Moving Forward, Holding Fast

An era of remarkable change and progress, the nineteenth century was in every sense of the word dynamic. In France, writers and artists reflected the ambivalence of their compatriots to the relentlessly changing world around them. The essays assembled here, selected from the Twenty-first annual Nineteenth-Century French Studies Colloquium held at the University of Delaware in 1995, bear witness to this ambivalence. They also testify to an impressive array of approaches to the theme of movement, from the literal to the literary, the social and socially conscious to the unconscious. The three-part collection (Thrust and Drag, Travel and Exile, Uncontrolled Movement) features essays by well-known British, Canadian, French, and American scholars on such authors as Balzac, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Gautier, Maupassant, Stendhal, and Zola and on such artists as Puvis de Chavannes, Millet and Corot.