FRE 341: 19th-Century French Novel

In The Enemy Within, Gilbert D. Chaitin deepens our understanding of the nature and sources of culture wars during the French Third Republic. By deploying Lacanian concepts to understand the "erotics of politics" revealed in the novels of this period, Chaitin examines the formation of national identity, offering a new intellectual history of the period and shedding light on the intimate relations among literature, education, philosophy, morality, and political order.

Focusing on Stendhal, Gérard de Nerval, George Sand, Émile Zola, and Marcel Proust, The Novel Map: Mapping the Self in Nineteenth-Century French Fiction explores the ways that these writers represent and negotiate the relationship between the self and the world as a function of space in a novel turned map. In this significant study, Patrick M. Bray charts a new direction in critical theory.

The turning point of Madame Bovary, which Flaubert memorably set at the opera, is only the most famous example of a surprisingly long tradition, one common to a range of French literary styles and sub-genres. In the first book-length study of that tradition to appear in English, Cormac Newark examines representations of operatic performance from Balzac's La Comédie humaine to Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu, by way of Dumas père's Le Comte de Monte-Cristo and Leroux's Le Fantôme de l'Opéra.

The essays of this volume show how Joyce's work engaged with the many upheavals and revolutions within the French nineteenth-century novel and its contexts. They delve into the complexities of this engagement, tracing its twists and turns, and reemerge with fascinating and rich discoveries. The contributors explore Joyce's explicit and implicit responses to Alexandre Dumas, Honore de Balzac, Victor Hugo and Emile Zola and, of course, Flaubert.

Reconstructing Woman explores a scenario common to the works of four major French novelists of the nineteenth century: Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, and Villiers. In the texts of each author, a "new Pygmalion" turns away from a real woman he has loved or desired and prefers instead his artificial re-creation of her. The central chapters examine this plot and its meanings in multiple texts of each author. The premise is that this shared scenario stems from the discovery in the nineteenth century that humans are transformable.

In Fiction Rivals Science, Allen Thiher describes the epistemic rivalry that the major nineteenth-century French novelists felt in dealing with science. After brief considerations of Stendhal, Thiher focuses on the four most important "realist" novelists in France: Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, and, going into the twentieth century, Proust. According to Thiher, each of these novelists considered himself to be in competition with science to make the novel an instrument for knowledge.