Fla^nerie in Zola's Paris
- UNCG Author/Contributor (non-UNCG co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)
- Sarah A. Peterson (Creator)
- Institution
- The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG )
- Web Site: http://library.uncg.edu/
- Advisor
- Roberto Campo
Abstract: "This thesis is a study of the practice of fla^nerie ("strolling") in three novels by the nineteenth-century French author and purveyor of Naturalism, E´mile Zola: The´re`se Raquin, La Cure´e, and Au Bonheur des dames. Fla^nerie, the dual activity of walking and observing, constitutes a spatial and visual negotiation of the urban landscape. As defined by Charles Baudelaire and redefined by the twentieth-century German Marxist critic, Walter Benjamin, the fla^neur is a leisurely male stroller with an ambiguous role in the changing metropolis. The possibility of a female fla^neuse raises fundamental questions about the role of women in urban public life. In the course of this thesis, I expose the presence and nature of a Zolian fla^neuse by examining the cases of his female characters in the three novels and their relation to existing social limitations and new possibilities for emancipation in late nineteenth-century Paris. In the end, I propose that the successful and failed fla^nerie of these characters highlights the paradoxes of women in the new spaces of modernity, areas devoted to leisure, consumerism, and spectatorship."--Abstract from author supplied metadata.
Fla^nerie in Zola's Paris
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Created on 5/1/2007
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Additional Information
- Publication
- Thesis
- Language: English
- Date: 2007
- Keywords
- Flanerie, strolling, nineteenth-century, French, author, Naturalism, E´mile Zola, The´re`se Raquin, La Cure´e, Au Bonheur des dames
- Subjects
- Walking in literature
- Zola, E´mile,--1840-1902--Criticism and interpretation
- Zola, E´mile,--1840-1902--Characters--Women