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  3. Literature and Material Culture from Balzac to Proust
  • Cited by 15
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    • Publisher:
      Cambridge University Press
      Publication date:
      22 September 2009
      13 January 2000
      ISBN:
      9780511485909
      9780521661560
      9780521025461
      DOI:
      https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511485909
      Dimensions:
      (228 x 152 mm)
      Weight & Pages:
      0.47kg, 242 Pages
      Dimensions:
      (228 x 152 mm)
      Weight & Pages:
      0.369kg, 244 Pages
      • Subjects:
      Literature, Area Studies, Literary Theory, European Literature, European Studies
      Series:
      Cambridge Studies in French (62)
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    • Selected: Digital
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    Subjects:
    Literature, Area Studies, Literary Theory, European Literature, European Studies
    Series:
    Cambridge Studies in French (62)
    Information

    Book description

    This book addresses the issues of collecting, consuming, classifying and describing the curiosities, antiques and objets d'art that proliferated in French literary texts during the last decades of the nineteenth century. After Balzac made such issues significant in canonical literature, the Goncourt brothers, Huysmans, Mallarmé and Maupassant celebrated their golden age. Flaubert and Zola scorned them. Rachilde and Lorrain perverted them. Proust commemorated their last moments of glory. Focusing on the bibelot (the modern French term for knick-knack, curiosity or other collectible), Janell Watson shows how the sudden prominence given to curiosities and collecting in nineteenth-century literature signals a massive change in attitudes to the world of goods, which in turn restructured the literary text according to the practical logic of daily life, calling into question established scholarly notions of order. Her study makes an important contribution to the literary history of material culture.

    Reviews

    "a complex and fascinating story...a memorable book that is indispensable for readers interested in the study of consumer culture and in the connection between realism and cultural production in the nineteenth century." L'Esprit Createur

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