Politics and Narratives of Birth: Gynocolonization from Rousseau to Zola: 41 (Cambridge Studies in French, Series Number 41)
Cambridge University Press, 8/21/2008
EAN 9780521030984, ISBN10: 0521030986
Paperback, 272 pages, 21.6 x 14 x 1.7 cm
Language: English
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, Rousseau, 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 Régime 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.
Acknowledgements
A note on translations
Introduction
conception of this book
Part I. Stendhal
Delivering a Plot
1. Death and transfiguration in the Vie de Henry Brulard
2. Palimpsest and pregnancy
reading across Stendhalian autobiography
3. Stendhalian fictions
plotting the unspeakable
Part II. Production, Reproductions and Narrative Form
Adolphe
4. Introduction
5. The economy of production
the paternal and narrative form
6. Reproduction
(de)composing mother
7. Rebirth and the performance of matricide
Part III. Gynocolonization
Rousseau, Michelet, Zolar and the Nineteenth-Century French Novel
Section 1
8. Introduction
toward a bodied politics
9. For unto us a son is born
Emile
10. Birthing the body politic
Du contrat social
11. The politic in the body Rousseau
Emile revisited and 'La Reigne Fantasque'
Section 2
12. Introduction
birth, motherhood and the disease of democracy
13. The flesh made word
Enfants du siècle and pathologies of reproduction in the nineteenth-century French novel
14. Liberty, equality, maternity
Michelet as body snatcher
15. Into Africa
Zola and gynocolonization
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index.