Victims of the Book: Reading and Masculinity in Fin-de-Siècle France

by Francois Proulx

Overview

Victims of the Book uncovers a long-neglected but once widespread subgenre: the fin-de-siècle novel of formation in France. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, social commentators insistently characterized excessive reading as an emasculating illness that afflicted French youth. Novels about and geared toward adolescent male readers were imbued with a deep worry over young Frenchmen’s masculinity, as evidenced by titles like Crise de jeunesse (Youth in Crisis, 1897), La Crise virile (Crisis of Virility, 1898), La Vie stérile (A Sterile Life, 1892), and La Mortelle Impuissance (Deadly Impotence, 1903). In this book, François Proulx examines a wide panorama of these novels, as well as polemical essays, pedagogical articles, and medical treatises on the perceived threats posed by young Frenchmen’s reading habits.

Fin-de-siècle writers responded to this pathologization of reading with a profusion of novels addressed to young male readers, paradoxically proposing their own novels as potential cures. In the early twentieth century, this corpus was critically revisited by a new generation of writers. Victims of the Book shows how André Gide and Marcel Proust in particular reworked the fin-de-siècle paradox to subvert cultural norms about literature and masculinity, proposing instead a queer pact between writer and reader.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781487532185
Publisher:	University of Toronto Press
Publication date:	11/04/2019
Series:	University of Toronto Romance Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	408
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

François Proulx is an associate professor in the Department of French and Italian at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations 
Note on Translations and Previously Published Material 
Acknowledgments 

Introduction: Reading Anxieties  

Part I: Youth in Crisis 

1. Contagions and Cures 
2. Representing the Fin-de-Siècle Reader: Exhaustion, Deviation, Impotence

Part II: The Three Dangers of Literature 

3. Vallès, the Déclassé, and the Pitfalls of Education 
4. Bourget, the Chambige Affair, and the Queer Seductions of the Novel 
5. Barrès and the Ghosts of Balzacian Ambition 

Part III: Forming the Reader 

6. Martin du Gard, Tinan, and the Uses of Irony 
7. Gide and the Novel as Formation 
8. Proust and the Fantasy of Readerly Recognition 

Epilogue: The Afterlives of Bad Masters 

Notes
Bibliography 
Index