Browse

It has become common to build an opposition between prudish Victorian England and permissive nineteenth-century France. The lack of a full-length study of nineteenth-century Anglo-French literary relations means that both English reserve and French license have been greatly exaggerated, as French writers frequently met with far greater support in England than at home. French Novels and the Victorians aims to shed new light on these relations by exploring the enormous impact of French fiction on the Victorian reading public. The work considers the many different ties built between the two countries in the publishing industry, identifying how French novels could be accessed and by whom, as well as who promoted and who resisted the importation of Continental works in England and why. The book reflects on what ‘immorality’ meant to both critics and the readers they sought to warn, and how the notion was subjected to scrutiny through censorship debates as well as the fictional representations of readers. It also tackles the contemporary preoccupation with literary influence, and explores how the extensive circulation of French fiction in England affected the concept of a ‘national’ literature. Rather than a study of the (considerable) influence of novelists such as Balzac, Hugo, Dumas, or Sand on individual works of English literature, this book uncovers the networks and mediums that enabled French novels to cross the Channel, and looks at how the concept of the ‘French novel’ was elaborated, interpreted, and challenged.

This is the first critical biography of Xavier Marmier. The celebrity of Marmier was such that his death made headline news in most major newspapers in France. Marmier earned his reputation by being a traveller, travel writer, translator, literary critic, comparatist, journalist, novelist, poet, lecturer, linguist, ethnologist, social historian, and latterly as an outspoken member of the Académie Française. His work had a great deal of influence, both direct and indirect, on literary and intellectual developments in France, and also had a significant impact in a number of the countries he visited. Although his name still figures in studies of comparative literature or the history of travel writing, Marmier's innovations have gradually been eclipsed by his successors in various fields, resulting in the neglect of his overall achievements. Marmier's numerous and diverse achievements are assessed in their intellectual and historical context, and within the framework of his colourful and somewhat controversial private life. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of the history of nineteenth-century French literature and intellectual life, the history of literary criticism, travel writing, the introduction of foreign literature to France, and those with an interest in the intellectual, social, and cultural history of the regions Marmier visited.