Literature and Material Culture from Balzac to Proust

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, Mallarmé 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. Her study makes an important contribution to the literary history of material culture.

• Genuinely innovative and important study of the relationship between material culture and literature, which should revolutionize the way scholars look at nineteenth-century French literature • Illuminates the work of canonical writers including Balzac, Zola and Proust in a new way • Strong range of examples in text and context across broad chronological span

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 Pécuchet’s consumerist epistemology; 5. Narrate, describe, or catalogue? 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.