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Journal Articles by James Illingworth
Open Library of Humanities, 2022
This article considers the representation of catalepsy—a trance-like nervous condition characteri... more This article considers the representation of catalepsy—a trance-like nervous condition characterised by rigidity of the limbs that resembles death—in the literature of 19th-century France. It begins with an overview of the medical literature on catalepsy and its influence on the literature of the period, which reveals a particularly gendered aspect to the fate of the cataleptic, before turning to its primary case study: George Sand’s Consuelo novels (1842–44). These two texts provide Sand’s most sustained engagement with catalepsy, but they also set Sand’s depiction of the condition apart from how her (male) contemporaries represented it. While in the work of writers like Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850), Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly (1808–89), Théophile Gautier (1811–72), and Émile Zola (1840–1902) the cataleptic is generally an unstable male genius whose tale ends in death, madness, or oblivion, Sand elaborates an alternative model that allows these superior individuals to find self-actualisation (irrespective of their gender). The occult knowledge associated with the cataleptic is not to be feared in Sand’s texts; rather, it provides personal fulfilment and offers new purpose that benefits society. Catalepsy in Sand’s texts is thus endowed with political significance, representing the potential for new beginnings and a move beyond traditional ways of being. Drawing on the Consuelo novels as a model, this article then turns to Sand’s wider oeuvre to posit the poetics of the ‘cataleptic novel’ as inherent to Sand’s literary enterprise.
Modern & Contemporary France, 2021
ABSTRACT This article proposes that George Sand can be considered as an ecofeminist. While Sand’s... more ABSTRACT This article proposes that George Sand can be considered as an ecofeminist. While Sand’s texts have often been associated with the natural world, this association has seldom been positive, and has come to define her position in the canon, with her bucolic idealism separating her from the ‘realist’ approach that came to typify the nineteenth-century novel. Shifting the focus from Sand’s depiction of the fields to her representations of volcanoes, this article argues that Sand’s engagement with the natural environment has political connotations that are inseparable from her commitment to undoing gendered subjugation. While the volcano connects Sand to the arch-Romantic notions of transcendence and reverie and therefore to the sublime, analyses of texts including Histoire du rêveur (1831), Indiana (1832) and Laura (1864) show that not only is the volcano linked to creativity but also represents for Sand the potential for destruction and therefore renewal.
Cahiers George Sand, 2020
George Sand Studies, 2019
French Studies Library Group Annual Review, 2017
Book Chapters by James Illingworth
"Plaisirs de femmes": Women, Pleasure and Transgression in French Literature and Culture, ed. by Maggie Allison, Elliot Evans and Carrie Tarr, 2019
The Allure of Napoleon: Essays Inspired by the Collections of the Bowes Museum, Jan 2017
Book Reviews by James Illingworth
H-France Review, 2021
Review by James Illingworth, Cardiff University. Martine Watrelot's edited collection explores Ge... more Review by James Illingworth, Cardiff University. Martine Watrelot's edited collection explores George Sand's interests in, engagements with, and in more uncertain ways contributions to, the natural sciences. The volume is the latest instalment in the Presses universitaires Blaise-Pascal's series Collection Révolutions et Romantismes to emerge from a conference organised under the auspices of the association Les amis de George Sand. The conference in question concluded the exhibition George Sand et l'histoire naturelle held between September and November of 2016 at the Muséum d'histoire naturelle de Bourges in Sand's native Berry.
Modern & Contemporary France, 2018
Cahiers George Sand, 2017
Modern & Contemporary France, 2017
Online Publications by James Illingworth
Literary Encyclopedia, 2017
Conference Presentations by James Illingworth
Open Library of Humanities, 2022
This article considers the representation of catalepsy—a trance-like nervous condition characteri... more This article considers the representation of catalepsy—a trance-like nervous condition characterised by rigidity of the limbs that resembles death—in the literature of 19th-century France. It begins with an overview of the medical literature on catalepsy and its influence on the literature of the period, which reveals a particularly gendered aspect to the fate of the cataleptic, before turning to its primary case study: George Sand’s Consuelo novels (1842–44). These two texts provide Sand’s most sustained engagement with catalepsy, but they also set Sand’s depiction of the condition apart from how her (male) contemporaries represented it. While in the work of writers like Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850), Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly (1808–89), Théophile Gautier (1811–72), and Émile Zola (1840–1902) the cataleptic is generally an unstable male genius whose tale ends in death, madness, or oblivion, Sand elaborates an alternative model that allows these superior individuals to find self-actualisation (irrespective of their gender). The occult knowledge associated with the cataleptic is not to be feared in Sand’s texts; rather, it provides personal fulfilment and offers new purpose that benefits society. Catalepsy in Sand’s texts is thus endowed with political significance, representing the potential for new beginnings and a move beyond traditional ways of being. Drawing on the Consuelo novels as a model, this article then turns to Sand’s wider oeuvre to posit the poetics of the ‘cataleptic novel’ as inherent to Sand’s literary enterprise.
