Les liaisons dangereuses(1782) ends with a cascade of calamities: the deaths of the libertine Valmont and his virtuous victim, Mme. de Tourvel; Chevalier Danceny’s withdrawal into celibacy as a Knight of Malta; and Mlle. de Volanges’s incarceration in a convent. Crowning these disasters is the fate of the villainous Mme. De Merteuil, recounted by Mme. De Volanges in the last letter of Laclos’s novel:

Mme. de Merteuil’s destiny seems at last accomplished, my dear and excellent friend; and it is such that her worst enemies are divided between the indignation she merits and the pity she inspires. I was...

Over the past twenty-odd years, semiotics has established itself as a powerful, rigorous, and at times elegant technique for the close reading of literary texts. Until recently, however, literary semioticians tended to remain fixated on the text itself, squandering the promise of Barthes’s early cultural criticism and leaving the issue of the relation between literature and society to either the liberal imagination or ideological criticism. In the last several years, however, context has reemerged as a respectable object for semiotic interrogation. Some Marxist academics have appropriated semiotic methods to forge a more formally sophisticated analysis of ideology; Frederic Jameson’sThe...

Flaubert was in the midst of composingMadame Bovary, when he wrote to Louise Colet, on December 27, 1852, “in the grip of a ghastly terror.” This sensation had been provoked, Flaubert went on to explain, by his discovery of an uncanny resemblance between Balzac’sLouis Lambertand his own experience: “Lambert is, in all but a few particulars, my poor Alfred. I have found some ofoursentences (from years ago) almost word for word: the conversations between the two school friends are our conversations, or analogous. There is a story about the manuscript stolen by the two of...

Between balzac and flaubert there is at once a hiatus and a continuity: a pertinent difference that permits one to recognize a passage as quintessentially Flaubertian or Balzacian, even as one acknowledges both Balzac and Flaubert as realists. One of literary history’s tasks is to cope with such paradoxes of identity and difference by specifying the conditions and nature of literary change. In practice, to be sure, literary critics tend simply to declare that Woolf’s or Stein’s modernism marks a distinct shift from the modernism of her near-contemporaries, or to describe Austen as an ovelist of manners, or to say...

There seems to be general agreement among literary historians that something like a “crisis of representation” afflicts realism during the last few decades of the nineteenth century, and that modernism—understood variously as “going-beyond-representation,” beginning with a text rather than an intention, or a turning inward of narrative—ultimately emerges to supplant the worn-out representational practices of Balzac, Flaubert, Eliot, Dickens, Turgenev, et al. Like all simple stories, this one has its attractions: it is easy to follow, offering only two protagonists, a dramatic break with the past, and clear winners and losers. Moreover, it points to a certain general...

If naturalism eagerly (some would say, all too eagerly) insists on being read in the context supplied by the sciences of its time, and in so doing establishes both its affinity with and its distance from realism as a genre, the classical detective story would see mat first glance to transcend context—whether historical or generic—altogether. Even though detective fiction seems more directly concerned with questions of knowledge than any other genre, there is nothing discursive or even fundamentally historical, it would appear, about the way knowledge is generated in this genre. As it has been theorized, the detective...

As the emergence of pararealistic genres like naturalism and detective fiction indicates, the tensions within pathological realism, already evident inMiddlemarch,do not abate but intensify as the century draws to a close, ultimately imperiling the enterprise of realism as such. Early on, Edmond Duranty, writing in the magazineRéalisme,had defined that enterprise’s object as “the frank and complete expression of individualities, . . . the exact, complete, sincere reproduction of the social milieu and the epoch in which one lives.”¹ Duranty’s terms have become standard ones for understanding realism, as well as for understanding the crisis of reproduction...

A central concern of this book has been to show: first, how clinical medicine constitutes a certain systematic view of, and way of talking about, its object—the pathologically embodied person; and second, how, and with what consequences both for aesthetics and ideology, novelists imitate this medical praxis as they go about their work. My premise is that the disclaimers of scientific clinicians and literary realists not withstanding, neither line of work is occupied with a simple act of transcription or prescription, and neither looks at reality with an innocent eye. Both diagnosis and description, prognosis and plotting, involve not...