Nineteenth-century Writers Research Articles

Beware of Americans Bearing Gifts

ABSTRACT Cultural theory often celebrates gift-giving as a benevolent force opposed to the socially destructive energies of commodity capitalism. Alexandra Urakova’s Dangerous Giving challenges this utopian tradition by showing just how ambivalent nineteenth-century writers in the United States were about the potentially pernicious effects of giving gifts. Rather than locating a space outside conflict and competition, gifts and the discourse surrounding their exchange lay bare, and in some cases intensify, the many forms of inequality that structured nineteenth-century American life.

Growing Old in Nineteenth-Century France: Texts, Fictions, and Representations

Abstract: The introduction to this special issue about French fascination with the aging process provides an overview of cultural interest in this topic from the Second Empire to World War I. It sets the scene for other contributors' analysis of the ways in which nineteenth-century writers and scientists took up aging or aged figures to explore complex new social dynamics.

Gothic Introspection: How Villette Nurtures Empathy and Reader Identity

While Charlotte Brontë is considered one of the foremost nineteenth-century writers of Gothic psychological realism, scholars have paid little attention to how a reading of the psychologies of her characters may impact readers’ thoughts on their own identity and mental state. This article redresses this gap by combining the field of Gothic Studies with narrative empathy studies to posit that Brontë’s use of Victorian Gothic motifs in her novel Villette (1853), such as the doppelgänger, excess and the abject, prompts readers into considering the struggles of their psychological well-being and how it affects their identity. Through entering a reflection on personal psychological adversity, readers are encouraged to consider how Villette teaches audiences the power of understanding how psychological maladies impact selfhood. This article will analyse how Lucy’s narration, her relationship with the Nun and the novel’s ending connect to Lucy’s psychology and, therefore, create empathetic connections with readers who can better understand their own experiences and mental well-being after reading Villette.

What We Didn’t Know a Recipe Could Be: Political Commentary, Machine Learning Models, and the Fluidity of Form in Nineteenth-Century Newspaper Recipes

In this article, I use document embedding models and a training set of nineteenth-century American recipes to build a pipeline classifier for identifying recipes in the broader nineteenth-century newspaper press. The model reveals a much more expansive understanding of the recipe form, which primarily centers around measurement words and prescriptive language rather than a heavily reliance upon the culinary. This fluidity of form allows nineteenth-century writers to harness the recipe form as a tool for political commentary all while no appearing to disrupt the careful divides between the public and domestic spheres. These recipe-adjacent texts, which are both recipe and not, offer a broader picture of short-form political commentary in the nineteenth century which can include genres and forms once thought unable to gestured beyond the confines of the kitchen.

Soledad Manero, un espíritu de libertad

"Soledad Manero is a nineteenth-century writer of great prestige in her time, however, over the years the relevance of her work in Mexican literature has been erased. That is why this research aims to give a broad overview of the writer’s work to highlight the contributions she had given to Mexican literature and the importance within the genealogy of Mexican female literature. For this reason, from the concepts of different approaches with a gender perspective such as those of Marcela Lagarde and Judith Butler, it will be shown how Manero relies on Spiritism, to show the relevance of the spirit, beyond of gender and precepts that prevent women from developing.Keywords: Spiritism; women writers; voice and writing; 19th Century literature; female literary bases"

Finding the “Ideal”: F. Marion Crawford’s Mystical Theology and Literary Form in Mr. Isaacs

While popular nineteenth-century writer F. Marion Crawford’s interest in religion is well-documented, his fiction has been categorised as not carrying overt theological overtones. In contrast to this critical view, this article argues that Crawford’s fiction can be linked to his religious thinking; however, the manner in which his works articulate this interest is non-prescriptive. The article contends that Crawford’s handling of religious dilemmas shapes the unusual generic form of his literary works, in particular Mr. Isaacs (1882). To this end, the article examines Crawford’s mystical position on the Idealism-materialism question that was much debated within theological circles in the nineteenth century. Through an analysis of his non-fiction writings and Mr. Isaacs, I demonstrate how Crawford places ideas from Buddhism and Christianity in conversation to arrive at a “mystical” position on a spiritual “Ideal,” which he defines as an aspiration towards the transcendental that can be partly grasped in reality. As I demonstrate, Crawford draws on this unusual mystical notion of the “Ideal” to develop a new literary form that merges romance with elements from realism in Mr. Isaacs.

