Amorous restoration : love, sex, and politics in early nineteenth-century France / Andrew J. Counter.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Counter, Andrew J.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

France--Civilization--1789-1830.

France.

Civilization.

France--History--Restoration, 1814-1830.

History.

Genre:

History.

Physical Description:

viii, 274 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2016.

Summary:

When Louis XVIII returned to the throne in 1814, and again in 1815, France embarked upon a period of uneasy cohabitation between the old and the new. The writers of the age, who included Chateaubriand, Stendhal, Balzac, and Mme de Duras, agreed that they lived at a historical turning point, a transitional moment whose outcome, though still uncertain, would transform the French way of life-beginning with the French way of love. The literary works of the Bourbon Restoration ceaselessly return to the themes of love, sex, and marriage, partly as vital cultural questions in their own right, but also as a means of critiquing the deficiencies of past regimes, negotiating the politics of the present, and imagining the shape of the political future. In the literature of the Restoration, love and politics become entwined in a mutually metaphorical embrace. The Amorous Restoration, the first book in English devoted to literary and cultural life under the last Bourbon kings, considers this relationship in all its richness and many contradictions. Long neglected as a drab historical backwater, the Restoration emerges here as a vibrant era, one rife with sharp cultural and political disagreements, and possessed of an especially refined sense of allusion, discretion, and even humour. Drawing on literature, journalism, political writing, life writing, and gossip, The Amorous Restoration vividly recreates the erotic sensibilities of a pivotal moment in the transition from an amorous old regime to erotic-and political-modernity. Book jacket.

Contents:

Introduction: Love, sex, politics

Impediments : critiques of marriage in Restoration France

Good breeding : romanticism, aristocracy, and reproduction

Gallantries : the literature of sexual worldliness under the Restoration

Olivier in the closet : gossip, scandal, and the novel in the 1820s

The sexual monster : celibacy and the anticlerical imagination

1830 : the end of an eros? Nodier and Fourier on the history of sexuality.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0198785992

9780198785996

OCLC:

944156684