Documents found
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54.More information
Various conventions govern what has been termed the “device of the found manuscript.” A common feature of seventeenth and eighteenth century literature, this device serves to compensate for certain implausibilities, to link, more or less seriously, the fictional text with the referential universe. Now, this phenomenon, when integrated into the novels of the nineteenth century, could not aim for the same effects. The present article proposes to analyze the presence of this device in contemporary works by examining, more specifically, the “prefaces of denial” that serve to refute the identity of the institutional author—the person whose name appears on the jacket—and by suggesting a new origin for the text. If the study of some novels employing distinct paratextual strategies (La chambre by Simon Lambert, Maleficium by Martine Desjardins and Une estafette chez Artaud by Nicolas Tremblay) allows us to establish the issues involved in a practice of this kind, the present article focuses, more particularly, on those borderline cases that actualize the device of the found manuscript in an unusual way: Wigrum by Daniel Canty, on one hand, and Éros mélancolique by Jacques Roubaud and Anne F. Garréta, on the other. The proposed answer to the first question that arises, “What purpose does it serve?”, involves the shift in the issue of the plausible, which in these works is less about belief than about origin.
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In his 1857 interpretation, Baudelaire is the first to misgender Emma Bovary, opening the way for a reading of the play of gender inversions rarely taken seriously by literary criticism. This article therefore seeks to demonstrate, question, and unsettle the ambiguities of gender in Flaubert's writing, positing that there is a major unspoken element in his poetics: from Novembre (1842) to Madame Bovary (1857), one can discern an ambivalent weaving of desire and identification. Postmodern in spirit and inspired by queering, this reading aims to reveal the family resemblance between the two works.
Keywords: Gustave Flaubert, féminisme, femme fatale, Gustave Flaubert, queer, feminism
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According to the norms of the sapphic novel – which, from the libertine novels of the late eighteenth century to fin de siècle writings, developed its own set of stylistic, aesthetic, and narrative conventions – Les Demi-sexes, published in 1897 by Jane de la Vaudère, does not, at first glance, appear to depart. Yet this register of the “over-said” cannot be considered apart from what it conceals: a set of dissonances within the tightly woven narrative fabric shaped by the Decadent tradition and, above all, a complex play around plagiarism. This depth of the said and this work of reiteration-with-a-difference open a breach toward what the discourse itself denies.
Keywords: Jane de la Vaudère, genre, plagiat, intertextualité, lesbianisme, Décadence, non-dit, Jane de la Vaudère, gender, plagiarism, intertextuality, lesbianism, Decadence, unspoken
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AbstractCharles Pigott hailed from a Shropshire gentry family that made the transition from Jacobitism to Jacobinism in the eighteenth-century. A bon vivant and man of the turf, Pigott scandalised the establishment by exposing the decadent habits of the landed aristocracy in the Jockey Club and the Female Jockey Club. These scurrilous exposés brought Pigott fame and persecution; they also established him as one of the first radical writers to make political capital out of the "boudoir politics" of the aristocracy.This paper examines the language of defamation in these pamphlets, their antecedents and their political purchase. Although the Jockey Club proved a resounding success, its sequel was less so; and this fact raises the question of why sexual scandal ultimately proved a more potent weapon of political criticism in late-eighteenth century France than in Britain. One reason is related to Britain's counter-revolution, to the reaction of the propertied classes towards French revolutionary violence, however critical they may have been to aristocratic libertinism. But another has to do with the nature of political society in France, the closer articulation between the “noble body” and the body politic. In Britain's more pluralist society, dominated by Parliament rather than the Court, attacks on the morals of the aristocracy were less politically damaging than they were in the France of the ancien regime.