European Literature

Most leading French authors wrote travel books in the first half of the nineteenth century. This book is the first study exclusively devoted to surveying the Romantic travelogues they produced and the reasons for and significance of this trend. For while ‘the journey’ was a central image and myth of all Romanticism, suggesting as it did a dynamic, expanding, and evermore complex world in which artists' lives were increasingly experienced as wanderings and endless quests, the fashion for Romantic travel books was more marked in France than in Germany or England. Chateaubriand, Staël, Stendhal, Nodier, Hugo, Lamartine, Nerval, Gautier, Sand, Custine, Quinet, Mérimée, Dumas, and Tristan all wrote one or more travelogues, including four masterpieces — Hugo's Le Rhin (1842), Nerval's Le Voyage en Orient (1851), and Stendhal's two Rome, Naples et Florence (1817 and 1826). The book explores the reasons for this difference from England and Germany and its underpinning by the aims of French foreign and cultural policies as well as the needs of Parisian publishers. It puts the case for the collective achievement and essentially promising character of these Romantic travel books, compared to those of most later writers in nineteenth‐century France. A distinctive feature of the survey is its belief in the value of concentrating on the text of these books as published by their authors, as opposed to manuscript and peripheral material, whether recovered posthumously or published piecemeal in contemporary reviews.

This book studies Irish improvement fiction, a neglected genre of 19th-century literary, social, and political history. The book shows how the fiction of Mary Leadbeater, Charles Bardin, Martin Doyle, and William Carleton attempted to lure Irish peasants and landowners away from popular genres such as fantasy, romance, and ‘radical’ political tracts as well as ‘high’ literary and philosophical forms of enquiry. These writers attempted to cultivate a taste for the didactic tract, an assertively realist mode of representation. Accordingly, improvement fiction laboured to demonstrate the value of hard work, frugality, and sobriety in a rigorously realistic idiom, representing the contentment that inheres in a plain social order free of excess and embellishment. Improvement discourse defined itself in opposition to the perceived extremism of revolutionary politics and literary writing, seeking (but failing) to exemplify how both political discontent and unhappiness could be offset by a strict practicality and prosaic realism. This book demonstrates how improvement reveals itself to be a literary discourse, enmeshed in the very rhetorical abyss it sought to escape. In addition, the proudly liberal rhetoric of improvement is shown to be at one with the imperial discourse it worked to displace. The book argues that improvement discourse is embedded in the literary and cultural mainstream of modern Ireland and has hindered the development of intellectual and political debate throughout this period. These issues are examined in chapters exploring the career of William Carleton; peasant ‘orality’; educational provision in the post-Union period; the Irish language; secret society violence; Young Ireland nationalism; and the Irish Revival.

This study places the last three novels of Victor Hugo’s maturity—Les Travailleurs de la mer (1866), L’Homme qui rit (1869), and Quatrevingt-Treize (1874)—within the context of his artistic development after the success of Les Misérables (1862). Situating these historical narratives in relation to each other, to all of Hugo’s previous fiction, and to a number of poetic and critical works published in exile and in the initial years of the Third Republic, it illuminates the final structural and thematic shifts from a poetics of harmony to one of transcendence. As in Les Misérables, the disharmony associated with social tumult, apocalyptic vision, and oxymoronic tensions provides an essential component of the later Hugo's Romantic sublime. Instead of merely capitalizing on the runaway success of Les Misérables by recycling its prominent features, however, each novel makes an original contribution to the political and aesthetic trajectory inscribed by the entire œuvre. Each testifies as well to the wizardry of Hugo's own ‘special effects’ that contribute to his storytelling genius. Such effects, especially the dizzying spatial optics and manipulation of temporal dimensions, function not as mere playful gimmicks or novelistic flourishes but as strategies for figuring and communicating the ideal, both political and artistic. The unique interplay of poetic and historical discourse in each text reconfigures our disordered experience of the world into something far more coherent—a construction of meaning that strives to change perceptions and to promote social action.