Utopian Realism

Around the turn of the nineteenth century writer, and opinion leader, Frida Stéenhoff (1865–1945), developed a theory of the future and the present of society, and argued that contemporary ideas of the social, ethical, and aesthetical were provisional, not comparable to the coming. An affinity between drama and theory, as well as investigations of peace as an idea, are distinctive features of her writing. Her play, Stridbar ungdom / Pugnacious Youth (1907), can be positioned in a tradition of peace dramas spanning from Aristophanes’ Lysistrata to Sarah Kane’s Blasted. This article studies the utopian potential of peace in Pugnacious Youth. By reading the play with Ruth Levitas’ method the Imaginary Reconstitution of Society (IROS) – suggesting that utopia is a method rather than a goal in itself – peace does not emerge negatively, as non-war, but as concrete development and possible presence. Furthermore, the division between realism and idealism when it comes to militarism and peace, as well as the realist and idealist branches of the peace movement, are problematized. In conclusion, it appears that studying ideas of peace in fiction enables an alternative entry into the actualization of its not-yet-here quality.

Anthropological Glimpses of Japan in Nineteenth-Century Britain

This article explores two early anthropological works on Japan that were produced in Britain during the nineteenth century. The first is James Cowles Prichard's chapter on Japanese culture from the third edition of his Researches into the physical history of mankind (1844) . It represents the first formative study by a leading ethnologist to tackle the subject. The second is Edward Burnett Tylor's essay on Japanese belief for the Journal for the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (1877). During the later decades of the nineteenth century, information about Japanese society still remained relatively incomplete. When Tylor wrote his important essay about Japan in the 1870s, he still drew on the same sources Prichard had used three decades earlier. Very little new ethnographic information had travelled back to England by the second half of the nineteenth century. As a result, researchers continued to struggle when writing about Japanese culture. What we get in these nineteenth-century writings is best described as anthropological ‘glimpses’ of Japan. By exploring these early sketches of Japan, a more textured disciplinary history emerges that helps to complexify and challenge the heroic and teleological narratives of British anthropology's supposed success story.

Soundscape

Recent studies demonstrate a significant level of interest to literature as a source of insight on sound and hearing. Attention has focused on the new ways to approach the acoustic dimensions of text, featuring narrative representation of sound in its physical characteristics and the psycho-somatic peculiarities of perception. Accordingly, the concept of soundscape, has entered critical scholarship to analyze the audible world in fiction. This essay addresses soundscape as a concept by scrutinizing the terms in which it was defined and situating soundscape in relation to nineteenth-century Gothic literature. My point of departure is the foundational work of R. Murray Schafer The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (1977), which introduces the concept and outlines the territory of soundscape studies as the intersection of science, the arts and society, and delineates terms central to the idea of the soundscape. I will elaborate on soundscape in its threefold dimensions: the panoply of sounds, the specific location, and the subjective experience of an individual inhabiting the space. The essay then considers the concept in light of the recent studies of sound in Gothic fiction and narrows down the topic to selected short stories by British and American nineteenth-century writers: E.A. Poe, E. Nesbit, S. Warren, and M.P. Shiel, among others. The shared features of the audible world in Gothic short stories and more distinctive elements of Gothic soundscapes offer some resources for thinking about a more complex elaboration of the concept, as well as implications and future directions for scholarly work.

Emerson and the lyric essay in Maggie Nelson’s Bluets

Abstract This article examines the previously underacknowledged influence of nineteenth-century writer Ralph Waldo Emerson on the contemporary essayist and memoirist Maggie Nelson, in particular the 2009 book-length essay Bluets. Nelson’s hybrid texts have often been seen as key examples of the quintessentially contemporary genre of the lyric essay. My argument here complicates the claims of originality that have been made for this genre and instead identifies Nelson’s formal concerns as the product of a profound engagement with a nineteenth-century model. Through my analysis of Bluets, I suggest that Emerson’s influence is key to understanding Nelson’s formal hybridity and, in turn, her particular representation of the relationship between the subject and the world. Through her engagement with Emerson, Nelson arrives at an understanding of subjecthood that is based on a radical dependency but that is also individually defined and self-sufficient.

