1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910455095203321

Autore

White Nicholas <1967->

Titolo

The family in crisis in late nineteenth-century French fiction / / Nicholas White [[electronic resource]]

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Cambridge : , : Cambridge University Press, , 1999

ISBN

1-107-11321-0

0-511-00524-5

1-280-16164-7

0-511-11642-X

0-511-15012-1

0-511-31002-1

0-511-48591-3

0-511-05353-3

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (xii, 214 pages) : digital, PDF file(s)

Collana

Cambridge studies in French ; ; 57

Disciplina

843/.809355

Soggetti

French fiction - 19th century - History and criticism

Families in literature

Adultery in literature

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (p. 205-211) and index.

Nota di contenuto

Introduction: fin de siecle, fin de famille? -- Pt. 1. The Promiscuous Narrative of 'Pot-Bouille' -- 1. Demon lover or erotic atheist? -- 2. The rhythms of performance -- Pt. 2. Pleasures and Fears of Paternity: Maupassant and Zola -- 3. Bel-Ami: fantasies of seduction and colonization -- 4. Incest in Les Rougon-Macquart -- Pt. 3. The Blindness of Passions: Huysmans, Hennique and Zola -- 5. The conquest of privacy in A Rebours -- 6. Painting, politics and architecture -- Coda: Bourget's Un divorce and the 'honnete femme'.

Sommario/riassunto

The Family in Crisis in Late Nineteenth-Century French Fiction, first published in 1999, 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 overlooked texts from fin de siècle 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'.