Chapter from the book: Helgesson, S et al. 2018. World Literatures: Exploring the Cosmopolitan-Vernacular Exchange.
The chapter constitutes an introductory reflection on an important theme in the nineteenth-century French novel: the trajectory of protagonists from the province to the cosmopolitan metropolis of Paris. Three novels will be analysed briefly, Le Rouge et le Noir by Stendhal, Illusions Perdues by Honoré de Balzac and Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert. In focus is the characters’ initial situation in the countryside and how they are affected emotionally by the force that drives them to transgress their confined locations, in direction of the capital and the new world. As we shall see, the literature that they read plays an important role in this transgression.
Alling, A. 2018. In Conquest of the World and of Modernity: Movements from the Countryside to Paris in Novels by Stendhal, Balzac and Flaubert. In: Helgesson, S et al (eds.), World Literatures. Stockholm: Stockholm University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16993/bat.r
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Published on Nov. 22, 2018