Research Catalog

Politics and narratives of birth gynocolonization from Rousseau to Zola

Title: Politics and narratives of birth gynocolonization from Rousseau to Zola / Carol A. Mossman.
Author: Mossman, Carol A.
Publication: Cambridge [England] : New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, ©1993.

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Use in library	PQ653 .M67 1993	Off-site

Details

Description

x, 259 pages; 22 cm

Summary

This book is a feminist analysis which combines a psychoanalytic perspective on catastrophic birth with the politics of reproduction in the emergent democracy of nineteenth-century France. It focuses on three major thinkers whose personal relation to origins is problematic - Roussea, Constant, and Stendhal - and also includes a broad reading of the nineteenth-century novel within the frame of pathological generation, giving special attention to works by Michelet and Zola. Professor Mossman identifies important areas of interaction between production and reproduction at the level of aesthetic form, and between private, birth-related discourse and the ideology of the birth of democracy. Within the context of the collapse of ancien regime France, the nascent ideology of motherhood collides with modes of discourse that invade and colonize the maternal body, generating a considerable burden of anxiety expressed in the nineteenth-century French novel.

Series Statement

Cambridge studies in French ; 41

Uniform Title

Cambridge studies in French ; 41.

Subject

Genre/Form

Criticism, interpretation, etc.
History.

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references (p. 241-248) and index.

Contents

Introduction: conception of this book -- Cycle 1. Stendhal: delivering a plot -- Death and transfiguration in the Vie de Henry Brulard -- Palimpsest and pregnancy: reading across Stendhalian autobiography -- Stendhalian fictions: plotting the unspeakable -- Cycle 2. Production, reproductions, and narrative form: Adolphe -- economy of production: the paternal and narrative form -- Reproduction: (de)composing mother -- Rebirth and the performance of matricide -- Cycle 3. Gynocolonization: Rousseau, Michelet Zola and the nineteenth-century French novel -- Introduction: toward a bodied politics -- For unto us a son is born: Emile -- Birthing the body politic: Du Contrat social -- politic in the body Rousseau: Emile revisited and "La Reine Fantasque" Introduction: birth, motherhood, and the disease of democracy -- flesh made word: Enfants du siecle and pathologies of reproduction in the nineteenth-century French novel -- Liberty, equality, maternity: Michelet as body snatcher -- Into Africa: Zola and gynocolonization.

ISBN

0521415861
9780521415866
0521415851 (canceled/invalid)

LCCN

92022019

OCLC

ocm26215701
26215701
SCSB-9144743

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library