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Reading Beyond Gender in Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames, L’Argent, and La Joie de vivre Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2024-02-12 Sophie Maddison
Much has been said about how Émile Zola uses fragmented corporeality and subjectivity in Au Bonheur des Dames (1883) to critique the implications of modern commerce for women. Comparatively little ...
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Naturalism and Denaturalising Whiteness in Zola’s Thérèse Raquin Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2024-02-07 Michelle C. Lee
In his preface to Thérèse Raquin (1867), Zola declares he will expose the inner truth of his characters. In the novel, however, it is the heroine's exterior that is scrutinised. Thérèse is physiogn...
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Between the Picturesque and the Political: Judith Gautier and Pierre Loti’s Play La Fille du Ciel Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2023-12-17 Michelle Chun-han Hsu
In La Fille du Ciel (1911), a play co-authored by Pierre Loti and Judith Gautier, allusions to ethnic equality between the Manchu and the Han celebrate the political thinking of Kang Youwei (1858–1...
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Cartographies of Region and Empire: Scaling Le tour de la France par deux enfants (and its Afterlives) Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2023-12-11 Victoria Baena
Augustine Fouillée's (alias G. Bruno's) Le tour de la France par deux enfants, a children's geography textbook initially published in 1877, has long been considered a nation-building tool in the Th...
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Lyric Spells: The Poet as Magus from Chateaubriand to Mallarmé Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2023-12-07 Roger Pearson
In this article I examine some aspects of the relationship between poetry and magic within the context of nineteenth-century French literature and culture. I focus on Mallarmé's ‘Magie' and use his...
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Zola’s Sense of Reality: Repetition, Deadtime, and Boredom in La Joie de vivre Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2023-09-14 Margot Szarke
ABSTRACT This essay considers Emile Zola's La Joie de vivre (1884) as a study of boredom which turns into a self-reflexive study of literature itself, highlighting the ways in which the text slows down perceptions of objects, events, and the passage of time. This ‘roman psychologique' stretches the reader's attention, thereby inducing forms of ennui that mirror those experienced by the novel's characters
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Generating Life from Literature: Proust in Balzac’s Aquarium Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2023-09-04 Célia Abele
The early drafts of Proust's Recherche discuss the novelty of the relationship between reality and literature developed by Balzac. According to Proust, Balzac infused reality itself with life, just...
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Crossings and Interconnections Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2023-09-01 Therese Dolan, Claire Moran, Mary Orr, Maria C. Scott
Published in Dix-Neuf: Journal of the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes (Vol. 27, No. 2-3, 2023)
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‘Nous sommes tous nés nomades.’ The Pictorial Compasses of Fromentin’s Dominique and Flaubert’s Salammbô of 1862 Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2023-09-01 Mary Orr
ABSTRACT This article takes its lead from Barbara Wright’s simple yet profound literary-critical imperative, ‘“Only Connect” … ’ (2010), to reflect Fromentin’s Dominique critically in Flaubert’s Salammbô – and vice versa – by means of the aesthetic compasses of critical reader response in 1862, and their authors’ earlier travel writing. In therefore arguing by example for renewed examination of important
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Journalistic Intermediation: The Newspaper Poetics of Nerval and Baudelaire Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2023-09-01 Sarah Gubbins
ABSTRACT This article analyses interconnections between the newspaper press and the creative processes of Gérard de Nerval and Charles Baudelaire. From Nerval's dizzying challenge to press restrictions in Les Faux Saulniers (1850), to Baudelaire's harnessing of the cacophony of La Presse in his placement of the petits poèmes en prose, the press environment becomes a unique site of experimentation in
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A Black Life Mattered: Jeanne Duval Then and Now Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2023-09-01 Therese Dolan
ABSTRACT Critics and art historians writing about Jeanne Duval, the subject of Édouard Manet’s 1862 La Maîtresse de Baudelaire, have provided multiple reactions to her, many of them viciously racist. Contemporary novels and short stories have appeared that counter the negative constructions of Duval, casting her not as la muse malade of Baudelaire’s poetry, but using her as a stimulus for their creative
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‘Qu’il est loin mon pays’: Staging (Be)longing in Massenet’s Sapho Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2023-08-28 Emma Kavanagh
At first glance, Jules Massenet's opera Sapho (1897) might appear to water down its source material, substituting the searing social commentary of Alphonse Daudet's novel (1884) with idealised trop...
