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17 - French Realism and History

from Part III - After the Revolution: The Novel in the Long Nineteenth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 February 2021

By
Maria Scott
Edited by
Adam Watt
Adam Watt
Affiliation:
University of Exeter
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Summary

The realist novel can be understood to bear witness to a changed understanding of history, ushered in with the modern era. This chapter argues that the French realist novel grew out of the historical novel, insofar as it attempted to offer a history of the present. However, a history of the present is challenging if not impossible to write because of the difficulty, and even the impossibility, of achieving a sufficiently distanced vantage point. French realist novels, consequently, aim to represent present reality but indirectly suggest the impossibility of any such representation. The chapter goes on to show that the French realist novels of the 1830s draw attention to the changeable nature of the present, partly because of the unstable social and political contexts of nineteenth-century France, and partly because of a shift in the way that people conceived of present reality. In at least two broad and closely interconnected senses, therefore, the early French realist novel is profoundly historical in its ambitions: it aims to offer a history of the present, however flawed that attempted history necessarily is, and it reveals the historical, or mutable, qualities of the present that it attempts to capture.

Keywords

French realismhistoryBalzacStendhalGeorge Sandhistorical novelRomanticism1830mutabilityillegibility
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of the Novel in French , pp. 309 - 325
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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References

Further Reading

Auerbach, Erich, ‘In the Hôtel de la Mole’, in Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Trask, Willard (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), pp. 454–92.Google Scholar
Barthes, Roland, Le Degré zéro de l’écriture [1953] (Paris: Seuil, 1972)Google Scholar
Barthes, Roland et al., Littérature et réalité (Paris: Seuil, 1982)Google Scholar
Bersani, Leo, A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature (Boston, MA, and Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1976)Google Scholar
Cohen, Margaret, The Sentimental Education of the Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Felman, Shoshana, ‘Women and Madness: The Critical Phallacy’, in Balzac, ed. by Tilby, Michael (London: Longman, 1995), pp. 266–83Google Scholar
Finch, Alison, ‘Reality and its Representation in the Nineteenth-Century Novel’, in The Cambridge Companion to the French Novel: from 1800 to the Present, ed. by Unwin, Timothy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 36–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Furst, Lilian R. (ed.), Realism (London: Longman, 1992)Google Scholar
Hamnett, Brian, The Historical Novel in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Representations of Reality in History and Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)Google Scholar
Jefferson, Ann, Reading Realism in Stendhal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)Google Scholar
Lucey, Michael, ‘Realism’, in The Cambridge History of French Literature, ed. by Burgwinkle, William, Nicholas Hammond and Emma Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 261–70Google Scholar
Lukács, Georg, The Historical Novel, trans. by Hannah, and Mitchell, Stanley (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1983)Google Scholar
Nelson, Brian, ‘Realism: Model or Mirage’, Romance Studies, 1 (1982), 1–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Petrey, Sandy, Realism and Revolution: Balzac, Stendhal, Zola, and the Performances of History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988)Google Scholar
Petrey, Sandy, ‘George and Georgina Sand: Realist Gender in Indiana’, in Textuality and Sexuality: Reading Theories and Practices, ed. by Worton, Michael and Still, Judith (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), pp. 133–47Google Scholar
Prendergast, Christopher, The Order of Mimesis: Balzac, Stendhal, Nerval, Flaubert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)Google Scholar
Rabine, Leslie W., Reading the Romantic Heroine: Text, History, Ideology (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985)Google Scholar
Schehr, Lawrence R., Rendering French Realism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar
Schor, Naomi, Breaking the Chain: Women, Theory, and French Realist Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scott, Maria, Stendhal’s Less-Loved Heroines (Oxford: Legenda, 2013)Google Scholar
Scott, Maria, ‘Stendhal’s Muddy Realism’, Dix-Neuf, 16.1 (2012), 15–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stephens, Bradley, ‘The Novel and the (Il)legibility of History: Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, and Alexandre Dumas’, in The Oxford Handbook of European Romanticism, ed. by Hamilton, Paul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 88–104Google Scholar

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