TY - BOOK ID - 1539099 TI - Le Grand Transit Moderne : mobility, modernity and French naturalist fiction PY - 2005 VL - 260 SN - 9042018151 9401202125 1417591110 9781417591114 9789042018150 9789401202121 PB - Amsterdam : Editions Rodopi, DB - UniCat KW - Fiction KW - Thematology KW - French literature KW - anno 1800-1899 KW - City and town life in literature KW - Transportation KW - History and criticism KW - Beweging in de literatuur KW - Motion in literature KW - Mouvement dans la littérature KW - Naturalism in literature KW - France KW - French fiction KW - 19th century KW - French literature - 19th century - History and criticism KW - Transportation - France KW - City and town life in literature. KW - History and criticism. UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:1539099 AB - This book explores fictional responses to the changing transport and urban infrastructure of nineteenth-century France, arguing that networks of movement (and an accompanying 'culture of networks') which had become firmly established by the time of the Second Empire constitute a privileged subject for representation, and that naturalist fiction in particular is that representation's privileged form. Contextualizing the study's critical focus by way of a brief historical outline of the development of infrastructural networks in nineteenth-century France and a delineation of the problematical parameters of French naturalism, Duffy examines literary representations of new forms and conceptualisations of movement, principally in works by Flaubert, Zola, and Maupassant. Other authors discussed include the Goncourt brothers, Huysmans, Baudelaire and Claretie. Literary texts are examined alongside a range of related scientific, sociological and medical texts. What emerges strikingly from consideration of these works and the discourses they - often subversively - incorporate, is that movement, central to nineteenth-century industrial society's view of itself, is frequently perceived and presented self-deludingly in the idealised metaphorical terms of smoothly-functioning systems of perpetual motion, and that naturalist fiction, by exploiting to their full potential the same metaphors in its narratives, challenges this 'anti-entropic' vision. ER -