imlr books
This book examines a corpus of frenetic novels – by Balzac, Barbey d'Aurevilly, Zola, Huysmans, Bloy and Bernanos – that foreground the motif of fever within a recurring masterplot: a pious young woman, just discovering her sexuality, finds herself torn between two father-figures, a doctor (typically a blood relative, often the biological father) and a priest (the spiritual father). She contracts a disease of uncertain origin, made manifest by a series of fevers that require interpretation in the light of contemporary religious, medical and literary discourses. Manzini traces the motifs of fever and frenzy back to Rousseau, the Gothic novel and Frenetic Romanticism, as well as forward to their recuperation within Surrealism, in order to...
Religion mattered in the eighteenth century and has not ceased to matter since. How German writers responded to the crisis of orthodox forms of belief in the period is a matter of abiding interest. Some remained rooted in orthodoxy. Many others rejected it, often without knowing for certain what they wished to put in its place. Experimenting with alternatives in the imaginative medium of literature was one way of trying to find out. The alternatives were embodied in three main heterodox types: the philosophical freethinker, the libertine, and the Schwärmer, or heretic and dissenter. This book traces the genealogy of these types in the polemical debates of the long eighteenth century and discusses how they were used in literature...