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Fidgeting Fingers and Fickle Flesh in Flaubert Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2023-08-14 Kari Weil
Writing about Francis Bacon, Gilles Deleuze comments on the body as the ‘zone of indiscernibility' between man and animal, especially ‘as it is flesh or meat.' Bacon's fleshy zone, I argue, finds a...
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Venise et ses télescopages magiques. La ‘Venise intérieure’ de Proust Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2023-08-09 Luciana Persice Nogueira-Pretti
ABSTRACT Venice constitutes a literary topos in France, and many writers contribute to the so-called ‘Venetian madness’, including Marcel Proust. His ‘Inner Venice’ is formulated by following in the footsteps of John Ruskin and having his narrator stumble on the uneven cobblestones of a Parisian courtyard. This emblematic incident of the Recherche generates a telescoping of cities and memories that
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La gesticulation typographique du Pierrot fin-de-siècle : Jules Laforgue et la ponctuation Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2023-07-27 Lucioni Monica
Au cours du XIXe siècle s'affirme le concept de « ponctuation d'auteur ». Dans la fin de siècle, au moment où la « ponctuation blanche » commence à apparaître, Jules Laforgue explore les possibilit...
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‘Ne vous effrayez point du costume bizarre dans lequel vous me voyez’: The Maidservant Disguise in Stendhal’s Mina de Vanghel and Barbey d’Aurevilly’s ‘Le Bonheur dans le crime’ Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2023-07-27 Jessica Rushton
This article analyses how the nineteenth-century fictional heroines in Stendhal's Mina de Vanghel and Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly's `Le Bonheur dans le crime' don a maidservant disguise in order to re...
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Insiders’ Landscapes in John Ruskin and Marcel Proust Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2023-04-03 Chiara Nifosi
ABSTRACT The article explores John Ruskin's legacy in Marcel Proust's literary production through the lens of phenomenological interpretations of place and landscape in twentieth- and twenty-first-century cultural geography. In both authors, landscape is integrated with a subjective geography; nevertheless, while Ruskin absorbs objective topography into a personal narrative, Proust's sense of communality
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Fashion’s Soft Power in Nineteenth-Century France: Introduction Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2023-03-09 Susan E. Hiner
Published in Dix-Neuf: Journal of the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes (Vol. 26, No. 4, 2022)
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The Discreet Power of Nineteenth-Century Gloves Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2023-03-06 Anne Green
ABSTRACT Grenoble’s presentation of 300 pairs of embroidered leather gloves to Empress Eugénie in 1860 exemplifies the traditional use of gloves as soft power. But the huge increase in glove-manufacturing and glove-wearing in nineteenth-century France gave gloves greater influence than ever before. As a powerful tool of social discrimination, they could reveal much about the wearer’s class, character
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The Laboratorium: Nineteenth-Century French Studies in the Anglophone Sphere (Part II) Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2023-03-06 Susan Harrow
ABSTRACT This is the second instalment of a two-part thematic review of nineteenth-century French research in the Anglophone sphere. The review sets aside the standard sub-disciplinary categories in order to envision a laboratorium, a space of multiple confluent and contiguous lines of exploratory work. In this space, more fluid thematic connections surface between projects irrespective of their focus
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Power Dressing: The Sartorial Politics of Dirt in Zola’s Son Excellence Eugène Rougon Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2023-02-27 Kasia Stempniak
ABSTRACT Zola’s 1876 novel Son Excellence Eugène Rougon explores power in its myriad forms in Second Empire Paris. Scholarly discussions, however, have sidestepped the novel’s exploration of soft power. Clorinde Balbi, Rougon’s spurned lover, demonstrates an ability to persuade through non-coercive means by deploying a peculiar arsenal of sartorial strategies including wearing wrinkled or muddy clothing
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The Power of (Writing) History: Jules Quicherat, France’s First Fashion Historian Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2023-02-27 Maude Bass-Krueger
ABSTRACT This article re-evaluates Jules Quicherat's (1814-1882) contributions to French dress studies. Quicherat was the first French historian to develop a theory on the development of clothing in French history by analyzing material artifacts, pictorial, textual, and philological sources. This paper argues that Quicherat should be recognized as the founder of French dress studies, and that his book
