San Antonio College Library

In this examination of the role of ornament in nineteenth-century French literature, Rae Beth Gordon shows that ornament, far from being a simple accessory, raises problems that are at the very heart of aesthetic experience: limits and their transgression, illusion and seduction, pleasure and tension, harmony and confusion, excess and marginality. After placing texts by Nerval, Gautier, Mallarme, Huysmans, and Rachilde within the context of the history...

This book studies the importance of typographic shapes in French Renaissance literature in the context of psychoanalysis and of the history of printed writing. Focusing on the poetry of Clement Marot, Rabelais's Gargantua, Ronsard's sonnets, and the Essais of Montaigne, it argues that printed characters can either supplement or betray what they appear to articulate, revealing compositional patterns that do not appear to be under authorial control,...