Culture Wars and Literature in the French Third Republic
Editor: Gilbert D. Chaitin
Date Of Publication: Sep 2008
Isbn13: 9781847188083
Isbn: 1-84718-808-7
The articles assembled in Culture Wars and Literature in the French Third Republic describe and analyze the ever-widening attempts in the early years of the Third Republic (1870-1914) to mobilize literary phenomena for the purposes of political and social warfare. Literature became the preferred site in which the human implications of the fiercest and most widespread of these culture wars, the battles over national identity waged between proponents of secular and religious education, were articulated, dramatized and appraised.

In studies of Erckmann-Chatrian and Vallès, Rachilde and Colette, the Goncourt brothers and Marcelle Tinayre, La Fontaine and Corneille, the song-writer Jules Jouy and the theater critic Francisque Sarcey among others, some of these essays open up new perspectives on well-known issues such as education, the definition of national classics, Boulangism and women’s liberation, while others bring to light hitherto unsuspected connections between apparently disparate problems like decadence, anarchism and feminism, the mystery of literariness and the ban on Muslim headscarves, or the posthumous publication of private letters and the State’s interest in cultural and literary heroes. The final piece crystallizes the fundamental conflict of democratization: the tension between the republican desire for popular participation and the fear of the consequences of that participation by an uncultured public.

Gilbert D. Chaitin is Professor Emeritus of French and Comparative Literature at Indiana University. He has published on psychoanalytic theory and the relations among French literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, education, politics and philosophy, including Rhetoric and Culture in Lacan and The Enemy Within: Culture Wars and Political Identity in Novels of the French Third Republic.

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