Rarement réédité, peu représenté dans les fonds publics, Lucien Descaves offre l’exemple d’un écrivain méconnu, enfermé dans une image réductrice qui ne correspond guère à la richesse et à la diversité de son œuvre. De sa longue et importante carrière de journaliste, de romancier, de dramaturge et de membre de l’Académie Goncourt, l’histoire littéraire ne retient que ses débuts naturalistes et le tumultueux procès de Sous-Offs qui le rendit un temps célèbre. Si le premier Descaves reste en effet quelque peu prisonnier des lieux communs zolistes, et si le procès de Sous-Offs est un moment important dans l’histoire de la mobilisation des intellectuels en France, il ne reste pas moins que réduire la vie et l’œuvre de notre auteur à la décennie 1880-1890 est injuste, voire ingrat à l’égard d’un écrivain très engagé dans la vie littéraire de son temps, dans le journalisme de combat et dans la comédie sociale. C’est à une telle iniquité que cette thèse tente de remédier. Nous y menons une étude à la fois génétique et thématique où l’accent est mis sur le parcours intellectuel de Descaves à travers un retour sur les diverses causes auxquelles il a prêté son concours d’écrivain, de journaliste et d’académicien actif. Les deux termes clés qui figurent dans le sous-titre («  naturalisme » et « libertaire »), soulignent une transformation progressive dont l'observation constitue le but de notre travail. / Lucien Descaves was hardly ever republished and is rarely represented in public archives. He is the perfect example of the unsung writer, confined to a reductive image which doesn’t reflect the richness and diversity of his work. He had a long and important career as a journalist, a novelist, a dramatist and a member of the Goncourt Academy; however, literary history only teaches us about his early days as a naturalist and about the tumultuous trial that took place when his novel Sous-Offs was published, which helped to make him famous for a while. It is an indisputable fact that Descaves, in his beginnings, remained under the influence of Zola and that the Sous-Offs trial remains an important moment of the history of the intellectuals mobilization in France. Nevertheless, it seems unfair to reduce the life and work of Lucien Descaves to the 1880-1890 decade, since he was very committed to the literary life of his time, to active journalism and to social comedy. This thesis precisely tries to address such an injustice. We have been studying both the genetic and thematic aspects of the intellectual career of Lucien Descaves in order to identify the various causes he tried to stand up for as an active author, journalist and academician. The key notions of “naturalism” and “libertarian”, which appear in the subtitle, underline the development of a progressive conversion which is the outcome of our study.

My interdisciplinary dissertation, Écriture Artiste and the Idea of Painterly Writing in Nineteenth-Century France, studies the notion of écriture artiste as an ideologically charged aesthetic doctrine that provides a better understanding of the rapports between art and the socio-historical context of mid nineteenth-century France. Specifically, using a case study approach, I examined four encounters between writers and painters, including Gustave Flaubert, Gustave Moreau, the Goncourt brothers, Eugène Delacroix, Émile Zola, Édouard Manet, J.-K. Huysmans and Odilon Redon. I analyzed how these pairings, each illustrative of a different facet of écriture artiste, highlight extratextual realities of the time through aesthetic embellishments. Findings show that some of these artists refashion the existing hierarchy of academically legislated rules on style by purposefully obscuring legibility in order to valorize artistic productions as alternatives to, not copies of, nature. Moreover, they reshape cultural views by staging the coexistence of lyrical and positivist elements, thus encouraging an array of subjective interpretations. I conclude that écriture artiste provides a valid framework for analyzing a self-conscious type of art that uses symbolic power to shape public taste. In turn this provides alternatives to a monolithic model upheld by legitimate culture. The central contribution of my project is its analysis of écriture artiste as a concept that does not fit neatly specific categories of genre or literary movements. My work intervenes in extant debates on literature and the visual arts in the latter half of the nineteenth century by challenging the critical tradition that considers écriture artiste as a pedantic descriptive style. My dissertation broadens the scope of écriture artiste beyond the work of the Goncourt brothers. This expansion of the field also reveals that this type of art theory is developed with an acute consciousness about the power of art and the artist to reach a changing readership, prompted by the shifting ideological climate of the time.

Thesis (doctoral)--Åbo Akademi, 2004. / Added thesis t.p. inserted. Includes bibliographical references (p. 207-221) and index.

Thesis (doctoral)--Åbo Akademi, 2004. / Added thesis t.p. inserted. Includes bibliographical references (p. 207-221) and index.

