code of orthodoxy -- what was traditionally believed and socially confirmed -- was replaced with a more readable, personal text. The five writers treated by Despland helped shape a broader definition of belief, on that included individual sensibility. The works they produced are, in a sense, new religious texts. They did not just restate or reinterpret the code, but achieved a new kind of narrative, which has become dominant in the modern era and has shaped individual relationships to all codes.

Since Julia Kristeva first coined the term ‘intertextuality,'explanations of the way literature incorporates other literature have produced few distinctions and much obscurity. In contrast, Allan H. Pasco's Allusion looks at the way allusion works in specific fictions and how it affects the process of reading. Drawing from a wide range of French authors, including Flaubert, Stendhal, Proust, Balzac, Zola, Sartre, and Robbe-Grillet, Pasco uses a number of examples to show how allusions work, how texts integrate other texts to create new metaphorical constructs.The text being read reminds us of another text, and the two texts come together to create an image (or text) quite different from either of the constituent texts. While distinguishing allusion from other forms of intertextuality like irony, satire, plagiarism, and imitation, Pasco follows a straightforward logic from the uncomplicated to the complicated, from the simple to the complex. What he calls parallel allusions serve to contrast with other devices and to clarify the way allusion functions. He discusses how the perception of irony may distort understanding, and he illustrates how allusion can illuminate a theme and render a feeling palpable. A discussion of ‘allusive complex'considers the way a set of parallel allusions work together to create something that differs significantly from both the text being read and the works it refers to. The device appears even more complicated when authors call on it set up oppositions, in some cases to imply that the work in hand might end different from the older text. The potential allusion remains as unlimited as the creative minds of authors, but the pattern, as Pasco demonstrates, remains simple and straightforward.

The year was 778. Charlemagne, starting homeward after an expedition onto the Iberian Peninsula, left his nephew, Count Roland, in command of a rear guard. As Roland and his troops moved through the Pyrenees, a fierce enemy swooped down and annihilated them. Whether the attackers were Moors, Basques, Gascons, or Aquitainians is still disputed. The massacre soon passed into legend, preserved but at the same time expanded and interpreted in oral tradition and written accounts.Dormant after the late Middle Ages, the legend began to inspire literary works even before the discovery and publication of the Oxford manuscript Chanson de Roland in 1837. The French Revolution and Empire, temporarily relieving Roland of his religious aura, hailed him as a patriot belaboring his country's foes. The Romantics made him either a dauntless, irrepressible extrovert or a noble victim struck down while making the world a better place. As the twentieth century dawned, a few authors scoffed at hero worship but others held up Roland as a heroic example that might help his countrymen live with the humiliation of their defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and then, as World War I approached, retake their lost territories.Fascinating as the Roland legend is in itself, no one has looked into the nonacademic French literature to which it has given rise in modern times. Harry Redman now shows how writers, with varying outlooks and approaches and divergent purposes, drew upon the legend from 1777 to the end of World War I. A monumental enterprise based on primary research, the book is of extraordinary value to scholars interested in the Old French epic and to all those concerned with more recent literary periods.

Includes index.

Examining the privileged relation of women to the singing voice in nineteenth-century literary works, the author argues for an emerging identification between women and artifice in the period. Beginning with texts by Rousseau and Proust that show a link between nostalgia for the maternal voice and the writer's self, the book then turns to the psychoanalytic literature on the role of the voice in the formation of the psyche. In the process, it analyses feminist polemics on the maternal voice to show how voice and rhythm together form the matrices of the subject. The voice of the soprano occupied a special place in nineteenth-century operatic history, replacing the castrato voice as a sexless, angelic, ethereal source of pleasure for the opera-goer. The author shows how these qualities are identified with women's voices in literary texts by Sand, Balzac, du Maurier and Nerval.

Description based on print version record.

A wide range of French women writers are surveyed, including Sand, Colette, Beauvoir and Duras among the'canonized', and many marginalized or forgotten and contemporary names not yet widely known outside France. These writers are seen within the political, economic and cultural context of women's lives and how these have changed across a century-and-a-half. Underpinning the whole account is the relationship between gender and language, between politics sexual and textual.