Department of French

Paper Fr 9

French Literature, Thought and History from 1789 to 1898

What follows is neither a list of required reading nor> a complete bibliography. It is designed to help you pursue your own explorations within the period. You might find the need for an initial way into this material. There are a number of possible approaches: you might, for example, sample works:

by a number of the better-known authors of the period, such as: Balzac, Stendhal, Baudelaire, Nerval, Flaubert, Maupassant and Zola, or, equally, the historically marginalised authors who are the increasing focus of scholarly attention such as George Sand.
from within a particular genre, such as: the novel (Stendhal, Flaubert, Zola) or poetry (Hugo, Baudelaire, Laforgue, Rimbaud, Mallarmé).
from within particular movements or tendencies, such as: Romanticism (Constant, Chateaubriand); early modernism (Baudelaire, Flaubert, Nerval); Naturalism (Zola, Maupassant); Decadence (Huysmans, Rachilde).
with particular social or political resonance, such as women's writing (Cottin, Duras, Sand, Rachilde).

General Introductory Reading

Denis Hollier (ed.), A New History of French Literature (Harvard University Press). See pp. 566-839, which cover the period 1789-1898, and offer a series of short articles on key moments in the cultural history of the century.
Sarah Kay, Terence Cave & Malcolm Bowie, A Short History of French Literature (Oxford University Press). See Part III (by Malcolm Bowie) on The Modern Period 1789-2000. In addition to Bowie's 'Overview of the Period', you should focus on pp. 208-53 of his account of 'The Period in Close-Up'.
John Cruickshank (ed.), French Literature and its background, Vols. 4 & 5, The Nineteenth Century (Oxford University Press) for a more traditional view.
The Oxford Companion to Literature in French, ed. Peter France (Oxford University Press) contains very useful outlines of broad cultural movements such as Romanticism, more specific topics such as le mal du siècle, and individual entries on writers.

Introductory Reading for Section A Topics

Desire and Transgression

Barthes, Roland, Le Plaisir du texte, 1973
Belenky, Masha, The Anxiety of Dispossession: Jealousy in Nineteenth-Century French Culture, 2008
Belenky, Masha, and Rachel Mesch (eds.), The State of the Union, a special number of the online journal Dix-Neuf (Number 11, October 2008)
Bernard, Claudie, Penser la famille au XIXe siècle, 2008
Cohen, Margaret, The Sentimental Education of the Novel, 2002
Cryle, Peter, 'Love and Epistemology in French Fiction of the Fin-de-Siècle: in Search of the Pathological Unknown', Dix-Neuf, 3 (2004)
Foucault, Michel, Surveiller et punir, 1975
Gleyses, Chantal, La Femme coupable, 1994
Mainardi, Patricia, Husbands, Wives and Lovers, 2004
Matlock, Jann, Scenes of Seduction: Prostitution, Hysteria, and Reading Difference in Nineteenth-Century France, 1994
Mesch, Rachel, The Hysteric's Revenge: French Women Writers at the Fin de Siècle, 2006
Overton, Bill, The Novel of Female Adultery, 1996
Segal, Naomi, The Adulteress's Child, 1992
Tanner, Tony, Adultery in the Novel, 1979
Waller, Margaret, The Male Malady, 1993
White, Nicholas, The Family in Crisis in Late 19th-Century French Fiction, 1999
White, Nicholas and Naomi Segal (eds.), Scarlet Letters: Fictions of Adultery from Antiquity to the 1990s, 1997
Wing, Nathaniel, Between Genders: Narrating Difference in Early French Modernism, 2004

Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century

Benjamin, Walter, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, 1973
Buck-Morss, Susan, Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, 1989
Clark, T.J., The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers, 1985
Gill, Miranda, Eccentricity and the Cultural Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Oxford University Press, 2009)
Parkhurst Fergusson, Priscilla, Paris as Revolution: Writing the Nineteenth-Century City, 1994
Prendergast, Christopher, Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century, 1982
Citron, Pierre, La poésie de Paris dans la littérature française de Rousseau à Baudelaire, 2 vols., 1961
Tester, Keith (ed.), The Flâneur, 1994
Gluck, Mary, Popular Bohemia: Modernism and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris, 2005

Introductory Reading for Section B Topics

1. The roman personnel

Waller, Margaret, The Male Malady, 1993
Cohen, Margaret, The Sentimental Education of the Novel, 1991, Chapter 1: 'Conflicting Duties: Sentimental Poetics'
Matlock, Jann, 'Novels of Testimony and the "Invention" of the Modern French Novel', in The Cambridge Companion to the French Novel, ed. Tim Unwin, 1997
Unwin, Tim, Adolphe, 1986
Knight, Diana, 'The Readability of René's Secret', French Studies 37, 1983, pp. 35-46
Cohen, Margaret, Introduction to Sophie Cottin's Claire d'Albe (the 2002 MLA edition)

2. Early realist fiction

Moretti, Franco, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture, 1987
Schor, Naomi, Breaking the Chain: Women, Theory, and French Realist Fiction, 1985
Cohen, Margaret and Christopher Prendergast (eds.), Spectacles of Realism: Gender, Body, Genre, 1995
Prendergast, Christopher, The Order of Mimesis: Balzac, Stendhal, Nerval, Flaubert, 1986
Brooks, Peter, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative, 1984
Jefferson, Ann, Reading Realism in Stendhal, 1988
Furst, Lilian, All is True: The Claims and Strategies of Realist Fiction, 1995

