Read more
This selection of essays by Alan Raitt provides a series of cross-readings of nineteenth-century French literary authors and texts. The collection revolves around Flaubert and Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, the two authors with whom Raitt is most associated, situating them and their principal works in relation to each other, as well as to Balzac, Nerval, Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Huysmans. In so doing, the collection shows the extent to which nineteenth-century French literary history appears both as a succession and as a simultaneity of literary styles and credos.
List of contents
Contents: Le Balzac de Flaubert - Time and instability in Nerval's Sylvie - Sylvie and L'Éducation sentimentale - L'Éternel Présent dans les romans de Flaubert - 'Nous étions à l'étude ...' - The date of the projected epilogue to Madame Bovary - L'Éducation sentimentale et la pyramide - La Décomposition des personnages dans L'Éducation sentimentale - On Le Spleen de Paris - Villiers de l'Isle-Adam et Flaubert - Villiers de l'Isle-Adam histrion véridique de lui-même - Stéphane Mallarmé: Villiers de l'Isle-Adam - Lectures croisées: Huysmans lecteur de Villiers et Villiers lecteur de Husymans.
About the author
Alan Raitt (1930-2006) was one of the most distinguished French scholars of his generation. He was Professor of French at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Magdalen College. His books include landmark studies of Flaubert, Mérimée and Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. He was a Fellow of the British Academy, Commandeur dans l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques and the general editor of French Studies.
Francesco Manzini is a Fixed-Term Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. He is the author of Stendhal's Parallel Lives (2004) and The Fevered Novel from Balzac to Bernanos (2011).
