Réalismes déclinistes du polar français contemporain : Nicolas Mathieu, Colin Niel, Antonin Varenne

2021 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-150
Author(s):  
ALICE JACQUELIN
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Social Realism ◽  
Magic Realism ◽  
Detective Novel ◽  
Political Commentary ◽  
The Social ◽  
Classical Realism

The detective novel has long been described as a form of “authentic” realistic literature (Collovald et Neveu). However, this article analyzes how three contemporary French crime novels—Aux animaux la guerre by Nicolas Mathieu (2014), Seules les bêtes by Colin Niel (2017) and Battues by Antonin Varenne (2015)—challenge and reappropriate conventions of realism. The three country noir novels follow in the lineage of two important traditions of realism, nineteenth-century French classical realism (Dubois) and the social realism of the 1970s and 1980s “néo-polar” (Desnain). Yet rather than anchoring the novels in familiar territory, the authors blur topographical references, create a polyphonic narrative structure and set a horrific tone to provide symbolic and political commentary. The novels thus borrow from magic realism to depict a declining rural and working-class world.

The “Chiliasm of Despair” Reconsidered: Revivalism and Working-Class Agitation in County Durham

1989 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. A. Jaffe
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social History ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Wide Acceptance ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Political Radicalism

The role of evangelical religion in the social history of the English working class has been an area of both bewildering theories and un-founded generalizations. The problem, of course, was given a degree of notoriety by Elie Halévy who, according to the received interpretation, claimed that the revolutionary fervor characteristic of the Continental working class in the first half of the nineteenth century was drained from its British counterpart because of the latter's acceptance of Evangelicalism, namely, Methodism.It was revived most notably by E. P. Thompson, who accepted the counterrevolutionary effect of Methodism but claimed that the evangelical message was really an agent of capitalist domination acting to subordinate the industrial working class to the dominion of factory time and work discipline. Furthermore, Thompson argued, the English working class only accepted Methodism reluctantly and in the aftermath of actual political defeats that marked their social and economic subordination to capital. This view has gained a wide acceptance among many of the most prominent labor historians, including E. J. Hobsbawm and George Rudé who believe that Evangelicalism was the working-class's “chiliasm of despair” that “offered the one-time labour militant … compensation for temporal defeats.”There could hardly be a starker contrast between the interpretation of these labor historians and the views of those who have examined the social and political history of religion in early industrial Britain. Among the most important of these, W. R. Ward has claimed that Methodism was popular among the laboring classes of the early nineteenth century precisely because it complemented political radicalism.

scholarly journals Indexing Bob Cranky: Social Meaning and the Voices of Pitmen and Keelmen in Early Nineteenth-Century Tyneside Song

2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 156-180 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rod Hermeston
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Meaning ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Meanings

This article examines the social meanings (indexical relations) of Tyneside dialect spoken by pitmen and keelmen in early nineteenth-century Tyneside dialect songs. I focus on the pitman Bob Cranky. Pieces about Bob and other pitmen and keelmen emerge from a song culture enjoyed by audiences of clerks, artisans, and shopkeepers. A debate emerged from the 1970s as to whether Bob is a subject of satire who could not appeal to a ‘working man’, or whether pitmen and keelmen derived self-celebration from him. Recently, the perspective of self-celebration has dominated. The songs, northern dialect literature more broadly, and dialect itself are said to promote communal values, regional, local, and ‘working-class’ solidarity, and populism. I show that pitmen and keelmen are most closely associated in the songs with non-standard spellings and with expletives. Employing a notion of dialogism, I argue that the meaning of the songs and the language attributed to pitmen or keelmen depends on the attitudes of audiences towards their behaviour, and towards nineteenth-century discourses of respectability and correct language. Bob and his speech may be the subjects of satirical mockery, resistance to ‘respectability’, or self-celebration. The material also has potential to convey labouring-class and regional solidarity.

Division of Purpose in George Gissing

PMLA ◽  
1955 ◽  
Vol 70 (3) ◽  
pp. 323-336
Author(s):  
Jacob Korg
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Educational Reform ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
Final Analysis ◽  
Social Realism ◽  
George Gissing ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Novels

