The Aesthetics of Artifice
Villiers’s L’Ève Future

Marie Lathers (Author)

9780807892589

Paperback / softback, published 28 February 1997

148 pages
23.1 x 15 x 1.2 cm, 0.283 kg

A detailed reading of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's 1886 novel L'Eve future, this study explores the author's construction of the android woman from two angles: science and art. Marie Lathers shows that the novel is a satire of the era's belief that science would cure the ills of the modern world and redeem the femme fatale. She also exposes Villiers's prescient discussion of technologies that form hybrids of science and art. The only lengthy study of Villiers's novel in English, Lathers's book engages significant thinkers of nineteenth-century French aesthetic, medical, and scientific discourse. Contemporary cultural and feminist criticism, particularly that of Roland Barthes, Mary Ann Doane, and Judith Butler, forms the framework of her analysis.