The sentimental education of the novel
By: Margaret Cohen.
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 1999
Place of publication: Princeton, N.J
Language: eng
Number of pages: 219
Subjects: French fiction -- 19th century -- History and criticism.; Sentimentalism in literature.; French fiction -- Women authors -- History and criticism.; Women and literature -- France -- History -- 19th century.
Description: "The nineteenth-century French novel has long been seen as the heroic production of great men, who confronted in their works the social consequences of the French Revolution. And it is true that French realism, especially as developed by Balzac and Stendhal, was one of the most influential novelistic forms ever invented. Margaret Cohen, however, challenges the traditional account of the genesis of realism by returning Balzac and Stendhal to the forgotten novelistic contexts of their time.

Reconstructing a key formative period for the novel, she shows how realist codes emerged in a "hostile takeover" of a prestigious contemporary sentimental practice of the novel, which was almost completely dominated by women writers."--BOOK JACKET.

"Cohen draws on archival research, resurrecting scores of forgotten nineteenth-century novels, to demonstrate that the codes most closely identified with realism were actually the invention of sentimentality, a powerful aesthetic of emerging liberal-democratic society, although Balzac and Stendhal trivialized sentimental works by associating them with "frivolous" women writers and readers."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [197]-209) and index.