This book deals with the important and hitherto neglected relationship between the works of Stendhal and Plutarch's Parallel Lives. Stendhal's readings of Plutarch are shown to inform his literary representations of Revolution and Empire, Restoration and Orleanism, as well as his theorizations of Romanticism. In particular, the Plutarchan concept of Parallel Lives is used to analyse one of the major themes of Stendhal's writing: the self-construction of individual identity, whether (auto)biographical or fictional, by means of the emulation (as distinct from the imitation) of heroic exemplars. As a consequence, the balance between irony and idealism often identified by critics in Stendhal's work is shown rather to be an imbalance, weighted in favour of an idealism derived from Plutarchan conceptions of heroism, particularly as they are represented in the Lives of Julius Caesar and Marcus Brutus.

If the eighteenth century was the age of reason and enlightenment, the nineteenth century was undeniably the age of movement. This tumultuous period in French history bore witness to the rise and fall of countless political movements, from revolutions and “coups d’état”, to popular protests and the first workers’ strikes. It was an age of economic movements as France embraced the new world of finance and banking, and underwent its own industrial revolution. Social mobility increased as a dynamic commercial bourgeoisie began to challenge the system of aristocratic privilege that neither the 1789 Revolution nor the Napoleonic Empire had dismantled entirely. The era was one of artistic ferment, as Romanticism gave way to Realism, Naturalism, Impressionism, and Symbolism. Intellectual and philosophical movements, from Liberalism to Saint-Simonianism, sought both to reconcile the country with its past and construct the framework for a progressive, more harmonious future. Through seventeen thematic essays, Aller(s)-Retour(s) seeks to understand nineteenth-century France as a society in perpetual motion. Recognising the instability that is key to the very concept of movement, this volume explores how the intellectual shifts and cross-currents of the nineteenth century responded to, and impacted upon, each other. Finally, it asks why questions of motion and movement dominated this period, as every sphere of French life confronted its own extremes of progress and renewal, stagnancy and regression.

This interdisciplinary volume explains the phenomenon of nationalism in nineteenth-century Europe through the prism of Graeco-Roman antiquity. Through a series of case studies covering a broad range of source material, it demonstrates the different purposes the heritage of the classical world was put to during a turbulent period in European history. Contributors include classicists, historians, archaeologists, art historians and others.

This is a book about the life and work of a singular writer, an author well-known for his biographies and travel writing but most famous for his novels The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma. As a child, Stendhal witnessed the unfolding of the French Revolution; as a young man, he served Napoleon first as a soldier and then as an administrator; and as a middle-aged man, he made it his task not to pursue his career, but instead to take as much paid leave as possible in order to be free and to be happy—and to write. Stendhal’s works often take the form of conversations with his readers—the “Happy Few” as he called them—about the things that matter most. He once claimed that he spent the majority of his life “carefully considering five or six main ideas.” This book makes clear what those main ideas were, why they mattered to Stendhal, and why they continue to matter to all of us.

Through a close reading of seven literary memoirs of the Nazi Occupation of France, Refiguring Les Années Noires: Literary Representations of the Nazi Occupation shows how the memory of the period has been shaped by political and social factors. An interdisciplinary study incorporating trauma theory, history, and folklore studies, this book examines representations of the Occupation by a diverse group of writers ranging from a female Resistance fighter to one of the first French Roma novelists. The methodological diversity of the volume brings to the fore each author’s unique perspective and demonstrates that their works are at once historically and artistically significant. Above all, this book gives voice to groups whose experiences in occupied France have largely been forgotten.

Challenging the master narrative of secularization, an exploration of the persistent influence of religious categories in the cultural landscape of Europe's first secular state.

From Sade at one end of the nineteenth century to Freud at the other, via many French novelists and poets, pleasure and pain become ever more closely entwined. Whereas the inseparability of these themes has hitherto been studied from isolated perspectives, such as psychoanalysis, sadism and sado-masochism, melancholy, or post-structuralist textual jouissance, the originality of this collaborative volume lies in its exploration of how pleasure and pain function across a broader range of contexts. The essays collected here demonstrate how the complex relationship between pleasure and pain plays a vital role in structuring nineteenth-century thinking in prose fiction (Balzac, Flaubert, Musset, Maupassant, Zola), verse and the memoir as well as socio-cultural studies, medical discourses, aesthetic theory and the visual arts. Featuring an international selection of contributors representing the full range of approaches to scholarship in nineteenth-century French studies – historical, literary, cultural, art historical, philosophical, and sociopolitical – the volume attests to the vitality, coherence and interdisciplinarity of nineteenth-century French studies and will be of interest to a wide cross-section of scholars and students of French literature, society and culture.