This book tells the story of three young men: two French, one Russian; all born the same year, when European culture was moving from Romanticism to something else in painting, music, and literature. Influenced by the environment from which they came, all three grew to take a leading role in moving the arts in a bold new direction. It was the age when Impressionism reinvented what painting could be, when Naturalism changed how fiction is written, and when Russia moved from the edges of European society to the vital role it has played ever since. Leading, guiding, determining this new course were Monet, Tchaikovsky, and Zola. Parallel biographies of these three artistic geniuses follow them from the magic year of their birth to the point when they established themselves as bold, original creators in the early 1870s. The book explores how they chose to follow careers in creative art, how each of them came to play such a central role in their respective domains, and how those arts interacted and influenced each other. As they move through the cultural world of 19th century Europe, a panorama appears of the rich intellectual environment of France and Russia in that period, as well as the unique experiences and talents that led all three to their towering position in modern culture. Often considered separately, art, music, and literature come together in this study to offer a multifaceted view of a key era in the development of modernism in all the arts.

Gut, Brain, and Environment in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Medicine offers a new way of conceptualizing food in literature: not as social or cultural symbol but as an agent within a network of relationships between body and mind and between humans and environment. By analysing gastrointestinal health in medical, literary, and philosophical texts, this volume rethinks the intersections between literature and health in the nineteenth century and triggers new debates about France’s relationship with food. Of relevance to scholars of literature and to historians and sociologists of science, food, and medicine, it will provide ideal reading for students of French Literature and Culture, History, Cultural Studies, and History of Science and Medicine, Literature and Science, Food Studies, and the Medical Humanities. Readers will be introduced to new ways of approaching digestion in this period and will gain appreciation of the powerful resources offered by nineteenth-century French writing in understanding the nature of connections between gut, mind, and environment and the impact of these connections on our status as human beings.

This study explores the interrelationship between spatiality and subjecthood in the work of Stéphane Mallarmé, Guillaume Apollinaire, Maurice Maeterlinck, and Alfred Jarry. Concerned with various modes of poetry and drama, it also examines the cross-pollination that can occur between these modes, focusing on a range of core texts including Mallarmé's Igitur and Un Coup de dés; Apollinaire's 'Zone' and various of his calligrammes; Maeterlinck's early one-act plays: L'Intruse, Les Aveugles, and Intérieur; and Jarry's Ubu roi and César-Antechrist.. The poetic and dramatic practices of these four authors are assessed against the broader cultural and philosophical contexts of the fin de siècle. The fin de siècle witnessed a profound epistemological shift: the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm, increasingly challenged throughout the nineteenth century, was largely dismantled, with ramifications beyond physics, philosophy, and psychology. Chapter 1 introduces three foundational notions—Newtonian absolute space, the unitary Cartesian subject, and subject-object dualism—that were challenged and ultimately overthrown in turn-of-the-century science and art. Developments in theatre architecture and typographic design are examined against this philosophical backdrop with a view to establishing a diachronic and interdisciplinary framework of the authors in question. Chapter 2 focuses on the spatial dimension of Mallarmé's Un Coup de dés and Apollinaire's calligrammes—works which defamiliarise page-space by undermining various (naturalised) conventions of paginal configuration. In Chapter 3, the notion of liminality is implemented in an analysis of character and diegetic space as constructed in Jarry's Ubu roi and Maeterlinck's one-acts. Chapters 4 and Chapter 5 undertake a more abstract investigation of parallel inverse processes-the subjectivisation of space and the spatialisation of the subject—manifest not only in the works of Mallarmé, Maeterlinck, Apollinaire, and Jarry, but in the period's poetry and drama more generally.

In this wide-ranging study, José Manuel Lopes proposes a theoretical framework for analysing the role of description in prose fiction. He offers readings of texts drawn from four national literatures—French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Brazilian—testing his model across a cultural and temporal spectrum. This critical breadth also illustrates the significance of description in disparate contexts: the postmodern novel, which implicitly challenges conventional notions of foreground and background, as well as the naturalist and realist fiction of the nineteenth century. Lopes applies his model to detailed readings of Emile Zola's Une Page d'amour, Claude Simon's Histoire, Benito Pérez Galdós' La de Bringas, Cornélio Penna's A Menina Morta, and Carlos de Oliveira's Finisterra. In addition to exploring the interplay of description and narration, these readings pay particular attention to spatial descriptions, and analyse the diverse roles of description in different contexts. After subjecting each fictional text to a detailed analysis which seeks to bring out the crucial aspects that contribute towards the foregrounding of descriptive passages (e.g., mise en abyme, parody, modes of representation), and which establishes, on occasion, certain relations that literary description may entertain with the other arts, he attempts to isolate the primary functions of foregrounding descriptions. What he seeks to demonstrate is that description constitutes a major textual component necessary for the analysis and understanding of both nineteenth- and twentieth-century fictional texts.

This collection of essays addresses the question of lucidity as a thematic in literature and film but also as a quality of both expression and insight in literary criticism and critical thought more generally. The essays offer treatments of lucidity in itself and in relation to its opposites, forms of obscurity and darkness. They offer attention to problems of philosophical thought and reason, to questions of literary and poetic form, and of photographic and filmic contemplation. Ranging from engagements with early modern writing through to more recent material the contributions focus in particular on nineteenth- and twentieth-century French prose and poetry, the field which has been the predominant focus of Alison Finch’s critical writing. They are written as tributes to the distinctively lucid insights of her work and to the breadth and clarity of its intellectual engagement.

Exploring the controversial history of an aesthetic – realism – this book examines the role that realism plays in the negotiation of social, political, and material realities from the mid-19th century to the present day. Examining a broad range of literary texts from French, English, Italian, German, and Russian writers, this book provides new insights into how realism engages with themes including capital, social decorum, the law and its politicisation, modern science as a determining factor concerning truth, and the politics of identity. Considering works from Gustave Flaubert, Charles Baudelaire, Émile Zola, Henry James, Charles Dickens, and George Orwell, Docherty proposes a new philosophical conception of the politics of realism in an age where politics feels increasingly erratic and fantastical.

The scholarly debate about authorship has not only transcended all aspects of literary studies, but has also prompted contemporary authors to counter, subvert, and challenge it. One author to whom this applies in particular is Milan Kundera. In this study, Christine Knoop re-examines Kundera's essayistic and novelistic work against the background of the theoretical paradigms of literary authority, intention, and ownership. In so doing, she demonstrates how he overcomes traditional theoretical distinctions by postulating the existence of both a strong, powerful author figure and of potentially boundless literary meaning. Kundera's radically ambiguous conception of the author in the novel, developed primarily to influence the reader, is discussed and developed to cast new light on the critical debate about authorship at large while maintaining his primary conjecture that authorship as such is perpetually hybrid, dynamic, and unfinished. Christine Angela Knoop is a Postdoctoral Research Associate for Comparative Literature at Freie Universitat Berlin.

"This work examines the genetic processes that shaped two of the great literary masterpieces of modernity: Flaubert's ""L'Education Sentimentale"" and Proust's ""A la Recherche de Temps Perdu"". A detailed investigation of Flaubert's notebooks and scenarios from 1864 and 1869 and Proust's ""Cahiers"" from 1908 to 1911 reveals the almost diametrically opposed ways in which the two novels evolved in their early stages."