Staël, Sand, Rachilde: we now remember women's contribution to the nineteenth-century French novel as a few exceptional figures leaving their mark on a genre dominated by men. But women were in fact the most acclaimed practitioners of the novel when the century opened and integral to the novel's development during what critics have long considered its 'golden age'. If their importance has subsequently been forgotten, it is the result of literary battles which this chapter describes. The nineteenthcentury novel takes shape in struggles between the sentimental form which reigns at the beginning of the century and newly-emerging realism which will come to supplant it. Throughout these struggles, female novelists overwhelmingly prefer sentimental codes.

The history of the nineteenth-century novel has long been written from the standpoint of the victorious realist aesthetic. This chapter brushes such literary history against the grain. It isolates four phases in women's contribution to the nineteenth-century novel that are inseparable from the prestige and decline of the sentimental form. From the Revolution to 1830, the most important novels are sentimental novels written by women. During the years 1830-1850, realism takes shape in a struggle to displace the sentimental novel, but the contest has no clear winner. The years 1850-80 correspond to the triumph of the realist aesthetic and women writers' disappearance from the vanguard of the novel. At the century's end, women writers once more emerge as important presences in the novel, and their contributions now cover the spectrum of possible novelistic forms (sentimental, realist, decadent).

The two decades spanning the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries were a period of intense crisis for the novel. On the one hand, it was not clear what more could be done with the form after the achievements of Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert and Zola. Balzac had created a world rivalling 'l'état civil' for his era, and Zola's project for systematic, scientifically documented studies of all sectors of society, had been all but consummated by its principal begetter. The realistic portrayal of everyday life could be extended into ever more marginal or sensational sectors such as those explored by the Goncourt brothers (Germinie Lacerteux, 1864) and less memorable exponents; but this was merely following in Zola's footsteps, without the creative conviction or epic gifts that, until the anticlimax of Les Quatre Evangiles, compelled the assent of his readers. In Pierre et ]ean (1888) and its prefatory essay, 'Le Roman', Maupassant sought to revitalise realism by drawing attention to the illusions of the mind that influence the formation of stories, but the picture conveyed by the naturalist novel was beginning to be perceived as the least significant feature of reality.

HISTORICAL SITUATION

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, lived religiousness and piety were no longer a matter of course in the intellectual circles of Europe. Schleiermacher's early work, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, signals this shift, as does the religion that is at once criticized and philosophically defended in Hegel's concept of Absolute Spirit. The opposition of rational enlightenment to nonconceptual (religious) revelation such as Kant and Lessing had carried out with exemplary success at the end of the eighteenth century lay like a long shadow over every effort of the subsequent period to present faith in God and religion - or even the core of Christianity, reconciliation - at all argumentatively.

If a reader should go into a good library and browse through the books about Kierkegaard, she would, I think, be struck immediately by a significant difference between most of the older books and quite a few, though certainly not all, of the more recent volumes. Older books, such as James Collins's The Mind of Kierkegaard, tended to see Kierkegaard primarily as a philosopher, albeit an unusual one with poetic gifts and religious interests. By and large, they approached Kierkegaard as one would approach other philosophers, inquiring as to his views on ethics, epistemology, and other standard philosophical issues. The underlying assumption is that Kierkegaard had convictions about such issues, and that those convictions might be, in part or as a whole, true or false, correct or incorrect.

Roger Poole's Kierkegaard: The Indirect Communication may serve as a good example of the type of later book I have in mind, though works by such authors as Louis Mackey, Sylviane Agacinski, John Vignaux Smythe, and John D. Caputo would serve equally well. Poole explicitly distances himself from the tradition, one that he stigmatizes as “theological,” that understands Kierkegaard's pseudonymous works as containing philosophical doctrines. On his view, “Kierkegaard writes text after text whose aim is not to state a truth, not to clarify an issue, not to propose a definite doctrine, not to offer some meaning that could be directly appropriated.” Kierkegaard cannot offer us objective truth because he is seen as committed to a view of language and meaning similar to that of Derrida and Lacan. In order for propositions to have fixed truth values, they must be about something, and Kierkegaard's texts do not refer in this way.

