Pleasure and pain in nineteenth-century French literature and culture / ed. by David Evans and Kate Griffiths.

• Superior document: Faux titre, 324
• TeilnehmendeR: Evans, David, 1976-; Griffiths, Kate (College teacher).
• Year of Publication: 2008
• Language: English
• Series: Faux titre ; no. 324.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (287 p.)
• Notes: Description based upon print version of record.

From Sade at one end of the nineteenth century to Freud at the other, via many French novelists and poets, pleasure and pain become ever more closely entwined. Whereas the inseparability of these themes has hitherto been studied from isolated perspectives, such as psychoanalysis, sadism and sado-masochism, melancholy, or post-structuralist textual jouissance , the originality of this collaborative volume lies in its exploration of how pleasure and pain function across a broader range of contexts. The essays collected here demonstrate how the complex relationship between pleasure and pain plays a vital role in structuring nineteenth-century thinking in prose fiction (Balzac, Flaubert, Musset, Maupassant, Zola), verse and the memoir as well as socio-cultural studies, medical discourses, aesthetic theory and the visual arts. Featuring an international selection of contributors representing the full range of approaches to scholarship in nineteenth-century French studies – historical, literary, cultural, art historical, philosophical, and sociopolitical – the volume attests to the vitality, coherence and interdisciplinarity of nineteenth-century French studies and will be of interest to a wide cross-section of scholars and students of French literature, society and culture.

Table of Contents

Preliminary Material -- List of Illustrations -- Introduction / David Evans and Kate Griffiths -- Jouir / souffrir: le sensible et la fiction / Henri Mitterand -- Balzac’s Convivial Narrations: Intoxication and its Discourse in La Comédie humaine / Michael Tilby -- The Zero-Sum Game of Providential Pain: Balzac’s L’Envers de l’histoire contemporaine / Francesco Manzini -- L’Affaire Lacenaire ou les jouissances de l’exhibitionnisme criminel au temps du romantisme / Anne-Emmanuelle Demartini -- Le sex-appeal de la Veuve: guillotine et fantasmes romantiques / Loïc Guyon -- Le ‘bonheur dans le crime’: le plaisir de perdre et de se perdre chez Barbey d’Aurevilly / Natalia Leclerc -- Marie Cappelle Lafarge ou l’écriture de la douleur / Anna Norris -- Malvina Blanchecotte and ‘la douleur chantée’: The Creation of a Female Poetic Self. / Sara James -- Sexual Healing: Power and Pleasure in Fin-de-siècle Women’s Writing / Rachel Mesch -- La Rage du plaisir et la rage de la douleur: Lesbian Pleasure and Suffering in Fin-de-siècle French Literature and Sexology / Gretchen Schultz -- Pathologizing Female Sexual Frigidity in Fin-de-siècle France, or How Absence Was Made into a Thing / Alison Moore -- Redefining Sexual Excess as a Medical Disorder: Fin-de-siècle Representations of Hysteria and Spermatorrhoea / Elizabeth Stephens -- What is Ugly? Taine, Allen, Moreau / Rae Beth Gordon -- ‘Il faut souffrir pour être belle’: Pain and Beauty in Prose Fiction / Carol Rifelj -- Creative Crucifixions: The Artist as Christ in Nineteenth-Century France and Belgium / Claire Moran -- Notes on Contributors -- Index.