Home and its Dislocations in Nineteenth-Century France

Edited by Suzanne Nash

Subjects: Literary Criticism
Series: SUNY series, The Margins of Literature
Paperback : 9780791415504, 345 pages, August 1993
Hardcover : 9780791415498, 345 pages, September 1993

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Table of contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction
Suzanne Nash

PART ONE: HOMESICKNESS AND THE URBAN ARTIST

Returning to Nostalgia
Michael S. Roth

The Flaneur: Urbanization and Its Discontents
Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson

PART TWO: AESTHETIC REPRESENTATIONS OF HOMELESSNESS

Narratives for a Liminal Age: Ballanche, Custine, Nerval
Mary J. Harper

Hearth and Homelessness: Place, Story, and Novel in Flaubert's Sentimental Educations
William Paulson

"La Maison demolie": Photographs of Egypt by Maxine Du Camp 1849 - 1850
Julia Ballerini

Whose House Is This?: Feeling at Home with the Past
Robert Morrissey

The Modern Metropolis and the Ancient City
Patrizia Lombardo

The Mnemonics of Dispossession: "Le Cygne" in 1859
Richard Terdiman

PART THREE: "A WOMAN'S PLACE ..."

Republican Politics and the Bourgeois Interior in Mid-Nineteenth-Century France
Philip Nord

The Female Pariah: Flora Tristan and the Paradox of Homelessness
Deborah Nord

A Woman's Place in the Utopian Home: The "New Paris" and the Saint-Simoniennes
Kari Weil

Homeless Women: Maidservants in Fiction
Martine Gantrel

Emma's Daughter: Femininty, Maternity, and "Mothersickness" in Madam Bovary
Janet Beizer

PART FOUR: FRANCE AS THE HOMELESS PLACE

The French Revolution and "Tintern Abbey"
David Bromwich

Charlotte Bronte's Savoir-Faire
Maria DiBattista

Afterword: Proust's Homecoming
Antoine Compagnon

List of Contributors

Index

Description

The nineteenth century witnessed an unprecedented social restructuring that disrupted traditional notions of people and place, country and city, private and public spheres. The break with the old order and the entry into the industrial age was most dramatically played out in France, with the growth of a new urban middle class under the July monarchy and the rebuilding of Paris by Haussmann under the Second Empire. The personal, immediate, and radical effects of these changes produced an altered conception of the meaning of home and a homeland.

Focusing primarily on mid-nineteenth-century France, these essays, by noted literary critics, offer fascinating new accounts of the relationship between the social history of home and homelessness and the imaginative expressions of the age. This probing interdisciplinary approach, combining theoretical sophistication with historical detail, addresses the fundamental importance of class and gender to the modern history of homelessness. Its provocative readings of well-known texts provide a model of cultural studies at its best and most serious.

Suzanne Nash is Professor of Romance Languages and Literature at Princeton University.

Reviews

"Home and Its Dislocations offers an impressive level of social and historical awareness while providing fresh insights on the realist novels, utopian fantasies, and urban discourses of the nineteenth century. The book is a highly innovative collective endeavour illuminating such topical issues as homelessness and dispossession in the genesis of cultural modernity."—Catherine Nesci, University of California, Santa Barbara