"Literature and Material Culture from Balzac to Proust: The Collection and Consumption of Curiosities" by 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, 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.

Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 The bibelot
A nineteenth-century object
2 The logic(s) of material culture
Imitation, accumulation, and mobility
3 The fashionable artistic interior
Social (re)encoding in the domestic sphere
4 Flaubert’s "musées reçus"
Bouvard and Pe´cuchet’s consumerist epistemology
5 Narrate, describe, or catalogue?
The novel and the inventory form in Balzac, the Goncourts, and Huysmans
6 The parlour of critical theory
Reading dwelling space across disciplines
7 Rearranging the Oedipus
Fantastic and decadent floor-plans in Gautier, Maupassant, Lorrain, and Rachilde
Notes
Bibliography
Index