1st Edition
Text, Image, and the Problem with Perfection in Nineteenth-Century France Utopia and Its Afterlives
By Daniel Sipe
Copyright 2013
228 Pages
by
Routledge
228 Pages
by
Routledge
228 Pages
by
Routledge
Also available as eBook on:
In the decades after the French Revolution, philosophers, artists, and social scientists set out to chart and build a way to a new world and their speculative blueprints circulated like banknotes in a parallel economy of ideas. Examining representations of ideal societies in nineteenth-century French culture, Daniel Sipe argues that the dream-image of the literary or art-historical utopia does... Read more
Contents: Introduction; Utopian displacement, irony, and the Romantic imagination; from Chateaubriand’s Atala (1801) to Hugo’s ’Fonction du poëte’ (1840) ; Testing the limits of utopian narrative in Cabet’s Voyage en Icarie (1840); Suspending the referent, upending the world in J.J. Grandville’s Un autre monde (1844); The aesthetics of work and madness in Courbet and Baudelaire; Gendered utopias and female automata; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.
Biography
Daniel Sipe is Associate Professor of French at the University of Missouri, USA.
'... articulate, engaging and wide-ranging study ... Very readably integrating phases of close reading with robust theoretical appetite, it is particularly successful in engineering a dialogue between elements of a contemporary, largely Anglo-American, ’utopian studies’ perspective and its primary French-language corpus, balanching historical sensitivity with analytical energy in the process.' Michael G. Kelly, Modern and Contemporary France '[Sipe’s book] makes an original and highly important contribution to the study of utopian thought in modern French culture.' Greg Kerr, Modern Language Review
