Spatial Imagination and Modernity in European Francophone Culture During the Long Nineteenth Century Critical Interiority

Introduction: Critical Interiority: Spatial Imagination and Modernity in European Francophone Culture During the Long Nineteenth Century

Part I

Critical Interiority in Architecture  

1. An Architecture of Shadows: The Sublime World of Étienne-Louis Boullée                                 

Laure Katsaros

2. Behind the F(r)ame of the Eiffel Tower: The Universal Exposition of Space and the Ontology of Objects                                                                                                                                                

Alexandre Dubois

3. Beneath the Surface of the Present. Temporality and Memory in Fernand Khnopff’s Art and Architecture                                                                                                                                          

Dominique Bauer

Part II

Critical Interiority in Literature

4. Haunting Houses: Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” with Verne’s Le Château des Carpathes       

Abigail RayAlexander      

5. Enchanted Paradou: Zola’s Garden Ecology in La faute de l’abbé Mouret                    

Annie Smart       

6. Broken Images: Imagined and Lived Domesticity in Huysmans’s En ménage                     

Aina Martí          

7. Disenchanting Enchantments: Zola, Manet, and the Erotics of the Conservatory          

Kathryn A. Haklin            

8. Proust’s Superimposed Spaces: The Bedroom, The Church, and Images of Things Past Jill Cornish  

Biography

Dominique Bauer is an Associate Professor of Cultural History in the Faculty of Architecture, KU Leuven, Belgium. She publishes on spatial images, temporality, and modernity in long nineteenth‑century francophone culture from a comparative perspective, with a focus on literary, philosophical (Benjamin, Nietzsche, Bergson), and artistic sources.

Alexandre Dubois is an Assistant Professor and Director of French at Regis University, USA. His research focuses on the fantasy of global colonialism that characterized French geographical societies from the late nineteenth century to the present day. He also specializes in Second Language Acquisition and Transnational French.

Jill Cornish is a full‑time senior lecturer in French at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. Her research focuses on domestic space, specifically the bedroom, in nineteenth‑century French literature and visual art as the space relates to
conceptions of identity. She also works on Second Language Acquisition in language lab courses and uses of artificial intelligence in the language classroom.

Kathryn A. Haklin is an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of French literature, medical humanities, cinema, and visual culture. She is a lecturer in French at Washington University in St. Louis and her research appears in Dix‑Neuf, L’Esprit Créateur, MLN, Écrire le huis clos au XIXe siècle (2024), and Ephemeral Spectacles, Exhibition Spaces and Museums 1750–1918 (2021).