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Making the Marvelous
Rori Bloom demonstrates that Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy (1652–1705) and Henriette-Julie de Murat (1670–1716) changed the stakes of the fairy tale: instead of inviting their readers to marvel at the magic that changes rags to riches, they enjoined them to acknowledge the skill that transforms raw materials into beautifully made works of art.
Man of Quality, Man of Letters
Best known for the short novel Manon Lescaut, Antoine-Francois Prevost was also the author of a dictionary, several important translations, an extensive corpus of historical writing, a dozen novels, and more than twenty volumes of journalism. While much of his fiction is reminiscent of the adventure stories of baroque novelists, Prevost's nonfiction expresses an encyclopedic ambition that prefigures the intellectual enterprises of the philosophes. In her exploration of the tension between his novelistic and journalistic writing, Rori Bloom argues that Prevost's novels employ established and even archaic attitudes toward authorship, while his newspaper elaborates a new understanding of the roles of author and public. By juxtaposing Prevost's novels and newspaper, Bloom analyzes the sophisticated literary strategies through which this author constructed his complex professional identity. Rori Bloom is an Assistant Professor of French in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Florida.
Medieval Saints in Late Nineteenth Century French Culture
Legends, tales, and mysteries featuring saints captivated the French at the end of the nineteenth century. As Jean Lorrain pointed out in an 1891 article for the popular weekly Le Courrier Francais, the seemingly simple language of the saints' lives, their noble battles between good and evil and the atmosphere of religious mysticism appealed to many, especially those involved in the visual and performing arts. Ironically The Third Republic (1870-1940), a regime that claimed to reinforce and institute the secular ideas of the French Revolution, was witness to this great popular interest in the saints and religious imagery. The eight essays in this work explore the popularity of the saints from the 1850s to the 1920s. The essays evaluate the role they played in literature, art, music, science, history and politics, examine portrayals of the saints' lives in both low and high culture (from children's literature, shadow plays and the popular press to literature, opera and theological studies), and reveal the prevalence of the saints in fin-de-siecle France.
Making the Marvelous
At a moment when France was coming to new prominence in the production of furniture and fashion, the fairy tales of Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy (1652-1705) and Henriette-Julie de Murat (1670-1716) gave pride of place to richly detailed descriptions of palaces, gardens, clothing, and toys. Through close readings of these authors' descriptive prose, Rori Bloom shows how these practitioners of a supposedly minor genre made a major contribution as chroniclers and critics of the decorative arts in Old Regime France. Identifying these authors' embrace of the pretty and the playful as a response to a frequent critique of fairy tales as childish and feminine, Making the Marvelous demonstrates their integration of artisan's work, child's play, and the lady's toilette into a complex vision of creativity. D'Aulnoy and Murat changed the stakes of the fairy tale, Bloom argues: instead of inviting their readers to marvel at the magic that changes rags to riches, they enjoined them to acknowledge the skill that transforms raw materials into beautiful works of art.
Modes of Play in Eighteenth-Century France
Collecting diverse critical perspectives on the topic of play—from dolls, bilboquets, and lotteries, to writing itself—this volume offers new insights into how play was used to represent and reimagine the world in eighteenth-century France. In documenting various modes of play, contributors theorize its relation to law, religion, politics, and economics. Equally important was the role of “play” in plays, and the function of theatrical performance in mirroring, and often contesting, our place in the universe. These essays remind us that the spirit of play was very much alive during the “Age of Reason,” providing ways for its practitioners to consider more “serious” themes such as free will and determinism, illusions and equivocations, or chance and inequality. Standing at the intersection of multiple intellectual avenues, this is the first comprehensive study in English devoted to the different guises of play in Enlightenment France, certain to interest curious readers across disciplinary backgrounds.
The Philosophy of Literary Amateurism
In this coherent, intense study, Naomi Lebowitz defines and explores what she calls "the philosophy of literary amateurism." With expert readings of the works of major international writers of the Western tradition, Lebowitz passionately argues that all great writing is guided by a moral complexity and richness. Lebowitz defines literary amateurism as an attitude of anti-professionalism that allows a writer to explore and represent experience with complexity and moral fluidity. Citing Montaigne as the father of this philosophy, Lebowitz explores the work of such followers of Montaigne as Emerson, Balzac, Dickens, Henry James, Conrad, William James, Santayana, Wallace Stevens, Virginia Woolf, and Italo Svevo, comparing their work to that of more self-consciously professional writers like Flaubert, Taine, Rousseau, and Proust. In a hyper-professional age of criticism marked by formulaic and political dictition and syntax, Lebowitz tries to recover the amateur perspective naturally carried by great literature's form and play. The Philosophy of Literary Amateurism makes a lasting contribution to the recovery of more generous relations between life and literature.
Eighteenth-Century Escape Tales
This volume is a study of the interdisciplinary nature of prison escape tales and their impact on European cultural identity in the eighteenth century. Prison escape narratives are reflections of the tension between the individual’s potential happiness via freedom and the confines of the social order. Contemporary readers identified with the prisoner, who, like them suffered the injustices of an absolutist regime. The state imprisons such renegades not just out of a desire to protect the public but more importantly to protect the state itself. Hence, prison escape tales can be linked with a revolutionary tendency: when free, such former detainees equipped with a pen openly and justly challenge the status quo, hoping to inspire their readers to do the same. Escape tales have had a considerable impact on cultural identity, because they embody the interdependent relationship between literature and myth on the one hand and literature and history on the other.
Sexuality, Iconography, and Fiction in French
This book explores the modern cultural history of the queer martyr in France and Belgium. By analyzing how popular writers in French responded to Catholic doctrine and the tradition of St. Sebastian in art, Queering the Martyr shows how religious and secular symbols overlapped to produce not one, but two martyr-types. These are the queer type, typified first by Gustave Flaubert, which is a philosophical foil, and the gay type, popularized by Jean Genet but created by the Belgian Georges Eekhoud, which is a political and pornographic device. Grounded in feminist queer theory and working from a post-psychoanalytical point of view, the argument explores the potential and limits of these two figures, noting especially the persistence of misogyny in religious culture.
"Better in France?"
This book discusses the way ideas and forms traveled between Britain and France during the eighteenth century, and the extent to which the circulation of ideas between the two countries could be difficult. The volume shows that this difficulty, because it was acknowledged and often thematized, contributed to an increased awareness of what was really at stake in the very concept of Enlightenment. The examination of points of contact between the two cultures-contacts that became very much the fashion in the course of the eighteenth century-helps us understand how apparently common concepts and concerns fared differently from one country to the next, while being enriched by those contacts. The ...
1650-1850
With issue twenty-four of 1650–1850, this annual enters its second quarter-century with a new publisher, a new look, a new editorial board, and a new commitment to intellectual and artistic exploration. As the diversely inventive essays in this first issue from the Bucknell University Press demonstrate, the energy and open-mindedness that made 1650–1850 a success continue to intensify. This first Bucknell issue includes a special feature that explores the use of sacred space in what was once incautiously called “the age of reason.” A suite of book reviews renews the 1650–1850 legacy of full-length and unbridled evaluation of the best in contemporary Enlightenment scholarship. These...
