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Literary Criticism French

Victims of the Book

Reading and Masculinity in Fin-de-Siècle France

by (author) Francois Proulx

Publisher
University of Toronto Press
Initial publish date
Nov 2019
Category
French, General, Gender Studies
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781487532185
    Publish Date
    Nov 2019
    List Price
    $97.00
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9781487505479
    Publish Date
    Nov 2019
    List Price
    $97.00

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Description

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.

About the author

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

Francois Proulx's profile page