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This volume draws contributors from around the globe who represent the full range of approaches to scholarship in nineteenth-century French studies: historical, literary, cultural, art historical, philosophical, and comparative. The theme of the volume - Birth and Death - is one with particular resonance for nineteenth-century French studies, since the nineteenth century is commonly perceived as an age of new life and renovation. It is the epoch that witnessed an efflorescence of industrial and artistic progress, the birth of the individual and the birth of the novel, and the creation of an urban population in the major demographic shift from the rural provinces to Paris. At the same time, however, it is the century of Decadence and degeneration theory, marked by a prominent morbid aesthetic in the artistic sphere and a fascination with criminality, moral decay and the pathologization of racial and sexual minorities in the scientific discourses. It is also the century in which reflection on processes of artistic creation begins to problematize concepts of mimetic representation, the function of the author and the status of the text. In the context of the dialectical quality of nineteenth-century French culture, caught between an obsession with the new and innovative and a paranoid sense of its own encroaching decay, the twin themes of birth and death open onto a variety of issues - literary, social, historical, artistic - which are explored, interrogated and reassessed in the essays contained in this volume. Intro -- Birth and Death in Nineteenth-Century French Culture -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- ON TEXTUAL GENESIS, TRANSLATION AND RESURRECTION -- George Sand: la genèse des fins de romans -- Flaubert, Apuleius and Ovid: The Genesis of a Recurring Theme -- Perdue en traduction: Translation, Betrayal and Death in Mérimée's -- Le Tombeau de la Poésie: Strategies of Textual Resurrection in Mallarmé and Banville -- NARRATIVES OF BIRTH AND DEATH -- Wilde's Salomé: Tenses, Tension and Progression in Salomé's Final Monologue -- Figures de l'artiste et comédiens du réel: de la difficile naissance à l'implacable mort dans La Comédie humaine -- Soeur Philomène ou comment la mort s'invite à l'hôpital -- Death for Beginners: Nineteenth-Century Katabatic Narratives for Young Readers -- PROBLEMATIZING MATERNITY AND FEMININITY -- Stendhal's Rebellious Mothers and the Fight Against Death-by-Maternity -- La Mort de Madame de Vernon et les deux dénouements de Delphine: invention romanesque et réminiscences maternelles chez Madame de Staël -- Midwifery and Malpractice in Fécondité: Zola's Fictional History of Problematical Maternities -- L'érotisme cristallin de Théophile Gautier: étude de la figure de la 'morte amoureuse' dans les contes fantastiques -- AESTHETICIZING BODILY DEATH -- L'Évangile de la pourriture selon Saint Huysmans: Lydwine de Schiedam -- Une esthétique de la mort au dix-neuvième siècle: Alphonse Daudet -- Selon Max Nordau: le poème naturel du corps de Mallarmé -- The Aesthetics of Self-Skeletonization in James Ensor -- Notes on Contributors -- Index.
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