by Jon Lackman | 1 May 2007 | Journals, Modern
The January 2007 issue of French Studies is devoted to “The Nineteenth-Century Art Novel.” In his introduction, guest editor Paul Smith writes that such novels often treated “the social and economic position of the artist, and the nature and gendering of creativity. The topoi of the genius and the raté also recur throughout. Several texts are vehicles for voicing aesthetic and political positions. And many draw closely on contemporary figures, events, and debates for their content. Yet this special issue does not aim to identify a discursive unity so much as to exhibit the variety and richness of the art novel’s evolution. It is also concerned to address some of the methodological issues involved in reading this kind of text, including the selectivity of the canon, intertextual connections, and the relationship between fiction and fact … Of course, attempts have been made periodically to revise the canon of ‘the literature of art’, but one major obstacle to these efforts is the persistent belief … that Balzac’s Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu is the origin and paradigm of all subsequent art fiction of any value … Many texts belonging to ‘the literature of art’ do undoubtedly issue from the ‘matrix’ provided by Balzac’s novella, but many do not … [also,] the vast majority of the innumerable (and admittedly often trivial) plays relating to art performed in nineteenth-century France have been ignored … It could also appear natural that the more serious examples of narrative fiction have enjoyed the most acute scholarly attention” but there are many other interesting works “whose tone varies from outright caricature to high seriousness … ‘the literature of art’ is especially worthy of the name when it is genetically inseparable from the art that it is the literature of – and hence exegetically inseparable too. Perhaps then, many neglected works of this kind have a claim to being counted among its central cases.”
