The Family in Crisis in Late Nineteenth-Century French Fiction

Cambridge Studies in French

by Nicholas White

The Family in Crisis in Late Nineteenth-Century French Fiction examines how novels represent the problems of family life at a key moment in modern social history. Nicholas White provides close readings of texts by popular novelists such as Zola and Maupassant as well as by hitherto neglected figures including Huysmans, Bourget and Armand Charpentier. His analysis, informed by a wider cultural perspective, shows how tales of adultery, illegitimacy, incest and divorce exemplify and interrogate the crisis in "family values" of late nineteenth-century France.

232 pages, Hardcover

First published January 13, 1999

About the author

The Sly Lake Gang is Nicholas White's first commercial fiction novel. He has been previously published in short story form in ‘The Blackest Death’ anthology series. He is a political science graduate from the University of Toronto and holds a Chartered Insurance Professional designation from the Insurance Institute of Canada.