Kierkegaard was prophetic in his estimate of the place Fear and Trembling was to have in his authorship. Although several of his pseudonymous works have also become philosophical classics, Fear and Trembling continues to haunt us like no other of his writings. Its defense of individual existence still resonates at the end of a century marked by horrifying mass movements, while its depiction of radical religious obedience stirs new fears as we enter a period when older political ideologies are being replaced by renewed expressions of religious absolutism.

Fear and Trembling remains so evocative partly because of its enigmatic nature. From the outset, by means of the famous epigraph drawn from Hamann, Kierkegaard signals that not everything that follows is as it seems. Beyond this, there is evidence that Kierkegaard designed Fear and Trembling as a text with hidden layers of meaning. In The Point of View for My Work as an Author, Kierkegaard tells us that the most important ethical and religious truths cannot be communicated directly, as though one were writing on a blank sheet of paper. They demand instead creative endeavor by the author and a corresponding effort by the reader that involves “bringing to light by the application of a caustic fluid a text which is hidden under another text” (PV 40).

The literary history of France and the Francophone world has, it has been said, a long tradition of censorship. Emphasis on individual genius has not only produced an exaggerated belief in the French cultural heritage, it has fostered an attitude of submissiveness on the part of the student of literature. Literary history has its covert political agenda, and what gets taught in the classroom and in literary manuals tells us much about the authoritarian tradition in which the discipline has evolved.

These were remarks made by Roland Barthes in a 1969 essay entitled 'Reflexions sur un manuel' ['Réflections on a Manual']. The definition of literature itself, he suggested, might in the end be nothing other than 'ce qui s'enseigne' ['what gets taught'], so that the great canonical figures are inevitably invested with all the authority of the state educational apparatus. And Barthes adds: 'II y a . . . toute une autre histoire de notre litterature a ecrire, une contre-histoire, un envers de cette histoire, qui serait l'histoire de ces censures précisément' ['A quite different history of our literature remains to be written: a counter-history, the other side of that history, and that would be, precisely, the history of what has been censored']. He suggests that, in telling the hitherto untold, any literary history worthy of the name must also be a history of the idea of literature, of the way literature has been interpreted, received, distorted or used as a form of political control. It must ask the hard questions, not only of other histories of literature, but also of itself. What is being occluded or foregrounded, and why?

A constant theme in Kierkegaard is what might be called the presence of the Absolute, though Kierkegaard does not often use this Hegelian term. He talks instead of God's unchangeableness, of the infinite, the unconditioned, or the absolute good. What can unchangeableness in the presence of change mean to us today? More than a limited scientific rationality would allow, no doubt. But within the so-called postmodern context, indifference and skepticism to such an idea have as their counterpart nothing but an escalation of irrational religious needs.

The dizzying speed of change in highly industrialized societies has given wide currency to talk of “crises of meaning” and with that ample scope for the expression of religious needs. But we should prevent such talk or needs from entering into theoretical discourse as a way of bolstering argument; pressure emanating from a need can substantially distort discussion in matters of truth. Today, it is only by skeptically insisting on even greater caution, and minimizing as best we may (for we can never altogether eliminate) the powerful dynamic of wishful thinking that we can keep the ideological function of religion separate from its absolute truth claim. The functions of religion can of course be analyzed from sociological and psychological points of view, but it is impossible in principle to reduce the meaning of absolute spiritual presence to these functions and they themselves contain hints of something more.

As Timothy Unwin points out in the opening chapter, one of the aims of this volume is to discuss not only 'great' French novels, but also fiction which has been marginalised by the literary-critical establishment - women's novels, thrillers, novels written in former French colonies. It is clear what kinds of prejudice may have operated in this marginalisation: sexism, snobbery, racism. But in the process of highlighting these prejudices, and reassessing the marginalised works, we need to remember that it may not be solely bias that has promoted some novels and allowed others to sink into the background. Is it purely misogyny that makes most readers prefer Stendhal's Le Rouge et le noir (1830) to the novel which in part inspired it, Edouard (1825) by the talented Mme de Duras? Is it purely middle-class ideology that makes them prefer Zola's L'Assommoir (1877) to Sue's shocking novels about the Paris working class (1842-57)?