Most of George Gissing's social novels bear the mark of an allegiance divided between social reform and art. Each begins by addressing itself to some problem of nineteenth-century civilization, such as poverty, Mammonism, socialism, rack-renting, educational reform, or the position of women, depicting evil conditions with powerful social realism. As the novel proceeds, however, social questions are gradually relegated to the background, and the story becomes a steady and, at best, inevitable unfolding of events whose course is determined in the final analysis by the characters of the people involved in it. There may be frequent reversions to “problems” and these may have some effect on the action, but a dénouement that fails to correspond with the social theme, or even contradicts it, makes it apparent that the novel of plot and character has usurped the place of the novel of protest. This inconsistency may well be one of the reasons why such social novels as Workers in the Dawn (1880), The Unclassed (1884), Demos (1886), Thyrza (1887), and The Nether World (1889) failed to win Gissing any but the smallest public, although they were recognized as faithful and moving portrayals of conditions that demanded reform. One reviewer of The Nether World pointed clearly to the ambiguity characteristic of Gissing's work by saying: “It is difficult to discover whether he hoped to add to that sort of fiction which has at times been more successful than Blue-books or societies in calling attention to evils crying for remedy or whether … the author chose his subject in something like an artistic spirit… His work does not show the energy either of an artist or of an enthusiast …”

Art from the Gutter: Heinrich Zille's Berlin

2013 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda M. Brian
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Protest ◽  
Social Boundaries ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Modern City ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The City

The quintessential Berlin artist Heinrich Zille, while remaining almost unrecognized outside Germany and certainly neglected in art historical circles on both sides of the Atlantic, nonetheless offers an important way to understand the modern city in late-nineteenth-century Europe. Zille, I argue, represents a proletarian modernism, a way of viewing and embracing a vibrant working-class domesticity—a milieu—that the Großstadt itself had created. In so doing, he offered intimate representations of Berlin for Berliners; he was decidedly grounded in the local and telescoped Berlin from its districts to its neighborhoods to its streets. What reemerged at this insider level, however, were glimpses of the wider world into which Berliners had been cast. Zille thus blurred distinctions between public and private spaces that marked the social boundaries of the city and drew from both the local and the global in ways that have gone unrecognized in his work. His perspective on the new capital, in other words, was accomplished by embracing the liminal, and he ultimately offered a kind of palatable social protest—a vision of reform without socialism—that was itself quite remarkable.

Reforming the Social Circle

2019 ◽  
pp. 63-100
Author(s):  
Kirstie Blair
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Unpublished Manuscript ◽  
Social Circle ◽  
The Social ◽  
Reform Politics ◽  
Selection Of

Whistle-Binkie is a collection of poetry and song, continually reissued in different formats and with new content throughout the nineteenth century, which has often been considered to exemplify the problems with popular Scottish Victorian literature. This chapter therefore concentrates on reassessing this key text and demonstrating that it is not purely a sentimental, nostalgic, and conservative selection of verse. The chapter shows how the first edition of Whistle-Binkie was part of the culture of Reform politics, and how its radical bent was toned down in later decades. It uses unpublished manuscript material to discuss the importance of Whistle-Binkie in encouraging working-class poets into print and fostering networks between them. A long concluding session focuses on the Whistle-Binkie spin-off, Songs from the Nursery, and assesses how and why ‘nursery verse’ became so important to Scottish working-class poetics in this period.

Peasant Migration and the Russian Working Class: Moscow at the End of the Nineteenth Century

Slavic Review ◽  
1976 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 652-664 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Eugene Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Effects ◽  
Legal Obligation ◽  
Industrial Workers ◽  
Factory Workers ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Village ◽  
The City

Almost a hundred years have elapsed since Russian Marxists and Populists began their polemics over the social effects of industrialization, and seven decades have gone by since Bolsheviks and Mensheviks first clashed over the “ripeness” or maturity of the Russian working class. Nevertheless, debate continues to this day over the outlook of the prerevolutionary Russian working class.No one disputes the fact that in the decades before 1917 a majority— albeit a shrinking proportion—of factory workers came from the peasant estate (soslovie). Before the Stolypin legislation of 1906, a peasant who moved to the city or factory found it almost impossible to end his legal obligation to the village commune where he was born, and roughly 90 percent of the industrial workers in the city of Moscow were legally peasants. The question remains, however, whether the ties imposed by the passport system and obligatory land allotments were an empty formality: Were the “peasants“ in Russian factories peasants in name only? How did the move to the cities and factories affect their ideas, values, or behavior ?

scholarly journals Peasant Migration and the Russian Working Class: Moscow at the End of the Nineteenth Century

Slavic Review ◽  
1976 ◽  
Vol 35 (04) ◽  
pp. 652-664
Author(s):  
Robert Eugene Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Effects ◽  
Legal Obligation ◽  
Industrial Workers ◽  
Factory Workers ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Village ◽  
The City