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Dressing the Part: King Louis-Philippe I, Tailoring, and Fashioning the July Monarchy Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2023-02-19 John Finkelberg
ABSTRACT The iconography of King Louis-Philippe I and his invoices for garments purchased new and refurbished between 1831 and 1846 bring to light how the July Monarchy deployed fashionable menswear in a canny politics of image-making. In doing so the regime used dress to establish the credentials of the new regime. This work examines Louis-Philippe’s iconography alongside the written records of his
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Le Corset Expérimental: Fashion, Fertility, and Fiction in Zola’s Pot-Bouille and Au Bonheur des Dames Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2023-02-19 Sara Phenix
ABSTRACT This essay examines fertility politics in Zola's Pot—Bouille (1882) and Au Bonheur des dames (1883) in terms of the controversial and ubiquitous foundation garment of nineteenth—century women's dress: the corset. The corset exemplifies the novels' concerns with good form — good form meaning both the ideal feminine silhouette and the code of bourgeois propriety. The corset abets a series of
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Where is the Decadent Suicide? Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2023-02-02 Ryan Atticus Doherty
ABSTRACT Although privileged in both classical and modern literature, suicide’s role in the Decadent literature of the late nineteenth century remains an underexplored and fruitful topic. This article proposes a Decadent theory of self-destruction that decentres the physical act itself. Suicide, in Decadence, functions as a type of escapism, mobilising the idea of death without actually engaging with
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No Earth from Nowhere: Jules Verne’s Critique of Terraforming Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2022-11-14 Sebastian Egholm Lund
ABSTRACT Nineteenth-century France was characterised by theoretical and fictional speculations about planet management, climate change, and anthropogenic power. In this context, Verne's novels strike us as more contemporary than ever. The purpose of his Sans dessus dessous (1889) is a scalar critique that highlights the catastrophic potential of engineering Earth: When terraforming is premised upon
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« L’horrible vrai » des Contes bruns de Balzac Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2022-11-13 Maria Beliaeva Solomon
ABSTRACT « L'horrible vrai est toujours plus horrible encore ! » s'exclame un personnage d'Une conversation entre onze heures et minuit – conte saturé de violence que Balzac intègre, avec Le Grand d'Espagne, au recueil collectif des Contes bruns, composé à la faveur de la mode frénétique et horrifiante. Ces textes, qui ironisent sur les lois de la littérature marchande tout en y acquiesçant, apportent
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Appropriation and Revision as Subversion in Intermèdes: Krysinska’s Palimpsests Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2022-10-19 Darci Gardner
ABSTRACT Marie Kysinska was a pioneer of French free verse, but her detractors characterized her work as derivative. Responding to them, her last collection, Intermèdes: Nouveaux rythmes pittoresques (1903), distances her poetry from its sources of inspiration. Although Intermèdes is replete with borrowed material—from pieces that Krysinska published earlier and from contemporaries' works—Krysinska's
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La vierge et le vagabond: Relire l’affaire Castellan à travers ses représentations médico-légales, sociales et littéraires Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2022-10-10 Sihem Gounni
ABSTRACT Suscitant une réévaluation des critères de définition du consentement jusqu'alors en vigueur, le procès de Castellan (1865) pour viol sous emprise magnétique de Joséphine Hugues manifeste les prémisses de la reconnaissance médico-légale d'états de conscience modifiée. Cet article propose de s'emparer des questions soulevées par cette affaire, dont le travail de Nicole Edelman a valorisé l'intérêt
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July Revolution as Repetition Compulsion: Batz de Trenquelléon’s Georges ou la Révolution de 1830 et l’homme de 1793 Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2022-07-24 Elizabeth Amann
ABSTRACT This essay examines Marie-Caroline Batz de Trenquelléon's novel Georges ou la Révolution de 1830 et l'homme de 1793 (1832), an early response to the Revolution of 1830. Although its author was a legitimist who blamed the French Revolution on Enlightenment thought, the novel is largely based on Voltaire's play Le fanatisme, ou Mahomet le Prophète (1741). This study explores how Batz de Trenquelléon's
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Silencing Scandal: Hector Malot’s Les millions honteux Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2022-07-13 Warren Johnson
ABSTRACT Hector Malot’s 1882 novel, Les millions honteux, highlights the interconnections between money and representational practice. Malot’s critique in this neglected text of the construction of personal reputation through journalistic manipulation demonstrates the inextricable linkage between scandal and the press, and suggests the way that scandals themselves might be constructed or inflated like
