"The Family in Crisis in Late Nineteenth-Century French Fiction" by Nicholas White

This book focusses on a key moment in the construction of the modern view of the family in France, examines how novels represent the problems of family life at a key moment in modern social history.



Nicholas White’s analysis of novels by Zola, Maupassant, Huysmans, Hennique, Bourget and Armand Charpentier is fashioned by perspectives on a wide cultural field, including legal, popular and academic discourses on the family and its discontents. His account encourages a close rereading of canonical as well as hitherto overlooked texts from fin-de-siècle France. What emerges between the death of Flaubert in 1880 and the publication of Bourget’s Un divorce in 1904 is a series of Naturalist and post-Naturalist representations of transgressive behaviour in which tales of adultery, illegitimacy, consanguinity, incest and divorce serve to exemplify and to offer a range of nuances on the Third Republic’s crisis in what might now be termed ‘family values’.

Contents
Acknowledgements page
Introduction: fin de siècle, fin de famille?
PART 1 The promiscuous narrative of Pot-Bouille
1 Demon lover or erotic atheist?
2 The rhythms of performance
PART 2 Pleasures and fears of paternity: Maupassant and Zola
3 Bel-Ami: fantasies of seduction and colonization
4 Incest in Les Rougon-Macquart
PART 3 The blindness of passions: Huysmans, Hennique and Zola
5 The conquest of privacy in A Rebours
6 Painting, politics and architecture
Coda: Bourget’s Un divorce and the ‘honnête femme’
Notes
Bibliography
Index