Almost a hundred years have elapsed since Russian Marxists and Populists began their polemics over the social effects of industrialization, and seven decades have gone by since Bolsheviks and Mensheviks first clashed over the “ripeness” or maturity of the Russian working class. Nevertheless, debate continues to this day over the outlook of the prerevolutionary Russian working class. No one disputes the fact that in the decades before 1917 a majority— albeit a shrinking proportion—of factory workers came from the peasant estate (soslovie). Before the Stolypin legislation of 1906, a peasant who moved to the city or factory found it almost impossible to end his legal obligation to the village commune where he was born, and roughly 90 percent of the industrial workers in the city of Moscow were legally peasants. The question remains, however, whether the ties imposed by the passport system and obligatory land allotments were an empty formality: Were the “peasants“ in Russian factories peasants in name only? How did the move to the cities and factories affect their ideas, values, or behavior ?

scholarly journals Socialist Sunday Schools in Britain, 1892–1939

1966 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. Reid
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
Religious Ideology ◽  
Sunday Schools ◽  
Recent Interest ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

Recent interest in the social conditions which underlay the emergence in Britain of independent labour politics in the last decade of the nineteenth century has thrown a good deal of light on the Labour Church movement. Dr. E. J. Hobsbawm, in a characteristically stimulating chapter of his Primitive Rebels, set the Labour Churches within the context of the “labour sects” which he isolates as a phenomenon of nineteenth century Britain and defines as “proletarian organisations and aspirations of a sort expressed through traditional religious ideology”. The concentration of academic attention on the Labour Church has given rise to the mention of a little known phenomenon of the British working-class movement, Socialist Sunday Schools which, it is usually suggested, were little more than a fringe activity of the Labour Churches. It is the object of this paper to give some account of the history of Socialist Sunday Schools in Britain until 1939 and to suggest that they too constitute a “labour sect” cognate with the Labour Church but organisationally and geographically distinct from it and therefore representing an extension of the working-class sectarian tradition beyond the limits of the nineteenth century within which Hobsbawn seems to confine it.

scholarly journals Three (Working-class) Girls: Social Realism, the ‘At-risk’ Girl and Alternative Classed Subjectivities

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-90
Author(s):  
Helen Wood
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Abuse ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Problem ◽  
Social Realism ◽  
Public Discussion ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Social ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Set Up ◽  
The Town

This article focuses on the BBC1 three-part drama Three Girls, broadcast in July 2017, which dramatised the Rochdale child sex-grooming gang scandal of 2011 and won five BAFTAs in 2018. While many of the dominant press narratives focused on the ethnicity of the perpetrators, few accounts of the scandal spoke to the need for a sustained public discussion of the class location of the victims. This article considers how the process of recognising the social problem of sex-grooming is set up for the audience through a particular mode of address. In many ways the drama rendered visible the structural conditions that provided the context for this abuse by drawing on the expanded repertoires of television social realism: the representation of the town as abuser; the championing of heroic working-class women; and the power of working-class vernacular. However, ultimately, the narrative marginalises the type of girl most likely to be the victim of this form of sexual abuse. By focusing on the recognisable journey of the girl ‘who can be saved’ this renders the impoverished girl as already constitutive of the social problem. The analysis draws attention to the difficulties of recognising alternative classed subjectivities on television because of the way that boundary-markers are placed between the working class and the poor and suggests that the consequence of these representations is to reify ideas about the victims of poverty and exploitation.

Cinematic Search for Identity in the Shade of Turkey’s 1960 Coup: The Social Realism Debate and The Hope

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 153-168
Author(s):  
Celal Hayir ◽  
Ayman Kole
Keyword(s):  
Party System ◽  
Social Realism ◽  
New Era ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
The Social ◽  
Turkish Cinema ◽  
To Come ◽  
First Time ◽  
Democratic Constitution ◽  
Realism Debate

When the Turkish army seized power on May 27th, 1960, a new democratic constitution was carried into effect. The positive atmosphere created by the 1961 constitution quickly showed its effects on political balances in the parliament and it became difficult for one single party to come into power, which strengthened the multi-party-system. The freedom initiative created by 1961’s constitution had a direct effect on the rise of public opposition. Filmmakers, who generally steered clear from the discussion of social problems and conflicts until 1960, started to produce movies questioning conflicts in political, social and cultural life for the first time and discussions about the “Social Realism” movement in the ensuing films arose in cinematic circles in Turkey. At the same time, the “regional managers” emerged, and movies in line with demands of this system started to be produced. The Hope (Umut), produced by Yılmaz Güney in 1970, rang in a new era in Turkish cinema, because it differed from other movies previously made in its cinematic language, expression, and use of actors and settings. The aim of this study is to mention the reality discussions in Turkish cinema and outline the political facts which initiated this expression leading up to the film Umut (The Hope, directed by Yılmaz Güney), which has been accepted as the most distinctive social realist movie in Turkey. 

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