Kierkegaard's slim book Repetition was published in 1843 on the same day as Fear and Trembling. Six weeks later he published a discourse on The Book of Job.The theme of sudden loss and wondrous restoration recurs: Abraham must release Isaac and then he gets him back; Job is stripped of his world and then he gets it back. The book Repetition alludes to Job's yearning for his world's return and also depicts the suffering of a young man who has lost his love and yearns for her return. These motifs provide a clue to the concept of repetition. The question posed by Repetition is whether repetition is possible, whether a world or loved one, now lost, can be restored. But unraveling either the text or the concept is not a straightforward task.

PRELIMINARIES

Repetition is written under the pseudonym Constantin Constantius. It gives ample grist for dialectical mills: repetition is paired with kinesis, the Aristotelian “motion” of becoming, and it is marked as “the task of freedom.” We learn that repetition is (paradoxically) both “the interest of metaphysics and the interest on which all metaphysics comes to grief” (R 149). But these remarks are largely undeveloped, and to complicate matters, they are inserted casually, perhaps even ironically, within a book that reads as a puzzling romantic roman à cléef or novella. Theoretical insights float precariously on a complex literary surface. However serious the idea of repetition is for Kierkegaard, in this book it often seems to flicker merely as an artifice or entertainment.

So little is known about Johnson's activities and whereabouts in the year 1745 that enthusiasts have imagined him in Scotland serving Bonnie Prince Charlie until the Jacobite cause met its final end at the battle of Culloden. The truth about his activities in 1745 is probably much more mundane. In 1745 Johnson published his Miscellaneous Observations on the Tragedy of Macbeth, a sixty-four page specimen of what would eventually become his edition of Shakespeare's plays (1765). It has been suggested that Johnson was responsible for a bare-bones edition of Shakespeare, hastily assembled in 1745 under the auspices of London publishers eager to reclaim the copyright over his works seized by Oxford University Press with the edition of Thomas Hanmer in 1744. This hack work would not be inconsistent with much that Johnson had done before for the London publishers. Moreover, it fits roughly into the particular kind of work Johnson was doing in the early 1740s and suggests a professional transition of the kind he made in the second half of the decade as part of the ongoing compromise in his life between the “dreams of a poet” and the fiscal realities of writing for a living in the eighteenth century.

Between March 1885 and May 1890 Oscar Wilde wrote more than seventy unsigned book reviews for W. T. Stead's Pall Mall Gazette, between November 1887 and June 1889 he was editor of The Woman's World, and throughout the late 1880s he contributed a number of pieces, some signed, some not, to other newspapers and journals.

It may seem surprising that one of the world's great literary stylists should have produced so much anonymous material. Today we would probably assume that anything written by Wilde would be instantly recognisable, but in the 1880s, when he was making his living as a professional journalist, one among many, not only was anonymity the general rule, the famous style had yet to become a badge of personality. That everyone now knows, or thinks they know, what constitutes the 'Wildean' is partly the result of more than a century's familiarity with his writings and with countless imitators. Once a style can be recognised it can also be copied.

There are signs nevertheless that Wilde saw anonymous journalism as a way of mapping out his personal literary territory, even if the hidden pattern can sometimes look like a maze. He certainly did not confine himself to a limited number of favourite topics. Indeed, it was one of the requirements of the kind of reviewer that Wilde aspired to become that he or she should be able to write on a wide range of subjects. From romantic novels to cookbooks, from every kind of translation to musicology: Wilde took pride in attempting the unlikely. His intellectual curiosity was more wide-ranging than has sometimes been assumed.

