French Literature, Thought and Culture in the Nineteenth Century

This volume adopts a varied approach to the study of the 'material world' in the French literature, thought and visual arts of the 19th century. Contributors look not only at the Romantic and Realist transcendence of the Neo-classical heritage of abstraction and idealism, but also adopt modern critical perspectives to analyse central themes such as urbanisation, fetishism and the representation of the female body.

Inhalt
List of Illustrations - Preface - Notes on the Contributors - A Tribute to Donald Geoffrey Charlton and a Bibliography of his Writings; C.W.Thompson - Romanticism and the Material World: Mind, Nature and Analogy; C.Crossley - Materialism in Nineteenth-Century France; M.Kelly - Managing Democratic Change: the Politics of Materialism in the Work of Alexis de Tocqueville; D.Hanley - Producing, Retailing, Consuming: France 1830-70; R.Magraw - Things, Distinction and Decay in Nineteenth-Century French Literature; B.Rigby - From Neo-Classical to Romantic Aesthetics: The Status of the Material World in Nineteenth-Century French Drama; W.D.Howarth - Towards the Materiality of the Sign: Aesthetics and Poetics in Nineteenth-Century France; D.Scott - No Object too Humble? Still Life Painting in French Art Criticism during the Second Empire; J.Kearns - Unstable Objects: acropole and barbarie in Rimbaud's Villes I; M.Treharne - Immaterial Views? Science, Intransigence and the Female Spectator of Modern French Art in 1879; A.Callen - Object Choices: Taste and Fetichism in Flaubert's L'Education sentimentale; D.Knight - Bibliography - Index