About

For more than fifty years, I have been fascinated by the complex interplay of the historical and the literary in nineteenth-century French prose fiction. Realists like Balzac and Flaubert, for instance, were self-conscious observers of social phenomena of abiding interest to historians. But even more romantically imaginative récits in Chateaubriand’s meditative Atala and René and Dumas père’s swashbuckling stories of Cardinal Richelieu’s arch opponents in Les Trois Mousquetaires suggest a richer textual layering of emplotment. Michelet was far from the only historical narrativist in the period. As a consequence, these developments have moved historians and literary specialists alike to explore a variety of disciplinary approaches.

My published work at this intersection of literature and history began with the social history of reading, writing, and publishing, first for the French romantics, then for subsequent literary movements in the (very) long nineteenth century. I have since taken a closer look at what reading owes to self-writing, a key source for the study of literate activities in “the age of the rage to read” and what it meant to social activists like feminists and Freemasons as civil society in modern France developed in the same period. See, for example, my latest book, _A Civil Society: The Public Space of Freemason Women in France, 1744-1944_ (Nebraska, 2022), that draws on self-referencing texts as one of its chief sources. Lucky for me and others, not just influential pioneers like Hayden White and Michel de Certeau, there remains much more to ponder in this huge field of inquiry, such as how members of the French resistance wrote about their experiences during the German occupation of France during World War II (my current research project).