Wilde's three Society comedies were produced by different managers: Lady Windermere's Fan by George Alexander at the St James's Theatre (20 February 1892), A Woman of No Importance by Herbert Beerbohm Tree (19 April 1893) and An Ideal Husband (3 January 1895) by Lewis Waller, both at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. Had Henry James's Guy Domville not been a failure and left Alexander with a gap in his season, Wilde would have added Charles Wyndham and the Criterion Theatre to his list with The Importance of Being Earnest. In the months before his career collapsed in the witness box of the Queensberry libel trial, he was sketching out a new play of modern life for Alexander, the Gerald Lancing scenario which Frank Harris later fleshed out as Mr and Mrs Daventry; and negotiating with American producers such as Albert Palmer about a play ' “with no real serious interest” - just a comedy', and with Charles Frohman for a 'modern “School for Scandal”' style of play. This flurry of activity indicates both Wilde's perceived marketability on both sides of the Atlantic and his own growing confidence in a genre he had only taken up in 1891, in fact at Alexander's invitation. 'I wonder can I do it in a week, or will it take three?' he reportedly commented to Frank Harris. 'It ought not to take long to beat the Pineros and the Joneses.'

Writing to Alexander in February 1891, Wilde offered a rather different attitude towards his progress on Lady Windermere's Fan: 'I am not satisfied with myself or my work. I can't get a grip of the play yet: I can't get my people real... I am very sorry, but artistic work can't be done unless one is in the mood; certainly my work can't. Sometimes I spend months over a thing, and don't do any good; at other times I write a thing in a fortnight' (L 282).

When the painter William Hogarth visited the novelist Samuel Richardson one day, “he perceived a person standing at a window in the room, shaking his head and rolling himself about in a strange ridiculous manner. He concluded that he was an ideot, whom his relations had put under the care of Mr. Richardson, as a very good man.”Yet suddenly the retard began to talk. Such was the power of his eloquence that Hogarth then looked at him with astonishment “and actually imagined that this ideot had been at the moment inspired” (Life, i, 146-47). This was Samuel Johnson, a great man who looked like an idiot. External appearances may not matter, but there is something symbolic here. For Johnson was indeed a man ever beset by a sense of discrepancy and paradox.

Three days before he died in the Hotel d'Alsace, Oscar Wilde was asked by the proprietor Jean Dupoirier about his life in London. 'Some said my life was a lie but I always knew it to be the truth; for like the truth it was rarely pure and never simple', he replied, echoing Algy Moncrieff, paradoxical as always and never one to lose the opportunity of recycling a well-turned phrase. Biographers ever since have been by turn delighted at the rich pickings and exasperated by the contradictions. The duality of Wilde in all aspects fascinates, confuses: the Anglo-Irishman with Nationalist sympathies; the Protestant with life-long Catholic leanings; the married homosexual; the musician of words and painter of language who confessed to Andre Gide that writing bored him; the artist astride not two but three cultures, an Anglo-Francophile and a Celt at heart. And overlaid on it all is the question of which facets of the Wildean dichotomy were real and involuntary and which were artificial and contrived for effect.

For the biographer it becomes important to find out, but for Wilde, who confessed that he lived in permanent fear of not being misunderstood, it becomes equally important that he should not. What is one to make of Wilde's response to the New York reporter who asked whether he had indeed walked down Piccadilly with a lily in his hand? 'To have done it was nothing, but to make people think one had done it was a triumph.' Wilde blurs the edges and hides behind a non-alignment with his own utterances:

Good critics clarify the meaning of a work of art by helping us see what its maker intended; they provide historical facts; and they sincerely express their unbiased opinions. To which Oscar Wilde responds that the best critic, rather than explaining the work of art, 'may seek rather to deepen its mystery'; that 'The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it'; and that 'the true critic is unfair, insincere, and not rational'. According to Wilde, 'the highest criticism is that which reveals in the work of Art what the artist had not put there'. Such criticism 'treats the work of art simply as a starting-point for a new creation'; it 'is itself an art', and of all the arts it is 'the purest form of personal expression'. As pure creation and personal expression, criticism's responsibility 'is to see the object as in itself it really is not'. Inaccurate and insincere, yet perfectly expressing the critic's moods, 'Criticism ... makes culture possible.' Therefore, 'It is to criticism that the future belongs': it 'will annihilate race-prejudices' and 'give us the peace that springs from understanding'.

