Vision in the Novels of George Sand (Oxford Modern Languages and Literature Monographs) - Hardcover

Mathias, Manon

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0198735391 ISBN 13: 9780198735397

Publisher: OUP Oxford, 2015

Synopsis

The first study of George Sand and vision, this book considers the pull between the visual and the visionary in nineteenth-century France through an examination of Sand's novels. With an extensive corpus ranging from Sand's early texts through to her later, less familiar works, it repositions Sand's œuvre alongside that of the major realist authors and demonstrates her distinctive understanding of the novel as a combination of the concrete and the abstract. By studying Sand's engagement with visual models associated with realism-the mirror, the model of painting, and the scientific gaze-this book proposes a more sustained dialogue between Sand's work and realism than has hitherto been acknowledged, but argues that Sand radically reworks these models to depict a dynamic, mysterious and ever-changing world. Whereas Sand has been read as an author bypassing reality in favour of the ideal, this study shows that she is committed to physical observation, but that she consistently ties this process with the conceptual and the visionary. The book breaks new ground in particular by examining Sand's literary engagement with the visual arts, and it also offers the first sustained consideration of Sand as a scientific writer. By examining Sand's œuvre from the perspective of vision, this study not only reassesses Sand's writing practice, but also rethinks the relations between the visual and the novel in this period. More specifically, it argues that Sand's work challenges our means of theorizing these relations. In her rejection of binaries and her syncretic understanding of vision, Sand breaks conventional categories and writes novels that are at once realist, visionary, mystical and scientific.

About this title

About the Author

Manon Mathias was born and raised in Cardiff. She completed her undergraduate and postgraduate degrees at Trinity College, University of Oxford, including a D.Phil. entitled 'Apprendre à voir: The quest for insight in George Sand's novels'. She has held posts at the University of Oxford and Bangor University, and is currently Lecturer in French at the University of Aberdeen. Having published widely on George Sand and co-edited Display and Disguise (Peter Lang, 2011), she is now focusing on the connections between the novel and the natural sciences in Sand and other authors.

Edition details

• Publisher: OUP Oxford
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0198735391
• ISBN 13: 9780198735397
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 180