Stealing Things

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Codes for Honest People
2. Objects of Fiction, Affairs of State
3. Time Bandits: Purloining the Pocket Watch
4. Identify Theft in the Second Empire
5. Out of the Shadows, Into the Shops: Theft, Gender, and Object Relations
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
About the Author

Provocative and fresh, this wide-ranging study offers a unique perspective on the anxieties and pressures of an increasingly commercial 19th-century French culture. Juxtaposing memoirs, moral codes, specialized dictionaries, and a children's novel with more conventional newspapers, literary texts, and theories, Peters (Louisiana State Univ.) explores a weary and suspicious century caught up in the throes of exchange and reinvention. Thoughtful and diverse early chapters on Balzac's Code des gens honnêtes, Vidocq's contemporaneous Mémoirs and Les voleurs, and Ségur's Les Malheurs de Sophie give way to an analysis of pocket watches—symbol of the emergence of a new social order and the upheaval of commodification—in Zola and Balzac. Final chapters on urban spaces and socioeconomic transformation detail questions of intellectual property theft and the tensions of literary kleptomania. The thoroughness and originality of the introduction alone, with its presentation of the philosophical, legal, and literary conditions of the late 18th century, truly distinguish this volume. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.