Woman in a turban: Domenichino’s Sibyl, Staël’s Corinne, and the image of female genius

The heroine of Germaine de Staël’s Corinne, or Italy (1807) makes her first appearance in the novel ‘dressed like Domenichino’s Sibyl’, wearing an Indian shawl wound into a turban. The aim of this essay is to highlight the contribution that the tradition of Sibylline iconography made to the characterization of the heroine of Corinne by locating Staël in a long line of artists, writers, and patrons, particularly female ones, who adapted and appropriated this iconography for their own purposes over the previous two centuries. A crucial breakthrough was made in the early seventeenth century by Domenichino, who provided the prototype for later generations of artists by painting a freestanding picture of a generic (not, as often said, the Cumaean) Sibyl wearing a turban. Domenichino’s composition nevertheless remained exceptional in its insistence on the primacy of Sibylline inspiration, which helps to account for its role in Corinne as well as for its appeal to other early nineteenth-century writers. Staël’s direct predecessors included the artists Angelica Kauffman and Élisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun, both of whom portrayed female sitters in more or less Sibylline guise, but the most important was Emma Hamilton, from whose famous Attitudes Staël almost certainly derived the motif of the turban fashioned out of an Indian shawl. Staël herself adopted the turban as her characteristic headdress, as did other literary and artistic women after her; its great advantage lay in the way it enabled them to lay claim to Sibylline authority whilst also disavowing any such intent.

Redemption of Matter

Despite her biographical proximity to figures such as Emerson and Thoreau, the nineteenth-century writer and editor Margaret Fuller is not often considered an environmentalist. Indeed, she is more often remembered for her contributions to political feminism than to environmentalism. I argue that in Fuller’s writing, however, an environmental ethics emerges in conjunction with her questioning of the binary between ‘matter’ and ‘spirit’. In place of this binary, Fuller proposed fluidity. This is evidenced in her first book, Summer on the Lakes, a literary travelogue chronicling Fuller’s journey through the West. With recourse to theoretical concerns in feminist new materialisms, I first demonstrate how her understanding of fluidity was influenced by the nineteenth-century vitalist theory of animalmagnetism. I then turn to the ways that Fuller takes her encounters with the West’s watery sites—its waterfalls, rivers, and lakes—as occasions to articulate an anticolonial environmental ethics.

Kept From All Contagion: Germ Theory, Disease, and the Dilemma of Human Contact in Late Nineteenth-Century Literature

Kari Nixon’s monograph has the distinction of being a book about reacting to pandemics written and published right before the worldwide outbreak of COVID-19, thus challenging so much of our knowledge about the public and disease. While a fascinating study in nineteenth-century attitudes toward germ theory and contagion, the book is also interesting from a predictive standpoint as it addresses many of the controversies about protection and personal risk that have come to dominate current public discourse. Nixon’s book highlights the ways in which nineteenth-century authors defy principles of isolation from contagion and how fiction “subverts germ theory specifically and unmitigated scientific authority more generally by defiantly and consistently illustrating intimate relationships as fruitful and meaningful in spite of—and sometimes because of—infectious contact” (5). The idea of sanitization becomes connected to the antibiotic, a process that renders matter lifeless, and thus circulation is both proper and necessary for healthy human interaction and community.Nixon’s analysis ranges freely between scientific theory and literary fiction as well as across time periods in the nineteenth century. She organizes her chapters around specific diseases, which allows her to illustrate how each infection, from plague to venereal disease, becomes a vehicle for discussing the relationship between selfhood and society. Her work coverers an array of prominent nineteenth-century writers and offers new readings of works by Daniel Defoe, Mary Shelley, Henry James, Charlotte Brontë, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Henrik Ibsen, Thomas Hardy, and Grant Allen, among others. The breadth of the works covered allows Nixon to develop her analysis of how authors use contagion as a metaphor for social ills, from stopping the circulation of trade to the isolation of Victorian women and the constraints of nineteenth-century morality. Nixon reads against the grain of seeing those who treat illness through containment and sterilization as heroes and instead shows that in fiction these characters often foster the metaphoric ills of society through their unwillingness to participate in the wider community.Nixon’s arguments are especially compelling when she unpacks texts that have been traditionally seen as enforcing the status quo of the scientific savior. Her reading of Ibsen’s Ghosts, for example, provides an intriguing reexamination of the idea that the protagonist, Stockmann, saves the people of the town by shutting down the local baths after discovering bacteria in the water. Instead, Nixon asks us to examine the shaky evidence Stockmann provides, which indicates that a hero complex rather than a scientific certainty may be driving his actions. As she notes, while literary critics today are likely to read the play as the triumph of ignorance over science (the townspeople drive Stockmann away after his revelation), the Victorians would be more likely to take a satirical view of the scientist’s extremism. Such readings ask us to remove our typical associations with science as irrevocable truth and ask us to consider the alternative possibilities, that extreme measures of protection may cause more harm than good.While many of the readings provide a fresh approach to popular texts or an examination of overlooked ones, the sheer mass of readings can leave the project feeling uneven. Some sections, such as the reading of Jane Eyre, seem more perfunctory and would have benefited from a lengthier focus. Nevertheless, Nixon’s monograph will prove to be a great asset to scholars considering the literary implications of nineteenth-century medicine as well as challenging our understanding of canonical Victorian authors. As her premise indicates, by connecting authors who often are quarantined into separate critical traditions, such as Hardy and Ibsen, we do not spread infection but instead circulate ideas more widely, promoting a more creative and dynamic critical environment and avoiding the lifeless inertia that can bedevil scholarship.Of course, Nixon’s focus on the necessity of social interaction despite the risk of contagion seems problematic during our current moment in history. Nixon herself addresses concerns that avoiding the decontamination protocols that create “imagined membranous bubbles of safety” (214) is resonant of the contemporary antivaccination movement. As she notes, denying basic preventive measures is a perverse twist on the idea of protecting the individual without disregarding the needs of the community. Such individuals believe that they “can live safely in the epicenter of a somehow privileged, purified world, while sickened individuals are shuffled to its margins. . . . There is something rather antisocial in the sense that one can live within a population and not be affected by its endemic pathogens” (217). Thus, Nixon’s inquiry into disease and isolation is perhaps the most exciting result of her research, asking as it does for us to consider our connection to contamination and community and how infection can make us reexamine what we owe to each other.