Such, at least, are the opinions of Wilde's spokesman in his dialogue 'The Critic as Artist', published in Intentions (1891), the book on which Wilde's claims as a critic chiefly lie. Criticism of a more conventional sort - reasonable, factual and often fair - Wilde had done in reviews by the score, from the mid-i88os, when he left the lecture platform, until 1890, when he looked to the West End stage for his earnings. But with Intentions he destabilises the very category 'criticism', obliterating boundaries, for instance between the critic and the thing criticised, which ordinarily define it.

Though Oscar Wilde has usually been regarded as an Aesthete or Decadent whose devotion to art for art's sake was immutable, in fact he never adhered rigidly to such a doctrine. From the beginning of his career, he wrote poems as a conventional Victorian, expressing moral, political and religious attitudes expected in serious art. His concern with the cultural crises of the time found expression in much of his early verse written during and after his Oxford years (1874-8) - that is, before he turned his attention to the nature of art in advancing the Aesthetic Movement. But even while rejecting the Victorian notion of art as moral edification, Wilde could not sustain his aestheticism, for he was driven by the conviction, drawn from such disparate figures as Baudelaire, Ruskin, Pater and Whistler, that life and art were ultimately shaped by one's moral and spiritual nature. Inevitably, the tension between his avowed aestheticism and his Victorian sensibility resulted in contradictions throughout his work, as summed up in the title of Norbert Kohl's study: Oscar Wilde: The Works of a Conformist Rebel (1989). Indeed, Wilde expressed his own position in his essay 'The Truth of Masks' in Intentions (1891): 'A Truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true' (CW 1173).

To talk about Wilde's fiction, is to talk about everything, for Oscar Wilde was his own best work of art.

Born and educated in Ireland, Wilde came from a country which gives a privileged status to fiction. In the words of his predecessor, William Carleton, meditating on 'Paddy's' skill at the alibi: 'Fiction is the basis of society, the bond of commercial prosperity, the channel of communication between nation and nation, and not unfrequently the interpreter between a man and his own conscience.' It follows that, if fiction is the very stuff by which society is made, Wilde could only become a writer - and an Irishman - in England. Only there could he create himself through the fictions which formed 'the channel of communication between nation and nation', the stereotypes by which one understood the other.

A member of the leading class known as Anglo-Irish, Wilde created himself by living on both sides of the hyphen. If in Ireland, his family had been a queer kind of English people - at once upholders of the embattled British regime and, at the same time, more Irish than the Irish themselves - in England, Wilde became a queer kind of Irishman.

Arriving in Oxford from Dublin, Wilde beat the scholars at their own game, scooping a Double First. Although born of the 'gentry' in Ireland, Wilde assumed the status of an English aristocrat, leisured, extravagant, charming and mannered. If these virtues were exaggerated, it was only to give a double edge to the performance, parodying as well the stereotype of the Irish: lazy, improvident, charming and witty. As Matthew Arnold trenchantly observed, the Irish had, by their very nature, more in common with the English upper class than either of them held with the hardworking, thrifty and dour English middle class.

Samuel Johnson's preeminence rests upon the extraordinary intellectual and moral achievements within his prose. That truth universally acknowledged nonetheless admits a complementary truth - Johnson is a great prose writer in part because he is a great poet. Johnson wrote poetry throughout his life. Even after a stroke and, later, upon his deathbed he turned to prayer in Latin verse. He wrote a blank-verse tragedy, translations, adaptations of classical poems, satires, love poems, poems warning of the dangers of love, elegies, epitaphs, comic parodies, serious prayers, odes, sonnets, meditations on his inner psychological and spiritual being, and, in the nature of things, poems that combined several of these genres. Johnson correctly said that at Pembroke College, Oxford his group of student-poets was a “nest of singing birds”(Life, I, 75). However naturally artful, Johnson's poetic production is small in comparison with other great poets, but several of his poems nonetheless are major and minor masterpieces. They include many devices that make his prose memorable, for his prose is memorable in part because it is so poetic. I begin this chapter by exploring some of his characteristic modes of proceeding.