Balzac and the Model of Painting: Artist Stories in La Comedie Humaine

by Diana Knight

Overview

"Texts about paintings, painters and sculptors are obvious test cases for issues of representation. A significant corpus of artist stories is scattered through Honore de Balzac's Comedie humaine which, from Marx to Lukacs to Roland Barthes's enormously influential S/Z (1970), has been a key literary work for critical debates around French realism. In a series of close readings, Diana Knight explores Barthes's 'model of painting' - the metaphorical code of painting and sculpture that underpins realist discourse - in the context of Balzac's fictional representations of the relation between artists, their models and their works of art. Whereas critics have tended to denounce Balzac's realist aesthetic as complicit with the misogyny of the society he portrays,Balzac and the Model of Painting takes the artist-model relationship, variously gendered in these stories, as the focus of the author's powerful realist critique of the sexual politics of prostitution and marriage in nineteenth-century France."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781351195454
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	12/02/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	160
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Diana Knight

Table of Contents

Introduction From Sculpture to Paiting 1. S/Z, Sarrasine and Le Chef-d'œuvre inconnu From Painting to Marriage 2. La Bourse 3. La Vendetta 4. La Maison du chat-qui-pelote From Model to Artist 5. La Rabouilleuse 6. The Joseph Bridau Cycle 7. Afterword

Editorial Reviews

Carefully focused, tightly written, and well-presented, this volume of close readings of Balzac’s artist stories is a solid and valuable addition to the Research Monographs in the Legenda series.

Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 38, Fall-Winter 2009-10, 119-20 - Marja Warehime

Are painting and sculpture equally liable to distort lived experience, or is sculpture capable of securing a closer approximation of material truth? This is just one of the intriguing questions suggested by Balzac and the Model of Painting.

caa.reviews - Elizabeth C. Mansfield