1870 - 1940 (Third Republic) - French History, 1848 - 1870 (Second Republic and Second Empire) - French History, Romanticism - Literary Movements, 1815 - 1848 (Bourbon Restoration & July Monarchy) - French History, Europe - Civilization, General & Miscell
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Overview
Sick Heroes examines the cultural practices that created those remarkably offensive, though strangely appealing, romantic heroes that appeared in European and especially in French literature in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Romanticism has long been considered a literary movement, but Pasco broadens its scope and, using methodologies of sociology, psychology, history and literary criticism, suggests that it was a cultural reality born of widespread social factors and sustained by a mass market for novels, poems and plays that popularized attitudes and behaviour. The French romantic hero incarnated and played out the deep-seated needs and dreams of the people of France in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Making use of new research materials, Sick Heroes offers fresh insight into the romantic spirit. It sheds light on the particular creations of the romantic world, on the causes for Romanticism, on French Romanticism as an aesthetic and social reality, and on the period's collective mentality.Editorials
French Review
“This attractively-written and thoroughly researched and documented study redefines Romanticism as primarily a cultural phenomenon and paints a sweeping portrait of the French people''s collective mentality during the period extending from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, a time-frame which encompasses the most profound social, political, and aesthetic changes.This is a remarkably rich, infromative, and in many ways innovative examination of a crucial period in French literary and cultural history.”—French Review, March 1999
French Review
This attractively-written and thoroughly researched and documented study redefines Romanticism as primarily a cultural phenomenon and paints a sweeping portrait of the French people’s collective mentality during the period extending from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, a time-frame which encompasses the most profound social, political, and aesthetic changes. . . This is a remarkably rich, informative, and in many ways innovative examination of a crucial period in French literary and cultural history.Nineteenth-Century French Studies
Pasco does not preach, does not try to make literary works into the heroes or the accessory villains of a political struggle in which he feels invested. Instead, they are symptoms of a sociopathology that one could readily corroborate with examples of abused and neglected children in the fictions of Hugo or Dickens. Pasco offers an impressive, harmonious blen of hard scholarship (investigation of original sources and imaginative synthesis. One can anticipate that this study . . . will become widely influential.Nineteenth-Century French Studies
Pasco does not preach, does not try to make literary works into the heroes or the accessory villains of a political struggle in which he feels invested. Instead, they are symptoms of a sociopathology that one could readily corroborate with examples of abused and neglected children in the fictions of Hugo or Dickens. Pasco offers an impressive, harmonious blen of “hard scholarship (investigation of original sources) and imaginative synthesis. One can anticipate that this study . . . will become widely influential.Book Details
Published
October 1, 1997
Publisher
Exeter, Devon, UK : University of Exeter Press, 1997.
Pages
272
Format
Paperback
ISBN
9780859895507