Literature and Material Culture from Balzac to Proust: The Collection and Consumption of Curiosities

by Janell Watson

Overview

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. She traces the phenomenon from Balzac, who introduced it to canonical literature, through Flaubert, Zola, Rachilde and Lorrain, to Proust. Her study makes an important contribution to the literary history of material culture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521025461
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	03/30/2006
Series:	Cambridge Studies in French , #62
Pages:	244
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.06(h) x 0.55(d)
Lexile:	1590L (what's this?)

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments; Introduction; 1. The bibelot: a nineteenth-century object; 2. The logic(s) of material culture: imitation, accumulation, and mobility; 3. The fashionable artistic interior: social (re)encoding in the domestic sphere; 4. Flaubert's 'Musées reçus': Bouvard and Pécuchet's consumerist epistemology; 5. Narrate, describe, or catalogue? The inventory form in Balzac, the Goncourts, and Huysmans; 6. The parlour of critical theory: Reading dwelling space across disciplines; 7. Rearranging the Oedipus: fantastic and decadent floor-plans in Gautier, Maupassant, Lorrain, and Rachilde; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

Editorial 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

From the Publisher

This is a skillful, wide-ranging exercise in literary sociology which should interest social historians and anyone who has suddenly found themselves besieged by their own bibelots.
—Times Literary Supplement

Graham Robb