This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1970.

Also published under title "Cassell's new French dictionary."

Reprint of the original, first published in 1874. The publishing house Anatiposi publishes historical books as reprints. Due to their age, these books may have missing pages or inferior quality. Our aim is to preserve these books and make them available to the public so that they do not get lost.

This book explores ideas about human physical appearance expressed in French novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as the pseudoscience of physiognomy that influenced them. Physiognomy, which purports to "read" the body as an index to spiritual, intellectual, or moral qualities, had its greatest proponent in the eighteenth century Swiss theoretician Johann Caspar Lavater. In addition to closely reading the fictional narratives of Marivaux, Balzac, Gautier, and Zola, the author offers a critical reading of Lavater's work. He looks at some of the most compelling and explicit literary treatments of physiognomy in the French canon, suggesting that the ways authors use physiognomical ideas to render the world "hyper-significant" poses fundamental questions about the nature of narrative itself. He also shows how physiognomy serves almost invariably as a tool of sexism as it attempts to ascribe intellectual or moral qualities on the basis of corporal features. Linked by more than their physiognomical themes, these novels share similar dynamics of reading, rhetoric, and representation.