Search results for "fin-de-siècle"
showing 3 items of 3 documents
Les Yellow Nineties de Mérimée
2014
L’article étudie les écrits consacrés à Mérimée par trois essayistes anglais de la fin du xixe siècle. Oscar Wilde s’interroge, au sujet de Mérimée, sur le rapport entre vérité et fiction dans la littérature et dans la vie. Walter Pater examine l’œuvre, mettant en relief l’impersonnalité mériméenne. Arthur Symons portraiture Mérimée en névrosé moderne.
Foetor judaicus: antisemitism and the excremental imagination in late nineteenth-century French-speaking novels
2021
This study examines the relationship between anti-Semitic discourse and excremental olfactory notations in French and Belgian fictional narratives during the second half of the nineteenth-century, including works from the Goncourt brothers, Rachilde, Léon Bloy, and Camille Lemonnier, among others. The novelists use nauseating olfactory notations, often linked to faecal matter, waste, digestion, etc., as clues of a character's ties with the Jewish community. The relationship between anti-Semitic ideology and excremental olfactory notations illustrates complex political, social, cultural, and economic tensions, directly influencing the ways in which literary texts conceive the discourses surr…
Symptomatic bodies: reading and writing the odor of sanctity in French culture (1868-1901)
2021
Using examples from novels by the Goncourt brothers, Huysmans, Zola and Lemonnier, this paper explores the literary representation of the odor of sanctity in regard to the main epistemological discourses of the second half of the 19th century. In this deeply anticlerical intellectual context, the Christian myth of the odor of sanctity is analyzed by medical professionals and scientists as a pathological phenomenon. Although taking into account the divergent aesthetics of the selected authors, the study focuses mostly on the ambiguity literary texts maintain between the unspeakable experience of religious ecstasy and a symptomatic vision of the body.