Modern & Contemporary France, 2021
ABSTRACT This article proposes that George Sand can be considered as an ecofeminist. While Sand’s... more ABSTRACT This article proposes that George Sand can be considered as an ecofeminist. While Sand’s texts have often been associated with the natural world, this association has seldom been positive, and has come to define her position in the canon, with her bucolic idealism separating her from the ‘realist’ approach that came to typify the nineteenth-century novel. Shifting the focus from Sand’s depiction of the fields to her representations of volcanoes, this article argues that Sand’s engagement with the natural environment has political connotations that are inseparable from her commitment to undoing gendered subjugation. While the volcano connects Sand to the arch-Romantic notions of transcendence and reverie and therefore to the sublime, analyses of texts including Histoire du rêveur (1831), Indiana (1832) and Laura (1864) show that not only is the volcano linked to creativity but also represents for Sand the potential for destruction and therefore renewal.
Cahiers George Sand, 2020
George Sand Studies, 2019
French Studies Library Group Annual Review, 2017
"Plaisirs de femmes": Women, Pleasure and Transgression in French Literature and Culture, ed. by Maggie Allison, Elliot Evans and Carrie Tarr, 2019
The Allure of Napoleon: Essays Inspired by the Collections of the Bowes Museum, Jan 2017
H-France Review, 2021
Review by James Illingworth, Cardiff University. Martine Watrelot's edited collection explores Ge... more Review by James Illingworth, Cardiff University. Martine Watrelot's edited collection explores George Sand's interests in, engagements with, and in more uncertain ways contributions to, the natural sciences. The volume is the latest instalment in the Presses universitaires Blaise-Pascal's series Collection Révolutions et Romantismes to emerge from a conference organised under the auspices of the association Les amis de George Sand. The conference in question concluded the exhibition George Sand et l'histoire naturelle held between September and November of 2016 at the Muséum d'histoire naturelle de Bourges in Sand's native Berry.
Modern & Contemporary France, 2018
Cahiers George Sand, 2017
Modern & Contemporary France, 2017
Literary Encyclopedia, 2017
Joséphine Benoîte Coffin, dite Chevalier, was born a commoner in Paris in 1825. Upon pursuing a c... more Joséphine Benoîte Coffin, dite Chevalier, was born a commoner in Paris in 1825. Upon pursuing a career as an actress she began working at the Théâtre des variétés under the stage name Mademoiselle Delorme. Whilst there her love of the arts flourished, a love that she shared with the theatre’s English owner, John Bowes, a successful businessman and son of the tenth Earl of Strathmore. Their shared interest in the arts fuelled their major collecting habits, a collection that after their marriage in 1852 would require a museum to house it. Thus they decided to build the Bowes Museum in County Durham. The Museum was, however, as much her idea as his. The bills kept by the Museum’s Trustees are usually made out to Madame Bowes rather than Monsieur, and the large collection of French texts the Museum holds belonged to Joséphine, not John, with some containing handwritten dedications from the authors to Joséphine rather than her husband. Despite this, the primary history of the founding of the Museum performs a kind of erasure, reducing Joséphine’s influence to the background. Through an exploration of the evidence in the Museum’s archive (bills, letters and Joséphine’s personal library), this paper reframes Joséphine as more than just a compulsive shopper, and simultaneously explores the gendered and class-based nature of collecting and of artistic patronage in nineteenth-century France, one reflected in fictional depictions of female collectors such as Champfleury’s absurd Désirée Carton (a possible satire of Joséphine) or Balzac’s Dinah de la Baudraye. Joséphine’s Museum thereby becomes more than just a receptacle of nineteenth-century culture, and can be seen instead as a lasting legacy of resistance to gender codes.
In 1852, Joséphine Benoîte Coffin-Chevalier, an actress at the Théâtre des variétés, married the ... more In 1852, Joséphine Benoîte Coffin-Chevalier, an actress at the Théâtre des variétés, married the theatre’s English owner, John Bowes, a successful businessman and son of the tenth Earl of Strathmore. The bedrock of their relationship was their shared interest in the arts, an interest that developed into major collecting habits, and they would go on to amass a collection that would require a museum to house it. The predominantly French and Spanish fine and decorative arts that form the collection held at the Bowes Museum in County Durham is world-famous, but the Bowes did not just collect art objects. The Museum also houses their library, running to some 1700 volumes of French literature, which has gone untouched since John’s death in 1885. These texts constitute at once both the Bowes’ personal library, as well as books likely intended as museum objects, either because of their content (in keeping with the museum’s pedagogical ethos) or because of a volume’s particular significance (inscriptions, bindings, etc.). Indeed, a number of volumes contain personal inscriptions from the author to John and/or Joséphine. With these two aspects in mind, this paper proposes to explore the contents of this library as a kind of ‘ideal’ nineteenth-century French library, reflecting on three main elements: the gendered nature of canonization (there are a great many female writers in this collection); the allure of popular fiction; and finally the problematic figure of the female collector, for Joséphine Bowes herself has long been forgotten.
