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The living body and the capitalist thinking of the modern economy seem to be irreconcilable objects. Nevertheless, their history and perception have been inextricably linked, at least since the times of industrialization and capitalization in the 19th century. Our volume follows this entangled history and the various contradictions it develops.

Since Pierre Bourdieu, we known that the body forms an incorporated cultural and social capital. It is a commodity and means of production, a sign of belonging to a social class, a place where sex, gender and power relations are negotiated or a pretext for social exclusions and racism. The body is the object of punishments, sanctions and social control, a support for affects, obsessions and illnesses as well as a site of rebellion and resistance. The 19th century novels analyzed in the contributions to this volume tell all this. From the perspective of current body studies, we propose a new reading of the great stories from Balzac to Zola, via Mirbeau, Maupassant, Louise Michel, Georges Sand, Rachilde, Eugène Sue and Huysmans to demonstrate, through their texts, how the images of the body and the policies of capital are entangled and, thus, form a central part of the imagination and the memory of 19th century French (and Northern/Western) society.

Contributions in French and German.


Issue 110 in the Series Literaturwissenschaft

ISBN: 978-3-7329-0916-2

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limits

“Resistance is a democratic right, sometimes a duty. With literature we can find models for this right and think about its limits.”

Gisela Febel
diversity and plurality

“Join us to create more diversity and plurality in knowledge production.”

Gisela Febel
city

“The city is a laboratory not only of modernity, but also of contradiction.”

Julia Lossau
hierarchy of norms

“If social contradictions are reflected in law, law cannot form a hierarchy of norms free of contradictions.”

Andreas Fischer-Lescano
prison of difference

“‘Contradiction is the prison of difference‘ writes the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Worlds of Contradiction asks: how can we explain and describe the world without making it more coherent and systematic than it is?”

Michi Knecht