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Émile Zola’s Black Lives: Colonial Experiments and the Limits of Empathy in La Joie de vivre Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2022-06-25 Jennifer Yee
ABSTRACT Émile Zola's allusion to (fictional) colonial medical experimentation in La Joie de vivre requires us to reconsider the impact of racial and geographical distance on empathy. Cazenove, a doctor whose formative years were spent with the colonial navy, recalls his own experiments with vivisection on Black women, and trying out poisons on Asian subjects. Drawing on recent theoretical explorations
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Drawing Blanks: Word and Image at the Expositions des Incohérents Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2022-06-17 Greg Kerr
ABSTRACT In the early 1890s, Jules Lévy organised a series of artistic exhibitions under the title of Les Arts Incohérents. Affiliated with Montmartre cabaret culture, the events lampooned the conventions of the Parisian salons and the conventions and institutions of the fine arts. This article explores the importance of the figure of the blank in a selection of art exhibited by the Incohérents. Adopting
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Lèche-vitrines: Human Identity and the Mannequin in Au Bonheur des Dames Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2022-06-17 Kate Foster
ABSTRACT The department store mannequin is often read as representative of commodity or sexual fetishism and, consequently, of woman objectified. This article posits that in Émile Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames (1883), the mannequin can highlight such objectification to the woman in the text. Through close readings of the text's mannequins this article seeks to analyse the combination of estrangement
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New Directions in Nineteenth-Century French Studies Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2022-03-07 Larry Duffy, Andrew Watts, Masha Belenky
ABSTRACT This introduction presents an overview of key critical developments arising in nineteenth-century French and francophone studies over the two decades since the inception of Dix-neuf, and then provides synopses of the articles in the special issue it introduces in terms of their engagement with and advancement of those developments. It identifies further areas of inquiry that fall within the
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Reading Incognito: Periodicals, Sapphic Fictions, and Lesbian Communication Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2022-02-28 Hannah Frydman
ABSTRACT The lesbian past is difficult to recover because traces of it are sparse in the archives. This archival absence, however, is not a straightforward effect of silencing. This paper shows how lesbian invisibility was a conscious production, a shield to protect queer women's lives. Using the often misogynist nineteenth-century French sapphic canon, women seeking women in the late nineteenth and
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Sensing, Measuring, Writing: On Recent French Historiography of the Nineteenth Century Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2022-02-28 Thomas Dodman
ABSTRACT This essay surveys recent francophone historiography of the Nineteenth Century. It focussed on three areas of research in particular: the french tradition of l’histoire des sensibilités; historical works that grapple with time, space, and scales of analysis; and the poetics of writing history in dialogue with literature. In each of these areas, the essay finds evidence of innovative and creative
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Degas’s Breath and The Materiality of Pastel Veils Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2022-02-07 Marni Reva Kessler
ABSTRACT I consider materiality as a lens of art historical analysis and demonstrate how this critical framework drives us to examine the agency not just of the visible and tangible substance of a work, but also of the unseen experiences of the artist, the medium, and the viewer. Focusing on a pastel by Edgar Degas, I further contend that study of the material depths and visceral procedures of objects
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L’empire des grands-pères : crise de succession dans les fictions de la défaite de 1870–71 Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2022-02-01 Marion Glaumaud-Carbonnier
ABSTRACT Curieusement, les personnages des récits racontant le conflit franco-prussien semblent tous partager la même ascendance : ils descendent d'un parent identique, d'un vieillard qui se répète d'histoire en histoire, d'un grand-père ayant participé aux guerres du début du xixe siècle, et qui fait peser son empire sur sa descendance. En s'intéressant à la brisure qui rompt le lien généalogique
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‘In from the Periphery’? Re-framing the Reach of the Nineteenth-Century French Literary-Scientific Imagination Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2022-01-24 Mary Orr
