While the notion of 'sexual poverty' is rightly contested in contemporary discourse, the phrase usefully describes a style of economic thinking about sex that can be found in a variety of ...nineteenth-century French texts, in which sex is imagined as a scarce resource and a bodily need. The emblematic figure of such deprivation is the vieillard, the old man imagined as desiring but obviously undesirable in erotic terms. I trace this figure in writings by Chateaubriand, Balzac, Fourier, and Baudelaire, and draw out the ironies and ambiguities of how these writers present old men as 'victims' of sexual poverty.
The French Revolution's severe restriction of the right of bequest reflected and consolidated a longstanding French legal skepticism about the ability of the dead to control property and, through ...property, the living. This article argues that this "resistance" to the power of the dead, and its legal enactment by the Revolution, had significant consequences not only for the legal but also for the literary cultures of post-Revolutionary France. The most straightforward of these was the relative absence of inheritance plots, and especially plots involving wills, in nineteenth-century French fiction, compared to their abundance in Victorian fiction. But through a reading of Honoré de Balzac's "The Elixir of Life" and Colonel Chabert, the article suggests that this resistance was itself sometimes thematized, and allowed for a reflection on the difficult relationship of modern France to its Revolutionary and pre-Revolutionary past, as well as on the all-powerful status of the law.
Oscar Wilde and Émile Zola are conventionally opposed as the figureheads of, respectively, the aestheticist and the naturalist literary trends. Yet they exhibit a number of uncanny similarities—not ...least the turn both made in their last years toward religious themes and imagery, and especially those of martyrdomand the Passion. This article explores such images in the later life, work, and public persona of each writer and sets them within the context of the dizzying proliferation of references to Christ and martyrdom in fin de siècle culture. It examines the “entailments”—the unexpected consequences, meanings, and echoes—that these overdetermined themes brought in their train from the wider literary field and shows how those entailments were exacerbated by the massive politicization of “martyr” discourse around the time of the Dreyfus affair, when the theme acquired its fullest significance.
In rejecting the two relational models-marriage and adultery-in which the nineteenthcentury novel so often appears to have wished to enclose the entirety of human experience, then, Flaubert relies on ...friendship. In another sense, however, both these works' eschewal of the love-and-marriage plots makes them novels about those plots; as Brooks puts it, ĽÉducation sentimentaler "tenuous readability depends directly on its intertextual support, its presupposition of a certain standard novelistic mode which it resolutely refuses to endorse" (171). In this article, however, I wish to consider a novel that, while self-consciously shunning the twin narrative predictabilities of love and marriage, attempts in seeming good faith to offer friendship as a viable narrative principle in their stead. In this article, I want to read the novel as an expression of the intellectual and political ferment of the 1840s, in which potential new forms of social organization were proposed and debated-notably the vague but powerful idea of association. ĽEnvers de ľhistoire contemporaine, I shall suggest, engages intellectually and conceptually, which is to say thematically, with these debates (association is a topic of explicit discussion in its latter part), while attempting to find a narrative mode in which the salient human relationships are not limited to-and therefore, for the sake of the demonstration, positively exclude-the erotic and the conjugal.
A Nation of Foreigners COUNTER, ANDREW J.
Nineteenth-century French studies,
03/2018, Letnik:
46, Številka:
3/4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Though Chateaubriand is known as a great writer of exile, his memoirs present many instances of homecoming: his own in 1800, and those of Louis XVIII, his brother the comte d’Artois, and the ...remaining émigrés in 1814. Th is article reads Chateaubriand’s treatment of these homecomings in his memoirs alongside his political writings of 1814–18 to consider how Chateaubriand presents them as moments of national identity-crisis, and retrospectively adopts in the memoirs some of the very positions he had rejected under the Restoration. It also considers these themes in the newspaper Le Conservateur, whose founding in 1818 coincided with the fi nal departure of the foreign troops from France. Using the central concept of “repatriation,” I consider how Chateaubriand presented himself as the apostle of a unified image of Frenchness; yet also how that image was undermined by his own collaborators, who consistently underscored the irremediably fractured state of the fatherland.
Human arteries engineered in vitro McKee, J Andrew; Banik, Soma SR; Boyer, Matthew J ...
EMBO reports,
June 2003, Letnik:
4, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
There is a pressing need to develop methods to engineer small‐calibre arteries for bypass surgery. We hypothesized that the rate‐limiting step that has thwarted previous attempts to engineer such ...vessels from non‐neonatal tissues is the limited proliferative capacity of smooth muscle cells (SMCs), which are the main cellular component of these vessels. Ectopic expression of the human telomerase reverse transcriptase subunit (hTERT) has been shown recently to extend the lifespan of certain human cells. We therefore introduced hTERT into human SMCs and found that the resulting cells proliferated far beyond their normal lifespan but retained characteristics of normal control SMCs. Importantly, using these non‐neonatal SMCs, we were able to engineer mechanically robust human vessels, a crucial step towards creating arteries of clinical value for bypass surgery.