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This work shows how the literary and political ideas of Mirbeau generated a vision of reality foreshadowing Modernity. Through Mirbeau's descriptions of the effects of technological, scientific developments of the day and the temporal and spatial implications of such developments on the literary process, coupled with his advocacy of a radical political ideology to expose the inadequacies of social democracy, it covers the relationship between literature and politics, showing how innovation in the creative process provides a reflective framework for the expression of political difference.
Political firebrand, tireless reformer, champion of the avant-garde, Octave Mirbeau embraced his role as disturber of the peace. Inspired by Kropotkin and Dostoyevsky, Mirbeau became the social conscience of the era, speaking in a clear voice to impugn capitalist ideology, to defend the cause of the worker, the child, the pauper, the prostitute, and the soldier sacrificed as cannon fodder. Mirbeau’s critiques of society seethe with indictments of indoctrinating agencies: the family, which stifled the child’s freedom and expressive creativity, the school, which besotted students with the aridity of its curriculum, the army, which privileged patriotism over the sanctity of life, the church...
Decadence is seldom looked at in the context of colonialism, and yet its heyday in the 1880s and 1890s is directly contemporary with the expansion of France’s modern colonial empire. Ever a slippery signifier, Decadence figures alternately as pro-colonial, anticolonial and apolitical. This edited volume gives a sense of the sheer range and diversity of intersections between colonialism and Decadence, from anticolonial anarchist writers to colonial discourse, from nineteenth-century women writers to our contemporary, Michel Houellebecq. Different chapters explore these intersections in the cultural imagination of dance, the novel, travel writing, historiographical theory, and literary netwo...
Provides the most complete listing available of books, articles, and book reviews concerned with French literature since 1885. The bibliography is divided into three major divisions: general studies, author subjects (arranged alphabetically), and cinema. This book is for the study of French literature and culture.
Après l'obtention de son diplôme de médecine, Maurice Loewel dit Level commence à écrire des contes et nouvelles. Le succès venant, il se consacre principalement à l'écriture, collaborant à de nombreux journaux et revues. Ce volume réunit pour la première fois les quarante contes que Maurice Level a publiés dans le quotidien sportif L'Auto, de 1904 à 1910, d'abord sous le pseudonyme de Hemelle. Journal littéraire méconnu dirigé par Henri Desgrange, L'Auto accueillait les plus importants écrivains-journalistes de son temps, tels Maurice Leblanc, Jean Richepin ou J.-H. Rosny qui se donnaient pour mission de promouvoir et de défendre l'éthique sportive par la littérature, contes, chroniques ou articles. Alternant conte bouffon ou tragique, Maurice Level cherche surtout des situations burlesques impliquant automobilistes ou cyclistes. Complété d'une bibliographie, ce volume a été préparé par Jean-Luc BUARD (co-fondateur et rédacteur en chef de la revue Le Rocambole).
Vernon Lee was the pen name of Violet Paget – a prolific author best known for her supernatural fiction, her support of the Aesthetic Movement and her radical polemics. She was an active correspondent who included many well-known figures among her circle. This scholarly edition of her letters makes a selection from more than 30 archives worldwide.
In an era when reality was aestheticized as collectibles, Octave Mirbeau unleashed his fiction like a destructive machine, setting fire to stale material and discredited ideologies, burning them as fuel and expelling texts as clean emissions. In this first English-language overview of all the novels published under Mirbeau's name, this study argues that Mirbeau is unique among his fin-de-siècle peers. Unlike the Decadents, whose art was a reliquary in which dead inspiration was preserved, Mirbeau disengaged himself from the corpses of past works. Abhorring tradition and complacency, Mirbeau elaborated a kinetics of fiction that made the novel into an agent of violent transformation. Contras...
Medicine and Maladies explores the aesthetic, medical, and socio-political contexts that informed depictions of illness and disease in nineteenth-century France. Eleven essays by specialists in nineteenth-century French literature and visual culture probe the acts of writing, reading, and viewing corporeal afflictions across the works of medical practitioners, surgeons, pharmacists, novelists, and artists. Tracing scientific discourse in literary narratives and signalling references to fiction in medical texts, the contributions to this interdisciplinary volume invite us to rethink the relationship between the humanities and the medical sciences.
The essays in this wide-ranging, beautifully illustrated volume capture the theoretical range and scholarly rigor of recent criticism that has fundamentally transformed the study of French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art. Readers are invited to consider the profound issues and penetrating questions that lie beneath this perennially popular body of work as the contributors examine the art world of late nineteenth-century France—including detailed looks at Monet, Manet, Pissarro, Degas, Cézanne, Morisot, Seurat, Van Gogh, and Gauguin. The authors offer fascinating new perspectives, placing the artworks from this period in wider social and historical contexts. They explore these pai...