Literature and material culture from Balzac to Proust : the collection and consumption of curiosities / Janell Watson.
"This book addresses the issues of collecting, consuming, classifying, and describing the curiosities, antiques, and objets d'art that proliferated in French literary texts during the last decades of the nineteenth century. After Balzac made such issues significant in canonical literature,...
Saved in:
| Online Access: |
Full Text (via Cambridge) |
|---|---|
| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Electronic eBook |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Cambridge, U.K. ; New York, NY, USA :
Cambridge University Press,
1999.
|
| Series: | Cambridge studies in French ;
62. |
| Subjects: |
| Summary: | "This book addresses the issues of collecting, consuming, classifying, and describing the curiosities, antiques, and objets d'art that proliferated in French literary texts during the last decades of the nineteenth century. After Balzac made such issues significant in canonical literature, the Goncourt brothers, Huysmans, Mallarme and Maupassant celebrated their golden age. Flaubert and Zola scorned them. Rachilde and Lorrain perverted them. Proust commemorated their last moments of glory. Focusing on the bibelot (the modern French term for knick-knack, curiosity, or other collectible), Janell Watson shows how the sudden prominence given to curiosities and collecting in nineteenth-century literature signals a massive change in attitudes to the world of goods, which in turn restructured the literary text according to the practical logic of daily life, calling into question established scholarly notions of order."--Jacket |
|---|---|
| Physical Description: | 1 online resource (x, 227 pages) |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 210-224) and index. |
| ISBN: | 0511010044 9780511010040 0521661560 9780521661560 0511033516 9780511033513 0511151012 9780511151019 051111804X 9780511118043 9780511485909 0511485905 9786610162116 6610162115 |
| DOI: | 10.1017/CBO9780511485909 |