Literature and Material Culture from Balzac to Proust: The Collection and Consumption of Curiosities

by Janell Watson

• ISBN13: 9780521661560
• ISBN10: 0521661560
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-01-28
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This book addresses the issues of collecting, consuming, classifying and describing the curiosities, antiques and objets d'art that proliferated in French literary texts during the last decades of the nineteenth century. After Balzac made such issues significant in canonical literature, the Goncourt brothers, Huysmans, Mallarmè and Maupassant celebrated their golden age. Flaubert and Zola scorned them. Rachilde and Lorrain perverted them. Proust commemorated their last moments of glory. Focusing on the bibelot (the modern French term for knick-knack, curiosity or other collectible), Janell Watson shows how the sudden prominence given to curiosities and collecting in nineteenth-century literature signals a massive change in attitudes to the world of goods, which in turn restructured the literary text according to the practical logic of daily life, calling into question established scholarly notions of order. Her study makes an important contribution to the literary history of material culture.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	x
Introduction	1	(4)
The bibelot
A nineteenth-century object	5	(22)
The logic(s) of material culture
Imitation, accumulation, and mobility	27	(30)
The fashionable artistic interior
Social (re)encoding in the domestic sphere	57	(26)
Flaubert's ``musees recus''
Bouvard and Pecuchet's consumerist epistemology	83	(26)
Narrate, describe, or catalogue?
The novel and the inventory form in Balzac, the Goncourts, and Huysmans	109	(34)
The parlour of critical theory
Reading dwelling space across disciplines	143	(27)
Rearranging the Oedipus
Fantastic and decadent floor-plans in Gautier, Maupassant, Lorrain, and Rachilde	170	(25)
Notes	195	(15)
Bibliography	210	(15)
Index	225