Literature and material culture from Balzac to Proust : the collection and consumption of curiosities / Janell Watson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Watson, Janell, author.

Series:

Cambridge studies in French ; 62.

Cambridge studies in French ; 62

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

French literature--19th century--History and criticism.

French literature.

Art objects in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (x, 224 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Edition:

1st ed.

Other Title:

Literature & Material Culture from Balzac to Proust

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

This book addresses the issues of collecting, consuming, classifying and describing the curiosities, antiques and objets d'art that proliferated in French literary texts during the last decades of the nineteenth century. After Balzac made such issues significant in canonical literature, the Goncourt brothers, Huysmans, Mallarmé and Maupassant celebrated their golden age. Flaubert and Zola scorned them. Rachilde and Lorrain perverted them. Proust commemorated their last moments of glory. Focusing on the bibelot (the modern French term for knick-knack, curiosity or other collectible), Janell Watson shows how the sudden prominence given to curiosities and collecting in nineteenth-century literature signals a massive change in attitudes to the world of goods, which in turn restructured the literary text according to the practical logic of daily life, calling into question established scholarly notions of order. Her study makes an important contribution to the literary history of material culture.

Contents:

1. The Bibelot: a Nineteenth-Century Object

2. Logic(s) of Material Culture: Imitation, Accumulation, and Mobility

3. Fashionable Artistic Interior: Social (Re)encoding in the Domestic Sphere

4. Flaubert's 'Musées reçus': Bouvard and Pécuchet's Consumerist epistemology

5. Narrate, Describe, or Catalogue? the Novel and the Inventory form in Balzac, the Goncourts, and Huysmans

6. Parlour of Critical Theory: Reading Dwelling Space Across Disciplines

7. Rearranging the Oedipus: Fantastic and Decadent Floor-plans in Gautier, Maupassant, Lorrain, and Rachilde.

Notes:

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

Includes bibliographical references (p. 210-224) and index.

ISBN:

1-107-11819-0

0-511-01004-4

1-280-16211-2

0-511-11804-X

0-511-15101-2

0-511-31043-9

0-511-48590-5

0-511-04875-0

OCLC:

475871126