'Armance' and 'Le Docteur Pascal'
- Submitting institution
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University of Oxford
: A - 26A - Modern Languages
- Unit of assessment
- 26 - Modern Languages and Linguistics : A - 26A - Modern Languages
- Output identifier
- 16093
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
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- Location
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- Brief description of type
- Two online dictionary entries that have been joined into one submission. Justification for joining the outputs is in the additional information statement.
- Open access status
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- Month
- January
- Year
- 2017
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- These two pieces (5700 words in total) are submitted as a single output because they are entries in the same encyclopaedia, the Literary Encyclopaedia. They appeared together in volume 7 (2017), which is on nineteenth-century French writing and culture. The two entries are each devoted to a novel—Le Docteur Pascal by Émile Zola and Armance by Stendhal. Each entry represents a substantial and important contribution to our understanding of the novel in question. The entries summarise their respective novels, contextualise the works using contemporary critical responses to them, and provide reviews of the current scholarly literature available on them. In this way, these articles target research students who require short but substantial overviews of these novels. These articles also represent serious interventions in the current understanding of these works: Jones offers innovative readings of the novels, thus contributing to our understanding of their literary significance.
Despite scholarship that attempts to ‘diagnose’ the hero, Jones argues that the most important aspect of Armance is its incessant ambiguity. She contends that the novel’s vagueness regarding themes such as Octave’s sexuality, impotence, and manipulation of Romantic tropes betrays a particular mal-du-siècle malaise that posits a pessimistic view of literature.
Jones rehabilitates Le Docteur Pascal as an essential, although often overlooked, component of the Rougon-Macquart cycle. She maintains that, like Zola’s more famous novels such as L’Assommoir, Le Docteur Pascal is dominated by a central autonomous figure, namely the genealogical tree the eponymous character creates. Whereas most scholars emphasize how the novel embodies Zola’s wish to synthesize his Naturalist literary project, Jones instead foregrounds the novel’s ambivalent stance on ‘choice’ between religion, science, and art. As such, she argues that the novel is inherently polemical and problematic. Each article researches both contemporary and modern responses to the novels.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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