The Literary Field: Agriculture and the Ecological Imagination in the Nineteenth-Century French Novel

Date of Award

Spring 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

French

First Advisor

Samuels, Maurice

Abstract

The Literary Field: Agriculture and the Ecological Imagination in the Nineteenth-Century French Novel argues that notions of the farmer and land developed their modern meanings in France in the nineteenth century. Ideas about agriculture fed into the formation of an environmental imaginary and vice versa, resulting in the co-construction of these concepts. To build this case, I develop a method I call agro-ecocriticism, which draws on literary criticism, materialist cultural studies, and ecology to identify flows of agricultural thought and actors within forms of cultural production. Particularly important in this reading method is a new attention to setting. In my analyses, I trouble traditional literary understandings of setting as static or fixed spaces, backgrounds against which the action of a novel takes place. Instead, I understand setting to be a dynamic network composed of all human and non-human, living or non-living entities within a text. In this optic, setting becomes a source of narrative agency. My readings show that nineteenth-century French novelists were actively experimenting with setting as a means to represent agricultural land and labor in new ways. Reading novels in the context of contemporaneous popular media (including newspapers, pamphlets and other genres of public writing art) I show how these sources both reflect and actively participate in the formation and revision of ideas about labor, the environment, and the changing face of agriculture. In the first chapter, I read novels from Honoré de Balzac’s “Scènes de la vie de campagne” to uncover a proto-Marxist critique of agricultural capitalism. Balzac designs a dualistic narrative space, in which bourgeois modes of interacting with the countryside are performed and then ironically undermined. He thus questions the real-life feasibility of these iterations of “Nature,” which he ultimately characterizes as bourgeois constructs that obscure chains of agricultural production. In the second chapter, I turn to George Sand’s romans champêtres, in which the peasant figures, for the first time in French literary history, as a hero-protagonist and a narrator of his own tale. This narrative shift allows Sand to represent the land from the perspective of the peasant, establishing a holistic agrarian cosmology that troubles accepted distinctions between Nature and Culture. Within this cosmology, Sand positions agriculture as a relational practice of care between humans and the non-human world that undergirds this worldview. The third chapter analyzes the uses of agriculture and agricultural knowledge as a political or discursive tool in the work of Gustave Flaubert. Through a close reading of the famous comice agricole scene in Madame Bovary, I show that Flaubert was attuned to the discursive use of agriculture in national myth-making projects and the limitations of such rhetoric. In a final coda, I jump forward in time to the work of Émile Zola. I argue that Zola’s novel La Terre marks a major shift in literary representations of the land, wherein agriculture comes to shape the form of the novel. Zola’s work foreshadows many elements in contemporary debates about the environment, including notions of non-human agency and scale critique. Based on his novel engagements with the land and agro-ecological cycles, I argue that Zola may be considered an early “Anthropocene” writer in France. The Literary Field is the first full-length literary history of French agriculture. It thus represents an important intervention in the field of French literary and cultural studies. However, sitting at the intersection of literature, agriculture and environmental studies, this project reaches beyond literary studies to make meaningful contributions to all of these fields.

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS