Mapping Memory in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Culture

"Memory and memory studies have shaped a major site of humanities research over the last twenty years. Examined by ethnographers, archaeologists, social scientists, historians, economists, archivists, art historians, and literary scholars, the theme of memory - individual memory and memoir, collective memory, official memory and oral memory, cultural memory and popular memory - has informed academic discourse and formed institutional structures. Yet, the matter of memory is, paradoxically, under-explored in studies of the 'long nineteenth century' in France. Mapping Memory in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Culture focuses critical attention on that neglected century when France was struggling to negotiate the serially renewed memory of revolutionary turmoil and socio-cultural redefinition. This volume explores the spaces that the memory process claims and shapes, and it works to identify the crosscurrents that connect those spaces. It asks how memory resists - or cedes to - colonisations by authority, by official discourse, by history, and by aesthetics. It asks how memory-work coincides with or morphs into the processes of the imagination. Eschewing diachronic approaches