The Family in Crisis in Late Nineteenth-Century French Fiction

A 1999 analysis of how novels represent the crisis in 'family values' in late nineteenth-century France.

Nicholas White (Author)

9780521562744, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 13 January 1999

232 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.45 kg

'… much rhetorical brilliance … the book demonstrates an impressive level of critical sophistication, skilfully anatomizing, for example, the parodic elements inherent in novels of adultery which rework the cycle of duplicity and disillusion.' The Times Literary Supplement

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'.

Acknowledgements
Introduction: fin de siècle, fin de famille?
Part I. The Promiscuous Narrative of 'Pot-Bouille': 1. Demon lover or erotic atheist?
2. The rhythms of performance
Part II. Pleasures and Fears of Paternity: Maupassant and Zola: 3. Bel-Ami: fantasies of seduction and colonization
4. Incest in Les Rougon-Macquart
Part III. 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 'honnête femme'
Notes
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK]