Department of French

Department of French

   

Claire White specializes in nineteenth-century French literature and art. Her doctoral thesis examined cultural representations of work and leisure in French fiction, poetry and Neo-Impressionist painting of the early Third Republic, with a focus on the works of Émile Zola, Jules Laforgue and Maximilien Luce. She has published on George Sand and Zola's utopian fiction (in the journals Dix-Neuf and Modern Language Review), and an article on Zola and Freud is forthcoming in Romanic Review. She has spoken at numerous conferences in the UK and the USA on Zola, Luce, Laforgue, Georges Seurat, and will be giving a paper at the 2013 MLA conference in Boston on Sand and Marx. She is currently preparing articles on Georges Seurat and theories of pleasure, and Jules Laforgue's Sunday poetry.

Claire is at present serving as the Publicity Officer for the UK Society of Dix-Neuviémistes. In October 2012, she co-organised a cross-disciplinary Symposium on Work Ethics: Rethinking Literary Labour in the Long Nineteenth Century, supported by CRASSH.