3. Rethinking representation after 1848

Lloyd, Rosemary (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Baudelaire, 2006
Unwin, Tim (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Flaubert, 2004
Gluck, Mary, Popular Bohemia: Modernism and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris, 2005
Chambers, Ross, Mélancolier et opposition: Les Débuts du modernisme en France, 1987
Wing, Nathaniel, The Limits of Narrative: Essays on Baudelaire, Flaubert, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé, 1986
Culler, Jonathan, Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty, 1974
Terdiman, Richard, Discourse/Counter-Discourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Opposition in Nineteenth-Century France, 1985
Barthes, Roland, Le Degré zéro de l'écriture, 1953
Green, Ann, Mary Orr and Timothy Unwin (eds.), Flaubert: Shifting Perspectives, a special number of Dix-Neuf, 15 (2011)
Orr, Mary, 'Still life and moving death in Flaubert's L'Éducation sentimentale', Dix-Neuf. 5 (2005)
Porter, Laurence, 'Flaubert's Fictional Conversations', Dix-Neuf, 5 (2005)
Yee, Jennifer, 'Mementoes and the Memory of the Reader in L'Éducation sentimentale', Dix-Neuf, 14 (2010)

4. Naturalist writing

Pagès, Alain, Le Naturalisme, 1989
Mitterand, Henri, Le regard et le signe: poétique du roman réaliste et naturaliste, 1987
Baguley, David, Naturalist Fiction: The Entropic Vision, 1990
Nelson, Brian (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Zola, 2007
Miterrand, Henri, Zola et le naturalisme, 1989
Serres, Michel, Feux et signaux de Brume: Zola, 1975
Baguley, David, Emile Zola: 'L'Assommoir', 1992
Bell, David F., Models of Power: Politics and Economics in Zola's 'Rougon-Macquart', 1988
Place-Verghnes, Floriane, Jeux pragmatiques dans les contes et nouvelles de Guy de Maupassant, 2005
Grandadam, Emmanuèle, Contes et nouvelles de Maupassant: pour une poétique de recueiul, 2007
Lloyd, Christopher, J.-K. Huysmans and the fin-de-siècle novel, 1990
Godo, Emmanuel, Huysmans et l'évangile du réel, 2007
Counter, Andrew, '"Sain d'esprit": The Notary as Analyst in the Short Fiction of Guy de Maupassant', Dix-Neuf, 9 (2007)
Lethbridge, Robert, 'In the Looking-Glass: Zola and Contemporary Painting', Dix-Neuf, 1 (2003)
White, Claire, 'Rewriting Work and Leisure in Émile Zola's Travail', Dix-Neuf, 13 (2009)

5. Women's writing

Finch, Alison, Women's Writing in Nineteenth-Century France, 2000
Cohen, Margaret, The Sentimental Education of the Novel, 1991
Schor, Naomi, George Sand and Idealism, 1993
Massardier-Kenney, Françoise, Gender in the Fiction of George Sand, 2000
Didier, Béatrice, George Sand écrivain, 1998
Hoog Naginski, Isabelle, George Sand: Writing for Her Life, 1991
Rabine, Leslie, 'George Sand and the Myth of Femininity', Women and Literature, 4 (1976), 2-17
Holmes, Diana, Rachilde: Decadence, Gender and the Woman Writer, 2001
Harkness, Nigel, 'Performance, représentation et (il)lisibilité du genre dans la fiction sandienne des années 1830', Dix-Neuf, 13 (2009)
Holmes, Diana, 'Decadent Love: Rachilde and the Popular Romance', Dix-Neuf, 1 (2003)
Prasad, Pratima, 'Contesting Realism: Mimesis and Performance in George Sand's Novels', Dix-Neuf, 3 (2004)
Nesci, Catherine (ed.), Delphine de Girardin, a special number of Dix-Neuf, 7 (2006)

6. Poetry

Schultz, Gretchen, , 1999
Prendergast, Christopher (ed.), Nineteenth-Century French Poetry: Introductions to Close Readings, 1990
Porter, Laurence M., The Crisis of French Symbolism, 1990
Cohn, Robert Greer, The Poetry of Rimbaud, 1973
Ross, Kristin, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune, 1988
Pearson, Roger, Unfolding Mallarmé: The Development of a Poetic Art, 1996, and Mallarmé and Circumstance: The Translation of Silence, 2005
Benjamin, Walter, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, 1973
Lloyd, Rosemary (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Baudelaire, 2006
Evans, David (ed.), Banville, a special number of Dix-Neuf, 14 (2010)
Fournier, Jean-François, 'Baudelaire et le rire d'enfance', Dix-Neuf, 12 (2009)
Kerr, Greg, 'Rhetorics of Transformation in Rimbaud's Illuminations', Dix-Neuf, 14 (2010)
Olds, Marshall, 'Visual Culture: The later Mallarmé and japonisme', Dix-Neuf, 3 (2004)
Pearson, Roger, '"Les Chiffres et les Lettres": Mallarmé's 'Or' and the Gold Standard of Poetry', Dix-Neuf, 2 (2004)
Bootle, Sam, 'Jules Laforgue and the Illusion of Spontaneity', Dix-Neuf, 15 (2011)

Other Authors

Previous generations of Fr9 students have also consulted this reading list, which is in the process of being updated; in the meantime, you may find more recent and relevant material on the bibliographies issued by your supervisor and in lectures.