Complicity in fin-de-siècle literature by Craske, H

Subjects:

Sexual poverty, or the price of love for old men by Counter, A

“…The emblematic figure of such deprivation is the vieillard, the old man imagined as desiring but obviously undesirable in erotic terms. I trace this figure in writings by Chateaubriand, Balzac, Fourier, and Baudelaire, and draw out the ironies and ambiguities of how these writers present old men as 'victims' of sexual poverty.…”

A sentimental affair: Vérité by Counter, A

“…Yet as we shall see, in articulating more explicitly the erotic content that we may well consider to have silently inhered in sentimental writing since its origins in the late eighteenth century (and especially with Rousseau, whose philosophical and stylistic influence is to be felt everywhere in Vérité), Zola chooses to eliminate many of the possibilities of that eroticism in favor of a relentlessly normative, procreative heterosexuality.…”