The novel map
Subtitle: space and subjectivity in nineteenth-century French fiction
By: Patrick M. Bray
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Published: 2013
Place of publication: Evanston, Ill
Language: eng
Number of pages: 271
ISBN-13: 9780810128668
Subjects: Space and time in literature; History and criticism; Subjectivity in literature; French fiction
Description: Focusing on Stendhal, Gérard de Nerval, George Sand, Émile Zola, and Marcel Proust, The Novel Map: Mapping the Self in Nineteenth-Century French Fiction explores the ways that these writers represent and negotiate the relationship between the self and the world as a function of space in a novel turned map. With the rise of the novel and of autobiography, the literary and cultural contexts of nineteenth-century France reconfigured both the ways literature could represent subjects and the ways subjects related to space. In the first-person works of these authors, maps situate the narrator within the imaginary space of the novel. Yet the time inherent in the text’s narrative unsettles the spatial self drawn by the maps and so creates a novel self, one which is both new and literary. The novel self transcends the rigid confines of a map. In this significant study, Patrick M. Bray charts a new direction in critical theory. --
Notes: Revised and expanded version of the author's dissertation--Harvard, 2005, under the title: Novel selves: mapping the subject in Stendhal, Nerval and Proust.

Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: Here and there: the subject in space and text; title: Part I. Stendhal's privilege; title: Chapter 1. The life and death of Henry Brulard; title: Chapter 2. The ghost in the map; title: Part II. Nerval beyond narrative; title: Chapter 3. Orientations: writing the self in Nerval's Voyage en orient; title: Chapter 4. Unfolding Nerval; title: Part III. Sand's utopian subjects; title: Chapter 5. Drowning in the text: space and Indiana; title: Chapter 6. Carte blanche: charting utopia in Sand's Nanon; title: Part IV. Branching off: genealogy and map in the Rougon-Macquart; title: Chapter 7. Zola and the contradictory origins of the novel; title: Chapter 8. Mapping creative destruction in Zola; title: Part V. Proust's double text; title: Chapter 9. The law of the land; title: Chapter 10. Creating a space for time; title: Conclusion: Now and then: virtual spaces and real subjects in the twenty-first century.