The Novel Map: Space and Subjectivity in Nineteenth-Century French Fiction

Focusing on Stendhal, Gérard de Nerval, George Sand, Émile Zola, and Marcel Proust, The Novel Map 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.

Table of Contents:
Table of Contents List of Illustrations 3 Acknowledgments 5 Introduction – Here and There: The Subject in Space and Text 8 Section I. Stendhal’s Privilege 28 Chapter 1 – The Life and Death of Henry Brulard 34 Chapter 2 – The Ghost in the Map 56 Section II. Nerval Beyond Narrative 82 Chapter 3 – Orientations: Writing the Self in Nerval’s Voyage en Orient 85 Chapter 4 – Unfolding Nerval 110 Section III. Sand’s Utopian Subjects 139 Chapter 5 – Drowning in the Text: Space and Indiana 143 Chapter 6 – Carte blanche: Charting Utopia in Sand’s Nanon 166 Section IV. Branching Off: Genealogy and Map in the Rougon-Macquart 189 Chapter 7 – Zola and the Contradictory Origins of the Novel 193 Chapter 8 – Mapping Creative Destruction in Zola 216 Section V. Proust’s Double Text 239 Chapter 9 – The Law of the Land 242 Chapter 10 – Creating a Space for Time 270 Conclusion – Now and Then: Virtual Spaces and Real Subjects in the 21st-Century 290 Works Cited 293 End Notes 304 Index 340

About the Author :
Patrick M. Bray is an assistant professor in the Department of French and Italian at the Ohio State University.

Review :
"For its originality, insights, and nuanced readings of monumental texts of nineteenth- and twentieth century French literature, The Novel Map marks a valuable contribution to French studies and will certainly inform debates about these works for many years to come." --H-France Review "Bray's beautifully written and impeccably researched study of space and subjectivity in nineteenth- century fiction will be of keen interest to scholars of modern French literature and culture, critical theory and of the novel more generally." --French Forum