Broken Glass, Broken World
Subtitle: Glass in French Culture in the Aftermath Of 1870
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group; Legenda; Routledge
Published: 2016
Language: eng
Number of pages: 164
ISBN-13: 9781909662872
Subjects: Art nouveau; French fiction, history and criticism; France, history, 19th century
Description: Crystal palaces and railway stations, greenhouses and arcades, church windows and shop frontages, wine glasses and lamp shades: from the monumental to the minuscule, glass became increasingly pervasive in nineteenth-century France. Yet as the bombshells and fires of the Ann&#xFFFD;ee Terrible wreaked havoc upon Paris in 1870-71, this modern dreamland was harrowed by the sight and sound of shattering glass. In this interdisciplinary study, Hannah Scott combines cultural history with close literary analyses of fictional works by three major authors from the period: Emile Zola's Au Bonheur des Dames (1883), Guy de Maupassant's Contes et nouvelles (1870-1891), and Joris-Karl Huysmans's decadent masterpiece, A Rebours (1884). She explores the distressing freight of meaning attached to glass for readers in the wake of the Ann&#xFFFD;ee Terrible, before Symbolism and the Art Nouveau could purify the material world of its haunting past.