Politics and narratives of birth gynocolonization from Rousseau to Zola
By: Carol A. Mossman.
Series: Cambridge studies in French ;; 41
Publisher: New York, NY; Cambridge University Press
Published: 1993
Place of publication: Cambridge [England]
Language: eng
Number of pages: 259
Subjects: Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1712-1778 -- Political and social views.; Zola, Emile, 1840-1904 -- Political and social views.; Stendhal, 1783-1842 -- Political and social views.; Constant, Benjamin, 1787-1842.; French fiction -- 19th century -- History and criticism.; Childbirth in literature.; Feminism and literature -- France -- History -- 19th century.; Politics and literature -- France -- History -- 19th century.; Narration (Rhetoric) -- History -- 19th century.; Narration (Rhetoric) -- History -- 18th century.; Motherhood in literature.
Description: This book is a feminist analysis which combines a psychoanalytic perspective on catastrophic birth with the politics of reproduction in the emergent democracy of nineteenth-century France. It focuses on three major thinkers whose personal relation to origins is problematic - Roussea, Constant, and Stendhal - and also includes a broad reading of the nineteenth-century novel within the frame of pathological generation, giving special attention to works by Michelet and Zola.

Professor Mossman identifies important areas of interaction between production and reproduction at the level of aesthetic form, and between private, birth-related discourse and the ideology of the birth of democracy. Within the context of the collapse of ancien regime France, the nascent ideology of motherhood collides with modes of discourse that invade and colonize the maternal body, generating a considerable burden of anxiety expressed in the nineteenth-century French novel.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 241-248) and index.