The Colonial Comedy: Imperialism in the French Realist Novel

Nineteenth-century French realism focuses on metropolitan France, with Paris as its undisputed heart. Through Jennifer Yee's close reading of the great novelists of the French realist and naturalist canon--Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant--The Colonial Comedy reveals that the colonies play a role at a distance even in the most apparently metropolitan texts. In what Edward Said called "geographical notations" of race and imperialism, the presence of the colonies off-stage is apparent as im...