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18 - Law and the Nineteenth-Century Novel

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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 February 2021

Adam Watt
Affiliation:
University of Exeter
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Summary

Though legal plots are a common feature of the nineteenth-century European novel, the massive legal changes brought about by the French Revolution made law a uniquely important theme of French fiction, and changed the way novelists made use of it. In the early part of the century, Romantic novelists’ meditations on law, such as those of Mme de Staël, reflected their eighteenth-century intellectual inheritance, in attempting to understand if and how individual happiness and social duty could be reconciled by enlightened legal reform. Yet later novelists abandoned such utopian abstractions, to see in law the very epitome of the ‘realist’ view of the world that ultimately gave them their name: law, novelists such as Honoré de Balzac suggest, is about compromise with imperfect systems, the balancing of competing interests, and the operation of power—it is, in short, political. To learn the law, as so many nineteenth-century heroes set out to do, is thus to learn ‘the way of the world’. Finally, however, nineteenth-century novelists saw in the language of the law (and especially the Civil Code of 1804) a model for, and indeed a rival to, their own task: to build worlds in words, to speak ideas into being.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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References

Further Reading

Bakhtin, Mikhail M., The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. by Michael Holquist, , trans. by Emerson, Caryl and Holquist, Michael (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981)Google Scholar
Cohen, Margaret, The Sentimental Education of the Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Counter, Andrew J., The Amorous Restoration: Love, Sex, and Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Counter, Andrew J., Inheritance in Nineteenth-Century French Culture: Wealth, Knowledge and the Family, (Oxford: Legenda, 2010)Google Scholar
Elias, Norbert, The Court Society, trans. by Jephcott, Edmund, in The Collected Works of Norbert Elias, Vol. ii, ed. by Mennell, Stephen (Dublin: University College Dublin, 2006)Google Scholar
Genette, Gérard, Figures II (Paris: Seuil, 1969)Google Scholar
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Gubar, Susan, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979)Google Scholar
Ladenson, Elisabeth, Dirt for Art’s Sake: Books on Trial from ‘Madame Bovary’ to ‘Lolita (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lichtlé, Michel, Balzac, le texte et la loi (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lucey, Michael, The Misfit of the Family: Balzac and the Social Forms of Sexuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003)Google Scholar
Martin, Xavier, Mythologie du Code Napoléon: aux soubassements de la France moderne (Paris: Dominique Martin Morin, 2003)Google Scholar
Miller, Nancy K., ‘Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women’s Fiction’, PMLA, 96 (1981), 3648Google Scholar
Moretti, Franco, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (London: Verso, 1987)Google Scholar
Olmsted, William, The Censorship Effect: Baudelaire, Flaubert, and the Formation of French Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pearson, Roger, Unacknowledged Legislators: The Poet as Law-Giver in Post-Revolutionary France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Petitier, Paule, ‘Amour et révolution: les intrigues sentimentales dans quelques romans de la Révolution’, in Fictions de la Révolution, 1789–1912, ed. by Roulin, Jean-Marie and Saminadayar-Perrin, Corinne (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2018)Google Scholar
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