Narration and Description in the French Realist Novel: The Temporality of Lying and Forgetting

by James H. Reid

Overview

This new study of the nineteenth-century French realist novel focuses on the fundamental incompatibility between the narrative and the descriptive modes of discourse. It shows how major novelists including Balzac, Flaubert and Zola, like some of their twentieth-century successors, grappled with their belief or fear that their stories lied in their representation of time and history, or that their descriptions forgot the reality of their socio-historical world, highlighting their use of irony and allegory in the struggle against the deceitfulness of their own texts.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521029780
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	11/02/2006
Series:	Cambridge Studies in French , #44
Edition description:	Reissue
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.47(w) x 8.46(h) x 0.75(d)

Table of Contents

Preface; Acknowledgements; 1. Balzac: the power of lying and the irony of power; 2. Descriptive and narrative self-deception: Flaubert's allegory of parody; 3. Forgetting and beyond: Zola and allegory; Conclusion; Notes; Bibliography; Index.