Hide the Outcasts: Isaiah 16:3–4 and Fugitive Slave Laws

AbstractIsaiah 16:3–4, part of an obscure prophecy about ancient Moab, appeared frequently in nineteenth-century writings about slavery in the United States, particularly in the context of opposition to fugitive slave laws. The verses were linked with other biblical passages to create a network of proof texts to justify assisting persons who escaped slavery. Eventually, the line “hide the outcast” from verse 3 took on a life of its own as an abolitionist slogan, largely independently of its biblical context. Rebuttals of these uses of the texts by anti-abolitionist writers, which began to appear in the 1850s, criticized the decontextualization of the verses, and one novel response attempted to link the text to interracial intimacy. Despite these rebuttals, the use of the text continued apace throughout the 1850s–1860s in response to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act and the execution of John Brown.

Danger, Disability, and Double Age: Precocity and the Misfit Bodymind in the Nineteenth Century

Danger, Disability, and Double Age:Precocity and the Misfit Bodymind in the Nineteenth Century Courtney E. Thompson (bio) At the age of ten months he could speak and repeat every word that was said to him; when twelve months old he knew by heart the principal events narrated in the Pentateuch; in his second year he learned the greater part of the history of the Bible, both of the Old and new Testaments; in his third year he could reply to most questions on universal history and geography; in the same year he learned to speak Latin and French; in his fourth year he employed himself in the study of religion and the history of the Church, and he was able not only to repeat what he had read, but also to express his own judgment. The King of Denmark, wishing to see this wonderful child, he was taken to Copenhagen, there examined before the Court, and proclaimed to be a wonder. On his return home he learned to write, but his constitution being weak, he shortly after fell ill, and died. . . . 1 Such was the tale of Christian Heinecker, who—by his untimely death at just four years old—purportedly achieved such wonders. This "remarkable instance" in the "annals of precocity" served as both a representation of and a warning for the problem of precocious intelligence.2 In the eighteenth century, Christian was celebrated as a wonder, but by the mid-nineteenth century—when his story and others like it circulated—precocity was instead viewed as a curse. The boundaries and nature of childhood became an object of both scientific study and sociocultural concern over the course of the nineteenth century in the United States. Physicians and scientists began to investigate the stages of life and development on physical and psychological levels.3 At the same time, social reformers worked to define childhood as a state worthy of further protection through such efforts as age-of-consent campaigns, even as social mores surrounding the role of the child in the white, bourgeois family also transformed.4 Within this context, children who failed to conform to the expectations [End Page 376] of childhood behavior—whose chronological age didn't match their physical or intellectual development—were labeled as precocious and subsequently became objects of concern among scientists and social commentators alike. Precocity was viewed as pathological: "double age" was a disease that resulted in disability or even death. Nineteenth-century physiological and neurological research suggested that boys—and to a lesser extent, girls—were overtaxing their brains in ways that endangered their bodies and lives. Anxieties about inappropriate education dovetailed with concerns about the shape of education and the nature of manhood itself at a time when both were challenged and reimagined. Though the stages of child development would become closely tied to specific ages over the course of the twentieth century, nineteenth-century medical and popular notions of childhood development were inchoate, less fixed on milestones linked to specific ages.5 Despite the inconsistency, nineteenth-century writers agreed: mental precocity was dangerous to both body and mind. Precocity, the development of one feature of body, character, or mind in a fashion that outstripped chronological age, could manifest itself morally, sexually, spiritually, and so forth. This article focuses on one form of precocity, early intellectual development, as a case study of double age. Nineteenth-century discourse about precocious intellectual development not only reveals anxieties about double age, but further illuminates the deep-seated relationship between body and mind in nineteenth-century understandings of disability. Interpretations of precocity hinged on an understanding of a reciprocal relationship between the body and mind, which in turn was affected by race, class, and especially gender.6 Representations of the precocious (white, male, bourgeois) child constituted the construction of a bodymind, which Margaret Price defines as "the imbrication (not just the combination) of the entities usually called 'body' and 'mind.'"7 Moreover, the precocious bodymind can be understood to be fundamentally "misfit," as defined by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson: the term "describes an incongruent relationship between two things. . . . The problem with a misfit, then, inheres not in either of the two things but rather in their...

