Read more
Crystal palaces and railway stations, greenhouses and arcades, church windows and shop frontages, wine glasses and lamp shades: from the monumental to the minuscule, glass became increasingly pervasive in nineteenth-century France. Yet as the bombshells and fires of the Année Terrible wreaked havoc upon Paris in 1870-71, this modern dreamland was harrowed by the sight and sound of shattering glass.
In this interdisciplinary study, Hannah Scott combines cultural history with close literary analyses of fictional works by three major authors from the period: Emile Zola's Au Bonheur des Dames (1883), Guy de Maupassant's Contes et nouvelles (1870-1891), and Joris-Karl Huysmans's decadent masterpiece, À rebours (1884). She explores the distressing freight of meaning attached to glass for readers in the wake of the Année Terrible, before Symbolism and the Art Nouveau could purify the material world of its haunting past.
Hannah Scott is a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham.
About the author
Hannah Scott is a native of southwest Arkansas and a current resident of Bryan, Texas, along with her husband, Landon, and their two children, Ezekiel (3) and Marlie (1). She earned her Bachelor of Science in Agricultural Education from the University of Arkansas in 2018. She taught agricultural education in Arkansas for 2 and a half years before making the move to Texas, where she is currently a stay-at-home mom. She also recently earned her Master of Arts in Creative Writing and English from Southern New Hampshire University. Hannah has always dreamed of being a published author and her two children inspired her to write her debut book, "The Prettiest Smile". Her daughter, Marlie, was born with a cleft lip and palate. She has undergone two surgeries just in her first year of life. Hannah hopes that her story of Marlie's life leading up to her first surgery will inspire someone and help any other families who are going through their own cleft journey.
