Exploring Solitude in a Social Century: Visual and Textual Culture of the long Nineteenth Century in France and beyond, by Susan HARROW

The contexts of political revolution and cultural change in France across the long nineteenth century impart a strong sense of social formations (capital and labour; the urban crowd; the expanding bourgeoisie). What of the solitary individual? And, what of solitude itself? What does art, literature, and critical thought reveal to us about this shared, yet intensely subjective, human experience. This lecture will examine the representation of solitude and its cognates (aloneness, loneliness) in French art and literature of the nineteenth century, opening up some comparative perspectives with British and American painting and literature of the period. 

Susan HARROW - Specialist in modern literature (19th and 20th centuries). She has published monographic studies on modern and contemporary poetry (The Fractured Self, Toronto University Press, 2004; Colourworks, Bloomsbury Academic, 2020, R. Gapper Book Prize, 2021); on Zola (Zola, the Body Modern, Legenda/MHRA, 2010; Zola: La Curée, University of Glasgow, 1998); on epistolarity and the everyday (Letterworlds in Nineteenth-Century France, Cambridge University Press, in press).  She holds the Ashley Watkins Chair of French Literature (Bristol). 

Supported by the GATES project (Grenoble ATtractiveness and ExcellenceS), funded by the French government's Programme d'Investissement Avenir and implemented by ANR France 2030