Cooking and feminism through Argentine literature

This essay analyzes women’s connections with cooking through the work of three female writers from Argentina. I uncover key moments in the history of the country in which culinary practices represent a channel for larger reflections on gender struggles and women’s rights. I distinguish three representative cases within the complex and rich relationship between women, cooking, and feminism in Argentine literature: the incursion of nineteenth-century writers in recipe books; the feminists of the 1980s and their use of the culinary language as a political and erotic expression; and cooking and food as an exploration of new social and sexual orders in contemporary literature. Within each period, I focus on a particular writer and literary work: Juana Manuela Gorriti’s Cocina ecléctica (1890), Tununa Mercado’s short story “Antieros” (1988), and Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s Las aventuras de la China Iron (2017). These Argentine authors provide their knowledge on the diverse cultural roots and habits in South American cooking and give predominance to senses and desire over rational prescriptions on women’s bodies, among other narrative strategies. Thus, analyzed as a corpus, these authors give us a broader idea of feminist practices through cooking and, ultimately, expand multiple meanings of feminism itself from a local perspective.

‘A very pleasant, safe, and effectual medicine’: The serial comma in the history of English

ABSTRACT The present paper traces the historical development of the serial comma in the history of English until its eventual decline over the course of the twentieth century. The serial comma (also known as the Oxford comma or Harvard comma) refers to the existence of a pause immediately before the conjunctions and/or (and sometimes nor) in a series of three or more elements in a clause. Although the use of this mark of punctuation is no longer a desideratum in Present-day British English, it was a disseminated practice among seventeenth-, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers. In light of this, this work has been conceived with the following objectives: (a) to study the use and distribution of the serial comma in the period 1500–1999; (b) to evaluate its distribution in the two types of writing, i.e. handwriting and printing, and the level of variation across text types; and (c) to ascertain whether the number of elements in the series participates in its deployment. The source of evidence comes from The Málaga Corpus of Early English Scientific Prose (MCEESP), the corpus of Early English Medical Writing (CEEM) and A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers (ARCHER 3.2).

What Is to Be Done with the Socialist Realist Canon: Nikolai Chernyshevskii in Late and Post-Soviet Cultural Imagination

Nikolai Chernyshevskii (1828–89), a major nineteenth-century writer and thinker, continues to play in important role in contemporary Russian culture as a subject of artistic performances and political discussions. This article argues that the current regenerative engagement with Chernyshevskii’s legacy was preceded by another period of intense fascination with the writer and his work, specifically in late Soviet conceptualist art. It examines representations of Chernyshevskii in different media created in the period from 1980 to 1991: sots-art paintings by Vitalii Komar and Aleksandr Melamid, essays and performances by Moscow Conceptualists, such as Dmitrii Prigov, and the ‘protopostmodernist’ early texts of Viktor Pelevin.

