The Spectacular Past: Popular History and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century France (review)

2006 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-111
Author(s):  
Nicholas Colcord Dobelbower
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Nineteenth Century France

Aesthetic Distance in Madame Bovary

PMLA ◽  
1954 ◽  
Vol 69 (5) ◽  
pp. 1112-1126
Author(s):  
B. F. Bart
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
New Techniques ◽  
Madame Bovary ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
Carry Over ◽  
Aesthetic Distance

AS novelists in nineteenth-century France grew more familiar with their medium through practice in handling it, it became ever more possible for them to conceive of incorporating into it many of the qualities hitherto sought only in poetry or in the theater: the grandeur of the epic, the penetration of comedy, the sublimity of tragedy. The novel, relatively new in comparison with other forms, required the development of new techniques and new understandings which force the critic regretfully to abandon many criteria made comfortable through long use; but some of the basic problems remain and carry over with them some at least of the older canons. An enquiry into the meaning of Madame Bovary may properly raise the familiar question of tragedy or pathos and, although the question is posed in terms foreign to the older forms, the criteria for them may be restated to meet the new issues. One such canon is the matter of “aesthetic distance,” which has recently been defined as “an implicit set of directions concerning the distance from the object at which the reader must stand if he is to see it for what it is.” Studied in this light, Madame Bovary shows constantly shifting distances which lead to a richness and variety prohibited in the shorter compass of most of the older forms but which also proportionately increase the difficulties for the novelist, who must bring unity and meaning into this complex.

scholarly journals Télémaque, Ṭahṭāwī and the (Counter-) Enlightenment in the Arab World

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Hisham Hamad ◽  
Robbert Woltering
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
History Of ◽  
Intellectual Movements ◽  
Political Lessons ◽  
Philosophical Writings

The Arab cultural awakening (Nahḍa) was one of the most pervasive and consequential intellectual movements in modern history. A key figure within this movement was the Egyptian civil servant, educator, translator and Islamic scholar Rifā‛a Rāfi‛ al-Ṭahṭāwī (1801–1873). Having visited Paris, he developed an interest in the moral, social and political ideas that were prevalent in nineteenth-century France. However, most current scholarship agrees that because of their secular nature, these ideas were of limited use for a devout Muslim such as Ṭahṭāwī in his own cultural and political context. In 1850 Ṭahṭāwī translated François Fénelon’s Les Aventures de Télémaque (1699), and while it has been suggested that this novel may have influenced Ṭahṭāwī’s later works, his translation of it has been mostly ignored by modern researchers. In this paper we demonstrate that Ṭahṭāwī found Télémaque to contain many potentially suitable moral and political lessons to translate into the modernizing Arabic-Islamic culture of the late nineteenth century. First, we present a history of the reception and cultural position of Fénelon’s Télémaque in France. This will help scholars understand it as a popular text across ideologies and philosophical movements. Then we discuss Ṭahṭāwī’s ideological makeup, specifically in relation to modernity. Lastly, we offer a discussion of passages from Ṭahṭāwī’s translation of Télémaque. This allows us to expose some of Ṭahṭāwī’s discursive strategies in Islamizing and Arabizing the concepts and ideas present in the novel, thus laying the conceptual groundwork for his later philosophical writings. On a broader level, this paper examines if and how Ṭahṭāwī’s own ideas and his appropriation of those of Fénelon as present in Télémaque can be plausibly included in the category of a ‘global Counter-Enlightenment’.

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