ABSTRACT By investigating what it calls the literary-scientific imagination, this article refocuses critical attention towards new nineteenth-century French scientific knowledge in texts outside the realist ‘canon’. Chateaubriand’s Atala (1801) reveals French natural scientific nomenclatures illuminating significant, non-Western, knowledge. Scientific discovery in ‘provincial’ France proves discipline-
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Anthropocene Under Paris? Rethinking the Quarries and Catacombs Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2022-01-24 Andrea Goulet
ABSTRACT This essay takes the Paris underground as a ‘naturalcultural contact zone’ that allows us to consider what current eco-critical discussions of the Anthropocene might contribute to nineteenth-century French studies. Although the origin-point of the anthropocene era continues to be debated, some scholars point to late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century geological theories of deep time as
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Trans Rachilde: A Roadmap for Recovering the Gender Creative Past and Rehumanizing the Nineteenth Century Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2022-01-18 Rachel Mesch
ABSTRACT Gender-focused studies of nineteenth-century French literature and history in the last few decades have often relied on heteronormative and gender normative paradigms. Using Rachilde as an example, I demonstrate how trans studies can offer tools through which to recover the gender-creative past. These tools are meant to work in concert with feminist and queer theories, while centering gender
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Use, Value, Justification: On History and Historicism in Nineteenth-Century French Studies Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2022-01-18 Andrew J. Counter
ABSTRACT The ‘historical turn' has been particularly fruitful and enabling in nineteenth-century French studies, and methodological approaches that might broadly be described as ‘historicist’ remain dominant within the subfield. Yet these approaches inevitably privilege certain types of literary critical thinking over others, and may even obscure some of the ways in which literary texts have, or can
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At Home [and] Abroad: Cosmopolitanism as Political Practice in George Sand and Pauline Viardot-Garcia Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2022-01-11 Alexandra Wettlaufer
ABSTRACT Cosmopolitanism has been the subject of considerable recent academic inquiry, but the frequently vexed concept has never attracted much interest, to date, in French studies. Yet a cosmopolitan ethos is central to women's cultural production in nineteenth-century France and provides a valuable lens through which to consider networks of meaning and collaborative conversations across the boundaries
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Anxious Influencers – Reading the Nineteenth Century in 2021 Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2022-01-10 Patrick Bray
ABSTRACT Looking at the conditions of academic work in nineteenth-century French literature as well as the foundations of the discipline of literary studies, this article argues that the study of literature in an historical context allows for a flexibility in conceptual frameworks. Readings attentive to the anxiety of overinterpreting the past, creating the possibility for us to compare the differences
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The Laboratorium: Nineteenth-Century French Studies in the Anglophone Sphere Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2022-01-10 Susan Harrow
ABSTRACT This is the first instalment of a two-part thematic review of nineteenth-century French research in the Anglophone sphere. The review sets aside the standard sub-disciplinary categories in order to envision a laboratorium, a space of multiple confluent and contiguous lines of exploratory work. In this space, more fluid thematic connections surface between projects irrespective of their focus
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Villiers de L’Isle-Adam’s Anarchism: A Legacy of the Paris Commune Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2021-12-22 Eleanor Stefiuk
ABSTRACT This article revisits Villiers de L'Isle-Adam's political affinities with fin-de-siècle anarchism through a reading of two of his late short stories, ‘Le Banquet des Éventualistes' and ‘L'Etna chez soi'. My re-evaluation involves moving away from l'ère des attentats of 1892–94 and returning to the Paris Commune as a key event for anarchism. Drawing on the work of Kristin Ross and Julia Nicholls
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Introduction: ‘Intimacy, the Nineteenth-century Outsider’ Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2021-10-23 Claire Moran, Apolline Malevez
ABSTRACT This introductory article gives an overview of the history and culture of intimacy in nineteenth-century art, architecture and literature, and discusses key theories and concepts. It explains how through a re-imagination of the potentialities of ‘intimacy’, nineteenth-century writers, artists and architects expressed the lived realities and the philosophical and aesthetic concerns of a rapidly
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Correction Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2021-09-28
(2021). Correction. Dix-Neuf: Vol. 25, Special issue on Intimacy, pp. 171-172.