This dissertation explores how literary descriptions of visual artworks affect the narrative and descriptive fabric of a text. The novels I examine operate on three textual levels: the painter's creative struggles, his amorous entanglements with his model and/or the painted women of his canvas, and his aesthetic claims to revolutionize painting. My project argues that ekphrasis is a translational mode that takes two forms: the traditional, "contained" description of a visual artwork; and a mode of writing that pervades the entire text and emulates the characteristics of painting. For example, Balzac's "Le Chef d'oeuvre inconnu" and the Goncourts' Manette Salomon successfully adopt the ekphrastic mode of writing, transforming the narrative into a canvas where the boundaries between the media are blurred. On the other hand, Zola's L'oeuvre exploits ekphrasis in order to advance the superiority of literature over painting. At the heart of these Realist and Naturalist texts, the fundamental adherence to the mimetic principle of art is confronted with the nonfigurative experiments of their fictional painters. The female body, as the embodiment of Art and the manifestation of the artist's desire, becomes the symptom of his incursion into abstract painting and the site of the resistance to ekphrasis.

Among the various studies written on the voluminous artistic production relating to the clownish figure in the XIXth century, more specifically on its melancholic form in the second half of the century, very few have carried interest to the novel. The objective of this master's thesis is to study the clown as a novel character, through Gavroche (Victor Hugo, Les Miserables ), Kenwell and Cox (Jules Claretie, Le Train 17) and the brothers Zemganno (Edmond de Goncourt, Les Freres Zemganno ). We will focus on the way those hyperbolic figures spread out their marginality, their laughter and their illusions within the novel, thus providing information on this one. Our analysis of the clown's passage through the novel, which always deploys in three phases (the marginal entrance, the ascension and the fall), demonstrates the incompatibility between the realistic material from the XIXth century and this nevertheless infinitely novelistic being.

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Au moment où la prostitution semble exploser dans les villes, la fille des rues envahit la littérature de la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle. Cette héroïne nouvelle acquiert bien vite le premier rôle de ce qui devient un sous-genre romanesque à part entière, le « roman de fille », dont on mettra en évidence la structure et les motifs privilégiés. Un détour par les discours médicaux, moraux et sociaux du temps sur la femme et la prostituée nous permettra de mieux appréhender le fonctionnement et les significations multiples que ce personnage revêt en littérature. Figure du manque et de la dépossession, la prostituée interroge la vision masculine du féminin, mais elle traduit aussi les inquiétudes des contemporains face aux nombreuses mutations sociales, économiques et politiques du siècle ; elle se fait le reflet d’angoisses existentielles sur le rapport au corps, aux autres et à la mort, ainsi que le lieu privilégié de réflexions artistiques et esthétiques / While prostitution was exploding within the cities, the character of the prostitute flourished in the second part of the nineteenth-Century literature. This new heroine quickly gets the leading part in a soon-To-Be proper literary fictional sub-genre, the “prostitute novel”, whose structure and motifs will be pointed out in our research. We will evoke medical, moral and social discourses about women and prostitutes in the 19th century in order to grasp the numerous roles this character can assume in literature. As a protagonist of the loss and deprivation, the prostitute questions the masculine vision of women, but she also embodies her time’s worries about the multiple social, economical and political transformations happening. She also holds a mirror to existential anxieties about the relationship to the Body, the Other and Death, and appears to be a privileged character for artistic and aesthetic considerations

Nombreux sont les romans du XIXe siècle qui ont pour thème principal le journalisme. Le présent mémoire se donne pour objectif de retracer l’évolution et les transformations du scénario romanesque de l’écrivain-journaliste à travers trois romans majeurs sur la presse soit Illusions perdues (1843) d’Honoré de Balzac, Charles Demailly (publié en 1860 sous le titre Les hommes de lettres) des frères Edmond et Jules de Goncourt ainsi que Bel-Ami (1885) de Guy de Maupassant. Pour ce faire, nous situerons d’abord Illusions perdues comme le modèle matriciel de ce scénario en ce sens que se cristallise dans ce roman l’ensemble des éléments clés propres à ce scénario et nous verrons par la suite en quoi les romans des Goncourt et surtout de Maupassant s’en rapprochent et s’en distancent. Nous avons choisi de convoquer ces œuvres, car elles représentent des repères incontournables dans une étendue temporelle d’un peu plus de quarante ans.

No description available.