Visions/Revisions

Selected from papers given at the first annual conference of the Society of Dix-Neuvièmistes, the nineteen essays in this volume contribute diversely towards a revision and a reconceptualisation of nineteenth-century France. Many adopt interdisciplinary methodologies attentive to the interplay between literature, history, art, popular and high culture, politics and science. The wide-ranging discussion of issues such as identity, alterity, commemoration, cultural history, tensions between centre and margins, mimesis and representation, suggest that no simplistic snapshot of this century is possible. Opening with a section on the modernity of the nineteenth century, the volume continues with sections on cultural transfer, war, readings and re-readings, and concludes with two essays on questions of identity. The critical reappraisals put forward here offer us various insights into directions in which nineteenth-century French studies are heading at the turn of another new century.

The Editors: Nigel Harkness, M.A., Ph.D. (Edinburgh) is Lecturer in French at The Queen-s University of Belfast, and has published on French women writers of the nineteenth century. Paul Rowe, BA, Ph.D. (Birmingham), is Lecturer in French at the University of Leeds, and has published on nineteenth-century French cultural history. Tim Unwin, M.A. (Cantab), Ph.D. (Exeter), is Professor of French at the University of Bristol, and has published on nineteenth-century realist fiction. Jennifer Yee, Ph.D. (Université de Paris VII), is Lecturer in French at the University of Newcastle, and has published on French colonial fiction of the late nineteenth century.

Contents: Nigel Harkness/Paul Rowe/Tim Unwin/Jennifer Yee: Introduction - Margaret Cohen: The Waterways of Modernity: The Case of Haussmann's Paris - Edward Welch: Zola, Jourdain and the Architectonics of Modernity - Aude Campmas: Les Fleurs de serre: entre science et littérature à la fin du dix-neuvième siècle - Miranda Gill: Hieroglyphs of the Mind: Delirious Interpretation and the Psychology of Enigma,1830-1910 - Mary Orr: Provincial Transfers and French Cultures: Flaubert's Voyage aux Pyrénées et en Corse - Heather Williams: Une suvagerie très douce - Kathleen Cambor: 'L'Invasion!': Colonising France's Mediterranean South - Tom Verschaffel: Art and Nationality: The French Perception of Belgian Painters at the Paris Salons (1831-1865) - Kate Turner: Balloons over Bismarck: The Interplay of Fact and Fiction in Representations of the Fabulous History of the Balloon during the Siege of Paris - Hannah Thompson: A Battle in the Feminine? The Gendered Body and the Franco-Prussian War - Rachel Chrastil: Great Powers, Small Communities: Commemorating the Franco-Prussian War, 1871-1914 - Karine Varley: Memorialising the Defence of Paris: The Commemoration of the Franco-Prussian War in the Capital - Michael Tilby: Past or Present? A New Look at the French Historical Novel in the Late 1820s - Judith Wulf: 'Rabâchage' et formation du sens romanesque chez Victor Hugo - David Evans: Baudelaire and Irresolvable Poetic Tension - Peter Dayan: L'Obscurité, entre Mallarmé et Proust - Masha Belenky: Gender Reversals: Reading Jealousy in Balzac and Rachilde - Göran Blix: The Archaeology of Private Life: The Romanic Discourse of Intimacy - James F. McMillan: Rediscovering Louis Veuillot: The Politics of Religious Identity in Nineteenth-Century France.