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‘Les douceurs de l’intimité’: Men and the Making of Domesticity in Belgian Architecture Magazines (1890-1914) Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2021-07-27 Apolline Malevez
ABSTRACT This article uses intimacy and architecture as a way to tell the lesser-known story of men and the domestic in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Belgium. Drawing upon little-known interior design and architecture magazines, domestic manuals and photographs, I highlight how male architects and critics of architecture contributed to the making of domesticity. I show how ‘intimacy’
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Minor Intimacies and the Art of Berthe Morisot: Impressionism, Female Friendship and Spectatorship Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2021-07-14 Claire Moran
ABSTRACT This article focuses on the topic of minor intimacies or attachments in the work of Berthe Morisot (1841–95). By analysing three inter-connected areas in Morisot, namely the absorbed self, female friendship and the material history of painting, and by comparing the works studied with other well-known Impressionist paintings by Manet and Renoir, and how each area impacts upon spectatorship
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Fabricating Intimacy – Images of Sleeping Women in Nineteenth-Century Painting Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2021-07-09 Rosanna Tindbæk
ABSTRACT In the nineteenth century, paintings of sleeping females proliferated, yet unlike painters of mythological sleep scenes of previous centuries, painters such as Courbet, Bonnard and Vuillard set an intimate scene, leaving the (usually female) sleeper alone with the viewer in interiors, wrapping her up in layers of sheets or heavy dresses. This article reveals how several painters (from about
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Naissance et évolution des espaces de l’intime en France Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2021-06-15 Monique Eleb
ABSTRACT La question de l’intimité dans la vie privée et ma méthode d’analyse des espaces m’ont conduite à proposer dans cet article une généalogie de l’habitation en France et un tableau des différents modes de vie urbains. Cet article historique étudie ces pratiques et les sensibilités, non seulement par l’analyse des discours savants ou non, des témoignages, de la littérature, mais aussi par celle
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Discours de protection de l’intimité féminine et dévoilements voyeuristes: pudibonderies et impudeurs du roman du second XIXe siècle Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2021-06-10 Lucie Nizard
ABSTRACT Une tension paradoxale existe dans les imaginaires romanesques du second XIXe siècle entre la négociation d’une pudeur féminine révélant l’obsession de l’époque pour préserver l'intimité, et le voyeurisme de textes qui ne cessent de dévoiler cette intimité pourtant sans cesse mise en lumière. Si le dévoilement du corps féminin est revendiqué dans beaucoup de textes critiques, il est beaucoup
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Incroyable and Merveilleuse: The Politics of Fashion in Balzac’s Les Chouans Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2021-03-31 Paul Young
ABSTRACT In Les Chouans, Balzac casts two central characters – Corentin and Marie de Verneuil – as an Incroyable and a Merveilleuse, extravagantly-dressed figures from the revolutionary era. Analysing the historical and cultural significance of the Incroyable and the Merveilleuse underscores an ambiguity inherent in this novel, as these dandies (here, sent to disable royalist forces) were known for
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Rewriting French Geographies in Les Français peints par eux-mêmes Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2021-02-24 Caroline Ferraris-Besso
ABSTRACT This article considers the Paris-province divide, which has meaningfully shaped the way one imagines the French territory, and which Les Français peints par eux-mêmes problematizes during the first half of the nineteenth century by crafting in-between spaces where traits usually attributed to provincials seep into Parisians, or where Parisians get ‘provincialized'. This leads to the transformation
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‘Ma tête mise à nu:’ Wigs and Wigmakers in Madame Bovary Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2021-02-24 Susanna Lee
ABSTRACT This article examines the moments in Madame Bovary where wigs are mentioned, reading them as a microscope into the novel’s representation of meaninglessness and its consequences. Starting with the wigs at Vaubyessard, then moving to the solitary wigmaker in Tostes, who serves as a double for Emma, then to the wigmaker in Rouen, and to Emma’s wig at the masked ball, I argue that wigs’ sartorial
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Zolian Zoology: ‘L’amour des bêtes’ and (Human-) Animal (-Machine) Ethics Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2021-03-10 Christopher Robison
ABSTRACT A genuine investment in animal ethics pervades Emile Zola's literary production at all stages of his career, occupying a central yet often overlooked space in his moral and aesthetic thought. Situating Zola's interest in animality alongside his engagement with the life sciences of his day, the present paper examines the parameters of Zola's animal ethics as manifested in his article ‘L'amour
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Precursors of Antislavery: Reassessing the Académie Française Poetry Competition of 1823 Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2021-03-20 Helen McKelvey
ABSTRACT Focussing on a selection of the poems from the 1823 Académie Française's Prix de Poésie, which had for its title l'Abolition de la traite des noirs, this article will explore the key imagery underpinning representations of slavery and arguments for abolition at the time, answering the critical neglect of antislavery poetry and bringing fresh insight to our understanding of the perceptions
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Ladies’ Choice: Prehistory and Sexual Selection in Au Bonheur des dames Dix-Neuf Pub Date : 2021-01-19 Sara Phenix, Daryl Lee
ABSTRACT Criticism of Au Bonheur des Dames has traditionally framed the novel’s Darwinian dynamics in terms of socioeconomic natural selection. We explore another facet of Darwinism in the novel: sexual selection. The urban modernity of Au Bonheur des Dames belies Zola’s concern with deep time. We consider courtship and seduction in the novel in the context of nineteenth-century theories of evolution