As a practitioner of the novel, Sand is far more famous for a lack of description and realist det... more As a practitioner of the novel, Sand is far more famous for a lack of description and realist detail than as a faithful adherent of mimesis. Critics tend to note the limitation of descriptions of her characters and their surroundings in favour of a poetics that takes internal emotional dramas as its focus. This paper, however, will read Sand’s texts specifically for those moments in which objects that decorate the domestic space loom large.
Sand’s autobiography, Histoire de ma vie (1854-5), is significant in this regard because its focus is on Sand’s development as a writer, detailing her formative experiences as she grew to nurture her creative energies. Much of this development is described in relation to objects that decorate domestic spaces: her first real memory is of cutting her head open against a fireplace; she offers a lengthy description of the Palais de la Paix in Madrid where she stayed with her parents when her father served Napoleon; and she frequently refers to objects that decorate her home at Nohant. Crucially, though, these ornaments always refer outward from themselves, allowing access to Sand’s imaginary, as she frequently imagines herself as part of a fairy story and even staged plays for her own reflection in her bedroom mirror. This reading of Sand’s childhood domestic interiors will be informed by Foucault’s notion of the heterotopia as a space connected to the real though distinct from it, a transitional space that reaches outward to some other spatial dimension that in turn allows for contestation of the real. Aligning this notion of heterotopia to Sand’s approach to interior spaces, this will facilitate a theorisation of Sand’s poetics as inherently heterotopic, seeking through a kind of allegorical impulse to destabilise spatial hegemonic codes.
As the etymology of patrimoine suggests, women have long had little say in the processes of inher... more As the etymology of patrimoine suggests, women have long had little say in the processes of inheritance, be it cultural, historical, or economic, and in nineteenth-century France this is reflected in the discriminatory statutes of the Napoleonic Code. George Sand therefore stands out as a figure who broke with convention, abandoning her unhappy marriage and becoming one of the most successful and influential writers of the period. Her notorious life has been a major focus of works on Sand, and hence her autobiography looms large. But the text is problematic, filled with factual inaccuracies, and the numerous letters from her father that Sand included to depict her ancestry are in fact heavily edited, whilst her mother’s heredity is briefly glossed. Amongst Sand critics, a split has consequently emerged between those who emphasise the influence of her mother or her father on Sand’s identity construction. Focusing instead on the text’s relationship with myth – particularly the sexless deity of Sand’s imagination that she claims inspired her literary creativity – this paper will set aside the attention paid to facts by previous criticism to contend that through her autobiography Sand explores the potential for one to achieve subjecthood without being beholden to a prejudiced history. A new reading will thereby emerge of Sand experimenting with the possibility of taking control of her own history, allowing for an identity less constrained by gender codification, one that privileges individual attributes such as creativity, compassion and a love of nature over the values of patriarchal tradition.
This paper considers how myth is used by George Sand to undermine dominant patriarchal discourse ... more This paper considers how myth is used by George Sand to undermine dominant patriarchal discourse and the gender roles it defines and perpetuates. As the first text in her pastoral vein, 'Jeanne' is situated in opposition to the gendered structures of the realist text, forming instead part of her idealist project announced in the "Notice" to 'Le Compagnon du tour de France' (1840). This paper argues that myth and fairy tale are essential to this project. Whilst her male Romantic contemporaries use myth to valorise women as objects of the male/artistic gaze, Sand's narrative reformulates existing myths to enable women to escape their predefined gender roles and enter spaces of representation. In 'Jeanne', this manifests itself primarily through the myth of Philomela, itself incorporated into Andersen's 'The Little Mermaid' of 1837.
This paper examines how George Sand’s magical realist text ‘Laura, Voyage dans le cristal’ (1864)... more This paper examines how George Sand’s magical realist text ‘Laura, Voyage dans le cristal’ (1864) deploys mythic and fantastic modes in order to subvert and dismantle patriarchal structures. This is illustrated through the use of two main theoretical strands. The first addresses the manifestation in the text of what Lacanian psychoanalysis has since called the ‘nom/non du père’, incarnated in this instance by the figure of Nasias, who is shown to be both maleficent and imaginary. This myth of the Father appears within the context of quasi-hallucinatory journeys into geodes, reflecting a nineteenth-century fascination with crystallisation explored by such figures as Baudelaire and Stendhal. The latter’s theories of desire as expressed in ‘De l’amour’ (1822) form the basis of this paper’s second theoretical strand, as it transpires that far from articulating the intensification of desire and the increased appeal of the desired object, Sand’s journeys into her imaginary crystalline world serve to reveal the trappings of male desire. A natural communion is encouraged instead, a return to nature in which both Man’s relationship to the natural world and man’s relationship to woman are redressed, and through the image of an Eden she forges a new system in which both man and woman are on an equal plane.
Aimed at a general audience, this discussion addressed the varied reception of George Sand's lite... more Aimed at a general audience, this discussion addressed the varied reception of George Sand's literary works both during her lifetime and after her death. Considering questions of gender identity and genre, looking specifically at the relationship between realism and idealism, it examined how one of the biggest selling authors of nineteenth-century France, and one who exerted such influence on her contemporaries both in France as well as abroad, can be excluded from the French 'canon'.