Politics and Narratives of Birth: Gynocolonization from Rousseau to Zola

by Carol A. Mossman

Overview

A feminist analysis that combines a psychoanalytic perspective on catastrophic birth with the politics of reproduction in the emergent democracy of nineteenth-century France, this book focuses on three major thinkers—Rousseau, Constant and Stendhal—and includes a broad reading of the nineteenth-century novel within the frame of pathological generation. In the collision of the nascent ideology of motherhood with modes of discourse that invade and colonize the maternal body, Professor Mossman identifies a considerable burden of the cultural anxiety expressed in the nineteenth-century French novel.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521415866
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	04/01/1993
Series:	Cambridge Studies in French , #41
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.63(w) x 8.74(h) x 0.79(d)

Table of Contents

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.

Editorial Reviews

"Mossman's presentation, while demanding, rewards the reader by providing an innovative contribution to feminist criticism. Her study has the merit of introducing a measure of balance to traditional interpretations of nineteenth-century fiction that focus on the father." Hollie Markland Harder, Nineteenth-Century French Studies

From the Publisher