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The Family in Crisis in Late Nineteenth-Century French Fiction

Nicholas White author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Cambridge University Press

Published:13th Jan '99

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The Family in Crisis in Late Nineteenth-Century French Fiction cover

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

This 1999 book examines how novels represent the crisis in 'family values' in late nineteenth-century France. A wide cultural perspective informs close readings of tales of adultery, illegitimacy, incest and divorce by popular novelists such as Zola and Maupassant as well as by hitherto neglected figures of the period.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'.

'… 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

ISBN: 9780521562744

Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 17mm

Weight: 450g

232 pages