A Harmless Liaison: On Céard's Une Belle Journée

The appreciation of Henry Céard's Une Belle Journée (1881) has been hampered, somewhat paradoxically, both by the relative obscurity of its author and by the reputation that his most famous text has acquired. Céard, so it seems, is irretrievably categorized as one of the so-called "petits naturalistes," whilst his novel is generally held to be the perfect expression of the naturalist aesthetic. This study argues that Céard's text invites us to attach the work less to this or that tradition of the novel, past or future, but more to the tradition of the novel that repudiates novelistic traditions, even those of an author and an age that Céard himself held in such esteem. (DB)