Tuesday 30th May 2023, 5:15-6:30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls College 

Ian Boyd (University of Cambridge): ‘Of Underworlds and Other Worlds: The Subterranean in Eighteenth-Century French Literature’ 

The subterranean voyage is most often considered to be part of the nineteenth-century “adventure fiction” tradition. In this paper, I will propose that there are eighteenth-century roots for the genre and that an interest in the subterranean goes deeper than it seems at first glimpse as well as travels across genres such as gothic fiction, satire, and proto-science-fictions. In this paper, I will take a close look at Casanova’s 1787 novel L’Icosameron, which tells the story of a brother and sister who fall into a subterranean world populated by polychrome half-sized people known as mégamicres. I will consider Casanova’s colorful world as demonstrative of the “slipstream”, a notion from twentieth-century science fiction and Indigenous stories that unpacks the idea of linear time streams. I will also dig into Madame de Genlis’ 1782 novella Histoire de la Duchesse de C***, a gothic story about the harrowing survival of a Duchess locked away in an underground cavern. This story will also be considered as a part of the slipstream as I build towards an understanding of subterranean fictions that revolve around the underground as womb. Finally, I will take the ideas hailing from the underground and the imagination of it and see what it can do for the ability to imagine another world in the eighteenth-century as well as what the subterranean can do for us today, as we struggle to imagine other worlds that we might like to live in.

Isabel Maloney (University of Cambridge): ‘“C’est Classique!”: Defending Naturalism in the Trial of Lucien Descaves’  

In March 1890, the young Naturalist writer Lucien Descaves found himself in court, charged with ‘injures à l’armée’ and ‘outrages aux bonnes mœurs’ for his anti-military novel Sous-Offs, which depicted misconduct, sexual debauchery, and poor living conditions in the French army. He cannot have been comforted by the fact that the person presiding over the trial was Jules Quesnay de Beaurepaire, who had a productive side-career as the author of Idealist novels and who had publicly professed his hatred of Naturalism. Naturalist fiction had crossed into the legal arena, where it was scrutinised as a threat to national security. Although underexplored in existing scholarship, the Sous-Offs scandal was one of the most high-profile clashes between the Third Republic and its artists, dominating the front pages of newspapers and triggering polarised reactions from the gamut of significant contemporary figures, from General Boulanger to Zola. I argue that Sous-Offs provoked such a scandal because it turned the Naturalist method to a sacrosanct symbol of the state, the army. I also provide a close reading of the novel alongside its trial to explore how sexual obscenity became a site of political contestation. What, I ask, can Descaves’s trial tell us about how aesthetic and political anxieties were intertwined in the late 1880s in the lead up to the Dreyfus Affair? And how was Naturalism’s ambiguous relationship with patriotism funnelled through contemporary discourse about sexual politics?