This article contends that Mallarmé’s use of the word “impersonnalité” at several key moments in his literary career (1866–1898) is linked to his sophisticated understanding of how works of art build up their own aesthetic value
This article focuses on Pages d’exil (1898), Émile Zola’s journal recounting his escape from France after being sentenced to prison following the Dreyfus Affair and his eleven-month exile in Britain.
Beginning with a close reading of the only appearance in La Bête humaine of the term progrès enables a reading of the novel that integrates its two settings—the railways and the legal system—into a single persp
While he laments the loss of traditional authority, Barbey’s early essays on dandyism and counter-revolutionary thought acknowledge the impossibility of political and religious restoration.
This article examines Gautier’s novel Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835) as an example of nineteenth-century French society’s interest and reluctance regarding male homosexuality, and the subsequent strategy of allusion that
This article explores the topics of confinement and claustrophilia in Xavier de Maistre’s Voyage autour de ma chambre (1795) and Expédition nocturne autour de ma chambre (1825), and in Jan Potocki’s Manuscr
This article considers Balzac’s Le Père Goriot (1835) in comparison with As minas de prata (Silver Mines, 1865–66) by José de Alencar, Brazil’s most important Romantic novelist.
This article offers a deeper understanding of Hugo’s social philosophy as expressed in Les Misérables through a reading of the novel’s treatment of prostitution and Parisian sewers in the context of contemporary thought
This article explores the link between parody and politics in four vaudeville plays from the period between July 1850 and Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte’s coup d’État of 1851: Le Jour et la Nuit by Alphonse Royer and Gustave