This book explores the concept of critical interiority in literature, art, and architecture within European francophone culture, spanning the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries.
As a lived, imagined, or conceptualized interior space, critical interiority initially suggests a duality between interior and exterior spaces. However, this division is simultaneously destabilized, to the point where the distinction between the two spatial categories nearly dissolves. This paradox forms a lens through which modern subjectivity is analysed as an interiority. By examining examples of critical interiority found in architecture, literature, and visual art, the chapters in this volume illuminate the fundamental tensions of modernity regarding the subject and its relationship to authenticity, gender, identity, memory, nature, privacy, sociability, and temporality.
Set at the intersections of various critical frameworks, this book offers a unique and interdisciplinary perspective on space. It will be of interest to researchers in the fields of nineteenth-century literature and architecture, France and Belgium, general cultural history, domesticity and the city, art history and aesthetic theory, literary genres and comparative literature.
By examining examples of critical interiority found in architecture, literature, and visual art, the chapters in this volume illuminate the fundamental tensions of modernity regarding the subject and its relationship to authenticity, gender, identity, memory, nature, privacy, sociability, and temporality.
Introducton: Critical Interiority: Spatial Imagination and Modernity in
European Francophone Culture During the Long Nineteenth Century
Part I
Critical Interiority in Architecture
1. An Architecture of Shadows: The Sublime World of Étienne-Louis Boullée
Laure Katsaros
2. Behind the F(r)ame of the Eiffel Tower: The Universal Exposition of Space
and the Ontology of Objects Alexandre Dubois
3. Beneath the Surface of the Present. Temporality and Memory in Fernand
Khnopffs Art and Architecture Dominique Bauer
Part II
Critical Interiority in Literature
4. Haunting Houses: Poes The Fall of the House of Usher with Vernes Le
Château des Carpathes Abigail RayAlexander
5. Enchanted Paradou: Zolas Garden Ecology in La faute de labbé Mouret
Annie Smart
6. Broken Images: Imagined and Lived Domesticity in Huysmanss En ménage Aina
Martí
7. Disenchanting Enchantments: Zola, Manet, and the Erotics of the
Conservatory Kathryn A. Haklin
8. Prousts Superimposed Spaces: The Bedroom, The Church, and Images of
Things Past Jill Cornish
Dominique Bauer is an Associate Professor of Cultural History in the Faculty of Architecture, KU Leuven, Belgium. She publishes on spatial images, temporality, and modernity in long nineteenthcentury francophone culture from a comparative perspective, with a focus on literary, philosophical (Benjamin, Nietzsche, Bergson), and artistic sources.
Alexandre Dubois is an Assistant Professor and Director of French at Regis University, USA. His research focuses on the fantasy of global colonialism that characterized French geographical societies from the late nineteenth century to the present day. He also specializes in Second Language Acquisition and Transnational French.
Jill Cornish is a fulltime senior lecturer in French at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. Her research focuses on domestic space, specifically the bedroom, in nineteenthcentury French literature and visual art as the space relates to conceptions of identity. She also works on Second Language Acquisition in language lab courses and uses of artificial intelligence in the language classroom.
Kathryn A. Haklin is an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of French literature, medical humanities, cinema, and visual culture. She is a lecturer in French at Washington University in St. Louis and her research appears in DixNeuf, LEsprit Créateur, MLN, Écrire le huis clos au XIXe siècle (2024), and Ephemeral Spectacles, Exhibition Spaces and Museums 17501918 (2021).
