The Family in Crisis in Late Nineteenth-Century French Fiction, first published in 1999, focuses on a key moment in the construction of the modern view of the family in France. Nicholas White's analysis of novels by Zola, Maupassant, Hennique, Bourget and Armand Charpentier is fashioned by perspectives on a wide cultural field, including legal, popular and academic discourses on the family and its discontents. His account encourages a close rereading of canonical as well as overlooked texts from fin de siecle France. What emerges between the death of Flaubert in 1880 and the publication of Bourget's Un divorce in 1904 is a series of Naturalist and post-Naturalist representations of transgressive behaviour in which tales of adultery, illegitimacy, consanguinity, incest and divorce serve to exemplify and to offer a range of nuances on the Third Republic's crisis in what might now be termed 'family values'.

A 1999 analysis of how novels represent the crisis in 'family values' in late nineteenth-century France.
Reviews
'... much rhetorical brilliance ... the book demonstrates an impressive level of critical sophistication, skilfully anatomizing, for example, the parodic elements inherent in novels of adultery which rework the cycle of duplicity and disillusion.' The Times Literary Supplement



Book Information
ISBN 9780521562744
Author Nicholas White
Format Hardback
Page Count 232
Imprint Cambridge University Press
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Weight(grams) 450g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 17mm