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Victims of the Book uncovers a long-neglected but once widespread subgenre: the fin-de-si¿e novel of formation in France. Novels about and geared toward adolescent male readers were imbued with a deep worry over young Frenchmen’s masculinity, as evidenced by titles like
Crise de jeunesse (
Youth in Crisis, 1897),
La Crise virile (
Crisis of Virility, 1898),
La Vie st¿le (
A Sterile Life, 1892), and
La Mortelle Impuissance (
Deadly Impotence, 1903). In this book, Fran¿s Proulx examines a wide panorama of these novels, many of which have rarely been studied, as well as polemical essays, pedagogical articles, and medical treatises on the perceived threats posed by young Frenchmen’s reading habits. Against this cultural backdrop, he illuminates all that was at stake in representations of the male reader by prominent novelists of the period, including Jules Vall¿ Paul Bourget, Maurice Barr¿ Andr¿ide, and Marcel Proust.
In the final decades of the nineteenth century, social commentators insistently characterized excessive reading as an emasculating illness that afflicted French youth. Fin-de-si¿e writers responded to this pathologization of reading with a profusion of novels addressed to young male readers, paradoxically proposing their own novels as potential cures. In the early twentieth century, this corpus was critically revisited by a new generation of writers.
Victims of the Book shows how Gide and Proust in particular reworked the fin-de-si¿e paradox to subvert cultural norms about literature and masculinity, proposing instead a queer pact between writer and reader.
List of contents
List of Illustrations
Note on Translations and Previously Published Material
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Reading Anxieties
Part I: Youth in Crisis
1. Contagions and Cures
2. Representing the Fin-de-Siècle Reader: Exhaustion, Deviation, Impotence
Part II: The Three Dangers of Literature
3. Vallès, the
Déclassé, and the Pitfalls of Education
4. Bourget, the Chambige Affair, and the Queer Seductions of the Novel
5. Barrès and the Ghosts of Balzacian Ambition
Part III: Forming the Reader
6. Martin du Gard, Tinan, and the Uses of Irony
7. Gide and the Novel as Formation
8. Proust and the Fantasy of Readerly Recognition
Epilogue: The Afterlives of Bad Masters
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
François Proulx is an associate professor in the Department of French and Italian at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Summary
Victims of the Book shows how the adolescent male reader became a subject of grave social concern in late-nineteenth-century France and how a new generation of writers later reworked the novel to subvert cultural norms about masculinity.
