Publication date:
28 August 2013Length of book:
276 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksISBN-13: 9780739180044
Stealing Things traces the representations of thieves and thievery in nineteenth-century French novels. Re-reading canonical texts by Balzac, the Comtesse de Ségur, and Zola through the lens of crime, Peters highlights bourgeois anxiety about ownership and objects while considering the impact of literature on popular attitudes about crime and its legislation and punishment. A detailed analysis of the role of objects, this work chronicles nineteenth-century changes in legal attitudes, popular mentalities, and individual and social identity, focusing particularly on the resulting transformations in representations of gender, class, and (criminal) subjectivity.
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.