Russia's Capitalist Realism: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov by Vadim Shneyder

Reviewed by: Russia's Capitalist Realism: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov by Vadim Shneyder Jonathan Paine Russia's Capitalist Realism: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov. By Vadim Shneyder. (Studies in Russian Literature and Theory) Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 2021. xii+248 pp. $120. ISBN 978-0-81014-249-7. It is a pleasure to welcome another new face to the growing ranks of economic criticism. In this, his debut monograph, Vadim Shneyder asks a crucial question: how did Russian novelists deal with the growth of capitalism in the nineteenth century? His study is not just a model of close textual criticism; it illustrates how thoroughly economic awareness pervades the Russian nineteenth-century novel. Whereas Western European counterparts often embraced the representation of economic change as a dynamic force in shaping novelistic plot and character, Shneyder argues that Russian writers struggled to describe Russia's idiosyncratic absorption of an industrial revolution which other nations had experienced decades earlier. He concludes: 'the experience of capitalism forced Russian writers to [End Page 319] confront the limits of literary representation and [. . .] some of the greatest works of Russian realist literature incorporated these limits into their structure' (p. 173). In this wide-ranging study, he shows how even the most conventional emblems of industrialization, such as the factory, are treated as either un-narratable because monotonous and banal, or else incomprehensible because unfamiliar and chaotic. Tolstoi, he suggests, incorporates the intrusion of this new capitalist society into Anna Karenina by the device of opposing two couples: Anna and Vronskii, represented by chaotic images of railroads, urban society, and extravagant consumption, and Levin and Kitty, represented by the synchrony of mowing hay in a timeless rural idyll. Dostoevskii confronts the implications of new economic patterns more directly, in Shneyder's perceptive analysis. The Idiot illustrates the developing schism between traditional merchants, represented by Rogozhin, and the new generation of emerging capitalists, such as Totskii and Epanchin. The merchants belong to an essentially sterile economy in which cash, symbolized by the wad of notes with which Rogozhin tries to buy Nastasia Filippovna, is the only means of exchange and yet proves immutable and unproductive. Notes may pass from hand to hand but never yield anything; and the merchants exist as a separate, closed society, represented by Rogozhin's Gothic house. Capitalists, by contrast, exist only on the fringes of the novel. Although not a subject of narrative interest, they persist as a pervasive background theme. By the time The Brothers Karamazov appeared in 1881, the transactional theme of money has become both invasive and insistent, advancing to the foreground. The sum of 3000 roubles, at the core of the novel's plot, symbolizes not just the consistency but the arbitrariness of exchange value. Dostoevskii's representation of the capitalist economy undermines faith in the validity of any kind of equivalence—a corrosive perspective which may attack the moral basis of society itself. Shneyder's tour of the realist horizon ends with Chekhov. Once again, he contends, 'the progress of capitalism threaten[s] the intelligibility of the world' (p. 174). Representing factories and other processes of economic production may now be unavoidable, since they provide the backdrop to many of Chekhov's stories, but his protagonists still fail to understand them. The bored bourgeoisie coexists with its economic means of support while trying to ignore or suppress it. Shneyder is at his impressive best when he stays closest to the text. His chapter on The Idiot is a remarkable demonstration of how the application of a particular textual grille de lecture, in this case the focus on how money circulates through the text, can deliver genuinely original insights into the novel's construction as a response to contemporary economic trends. His broader conclusions reflect established lines of criticism, but his particular skill is to provide new evidence through his sensitivity to the text. This is a valuable and readable contribution—Shneyder writes well—to our assessment of how Russian realism reacted to the spread of Western economic disciplines. Shneyder concentrates on how nineteenth-century writers addressed the challenge of representing—or failing to represent—these changing economic frameworks in their texts. The other side of this coin...

LES ÉMOTIONS D’EMMA BOVARY

For the nineteenth-century writer, and especially for the realist novelist Gustave Flaubert, so preoccupied with his writing and the fate of his characters, emotion drives the course of the action. Flaubert, well known for his special way of conceiving his novels, for his impersonality and impassibility as techniques that make his writing unique, was also tempted by the analysis of how Emma masters her emotions (in the novel Madame Bovary which created a stir at the time). Our study is, first of all, an analysis of the theory of emotions in general and, secondly, an analysis of Emma Bovary’s emotions, the main character of the novel Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, namely, illusion, pleasure and desire.