The Family in Crisis in Late Nineteenth-century French Fiction

by Nicholas White

• ISBN13: 9780521026802
• ISBN10: 0521026806
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-11-02
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

The Family in Crisis in Late Nineteenth-Century French Fiction focuses on a key moment in the construction of the modern view of the family in France. Nicholas White's analysis of novels by Zola, Maupassant, Hennique, Bourget and Armand Charpentier is fashioned by perspectives on a wide cultural field, including legal, popular and academic discourses on the family and its discontents. His account encourages a close rereading of canonical as well as hitherto overlooked texts from fin de siécle France. What emerges between the death of Flaubert in 1880 and the publication of Bourget's Un divorce in 1904 is a series of Naturalist and post-Naturalist representations of transgressive behaviour in which tales of adultery, illegitimacy, consanguinity, incest and divorce serve to exemplify and to offer a range of nuances on the Third Republic's crisis in what might now be termed 'family values'.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	xi
Introduction: fin de siècle, fin de famille?	1	(24)
PART ONE THE PROMISCUOUS NARRATIVE OF 'POT-BOUILLE'
1 Demon lover or erotic atheist?	25	(16)
2 The rhythms of performance	41	(32)
PART TWO PLEASURES AND FEARS OF PATERNITY: MAUPASSANT AND ZOLA
3 Bel-Ami: fantasies of seduction and colonization	73	(25)
4 Incest in Les Rougon-Macquart	98	(29)
PART THREE THE BLINDNESS OF PASSIONS: HUYSMANS, HENNIQUE AND ZOLA
5 The conquest of privacy in A Rebours	127	(23)
6 Painting, politics and architecture	150	(26)
Coda: Bourget's tin divorce and the 'honnête femme'	176	(15)
Notes	191	(14)
Bibliography	205	(7)
Index	212