The nineteenth-century French novel has long been seen as the heroic
production of great men, who confronted in their works the social
consequences of the French Revolution. And it is true that French
realism, especially as developed by Balzac and Stendhal, was one of the
most influential novelistic forms ever invented. Margaret Cohen,
however, challenges the traditional account of the genesis of realism by
returning Balzac and Stendhal to the forgotten novelistic contexts of
their time. Reconstructing a key formative period for the novel, she
shows how realist codes emerged in a "hostile take-over" of a
prestigious contemporary sentimental practice of the novel, which was
almost completely dominated by women writers.
Cohen draws on impressive archival research, resurrecting scores of
forgotten nineteenth-century novels, to demonstrate that the codes most
closely identified with realism were actually the invention of
sentimentality, a powerful aesthetic of emerging liberal-democratic
society, although Balzac and Stendhal trivialized sentimental works by
associating them with "frivolous" women writers and readers. Attention
to these gendered struggles over genre explains why women were not
pioneers of realism in France during the nineteenth century, a situation
that contrasts with England, where women writers played a formative role
in inventing the modern realist novel. Cohen argues that to understand
how literary codes respond to material factors, it is imperative to see
how such factors take shape within the literary field as well as within
society as a whole. The book also proposes that attention to literature
as a social institution will help critics resolve the current, vital
question of how to practice literary history in the wake of
poststructuralism.
