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The other rise of the novel in eighteenth-century French fiction
The rise of the novel paradigm—and the underlying homology between the rise of a bourgeois middle class and the coming of age of a new literary genre—continues to influence the way we analyze economic discourse in the eighteenth-century French novel. Characters are often seen as portraying bourgeois values, even when historiographical evidence points to the virtual absence of a self-conscious and coherent bourgeoisie in France in the early modern period. Likewise, the fact that the nobility was a dynamic and diverse group whose members had learned to think in individualistic and meritocratic terms as a result of courtly politics is often ignored. The Other Rise of the Novel calls for a radical revision of how realism, the language of self-interest and commercial exchanges, and idealized noble values interact in the early modern novel. It focuses on two novels from the seventeenth century, Furetière's Roman bourgeois and Lafayette's Princesse de Clèves and four novels from the eighteenth century, Prévost's Manon Lescaut, Graffigny's Lettres d'une Péruvienne, Rousseau's La Nouvelle Héloïse and Sade's Les infortunes de la vertu. It argues that eighteenth-century French fiction does not reflect material culture mimetically and that character action is best analyzed by focusing on the social and discursive exchanges staged by the text, rather than by trying to create parallels between specific behavior and actual historical changes. The novel produces its own reality by transforming characters and their stories into alternative social models, different articulations of how individuals should define their economic relations to others. The representation of interpersonal relations often highlights personal conceptions of private interest that cannot be easily reconciled with the traditional narrative of a transition towards economic modernity. Realism, then, is not only about verisimilar storytelling and psychological depth: it is an epistemological questioning about the type of access to reality that a particular genre can give its readers.
eBook
Madame Bovary : provincial ways
Offers a new translation of Flaubert's classic tale, in which the title character turns to spending and a series of affairs to combat the boredom of married life and, heartbroken and crippled by debts, takes drastic action that results in tragedy.
Book
Madame Bovary
One of the world's most celebrated novels, soon to be a major motion picture starring Mia Wasikowska This indelible portrait of a beautiful woman's aching lust for more--more romance, more glamour, more fun--and her resulting tragic demise, is widely considered one of the finest novels ever written.
eBook
Creating an Online Exhibit in a First-Year Seminar: \Luxury Objects in the Age of Marie Antoinette\
How can students arrive at a closer understanding of the material culture that shaped the lives of the French aristocracy and nascent bourgeoisie of late eighteenth-century France? This is one of the challenges that students face in the first-year seminar, Re-Membering Marie Antoinette, as they study the multiple and conflicting ways that Marie Antoinette was and has been represented in biographies, portraits, memoirs, fiction, film, fashion, plays and pornographic pamphlets, records of her trial in 1793, and the spaces and activies that shaped her daily life. This article focuses on a series of scaffolded assignments that lead students to imagine what Marie Antoinette's daily life might have been like by exploring the material culture of the period through the objects, decor, and activities depicted in Moreau le Jeune's series of engravings, Le Monument du Costume, and the craftsmanship, labor, and social practices they entail as described in Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie.
Journal Article
Madame Bovary. Episode 2
A new start in Yonville coincides with the discovery that Emma is pregnant and the introduction of Leon, a handsome and passionate young law student who quickly becomes Emma's close companion and confidante.
Streaming Video
Madame Bovary. Episode 1
Following the death of her mother, Emma Rouault spends her days dreaming of romance. A focus for her romantic ideals arrives in the form of Dr Charles Bovary, and he is soon captivated by her youthful charms.
Streaming Video
Madame Bovary. Episode 3
On the morning of departure, Rodolphe has second thoughts and flees town, leaving a farewell note in a basket of fruit presented to the Bovary household. Traumatised, Emma enters a downward spiral from which she may never recover.
Streaming Video
Baudelaire’s Impure Transfers
This chapter arose from the challenge of presenting a difficult author in lucid, clear text for a standard reference work. Light annotation has been added for this revision. In focusing on the complexities in Baudelaire’s experience, criticism, and poetry, I elaborate his lexicon of impurity, the terms that chart the process of making connections by breaking bounds.
Charles Baudelaire lived in a world even more aware than our own of rapid transformations in every aspect of life. The very term “modernity,” which figures importantly in his writings, only came into the French language during his youth. By the time he
Book Chapter