Smoke and mirrors: secret societies and self-reflexivity in the mystères urbains

This article reflects on the literary theoretical and literary historical significance of secret societies in the mystères urbains, a large corpus of popular novels produced in the latter half of the nineteenth century in response to the unprecedented success of Eugène Sue’s Mystères de Paris (1842–43). In these novels, representations of secret societies challenge and transform our understanding of l’envers and, by extension, our approach to the (rewritten) text. Distorted reflections, by pointing to the shared preoccupations of readers of “popular” and “serious” literatures, hint at the arbitrary nature of groupings both within and outside the text. A protean system of initiates and outsiders echoes the engagements of both an exclusive “Happy Few” and an indiscriminate “masse idiote” with the text itself. The fusion of heterogeneous characters into fictional secret societies echoes the efforts made to demystify and defuse the threat of a new and alarmingly disparate reading public

Detection in the second degree in French urban mystery novels

This article uses the palimpsest as an interpretative lens through which to consider Fortuné du Boisgobey’s Mystères du Nouveau Paris (1876) as a rewriting of Eugène Sue’s Mystères de Paris ([1842–43] 1989). In particular, via an examination of Boisgobey’s use of the hunting metaphor, I demonstrate the central role of the mystères urbains/urban mysteries in a hypertextual chain linking the adventure novel and the later roman policier/detective novel. Boisgobey veers between emphasizing the familiarity of the hunting cliché and wilfully subverting it, and this playful oscillation is echoed en abyme within the diegesis. The urban mystery novel, I suggest, emerges as an important precursor of the detective novel, in that this deliberate and sophisticated alternation between the predictable and the surprising echoes the ambiguity inherent to the palimpsest and integral to modern crime fiction

(RE-)MYSTIFYING THE CITY: THE MYSTÈRES URBAINS AND THE PALIMPSEST, 1842-1905

This thesis uses the palimpsest as an interpretative lens through which to consider various rewritings of Eugène Sue’s Mystères de Paris. The corpus date range reflects the extent of the mystères urbains phenomenon, from 1842, when serial publication of Sue’s novel began, to 1905, when serialization of Jules Lermina’s Mystère-ville was completed, and after which the mystères tended to adopt new settings and new preoccupations. Chapters I and II provide introduction and contextualization. Chapter III analyses the paratextual matter used to ‘package’ the texts, specifically prefaces, footnotes and illustrations. Chapter IV considers issues of identity, namely the emergence of the detective character, the role played by secret societies, and the implications of rewriting gender roles. Chapter V deals with geographical and temporal transpositions and Chapter VI compares feuilleton and book versions, as well as examining theatre adaptations and parodies. By way of conclusion, Chapter VII underlines the enduring relevance of the mystères urbains, as well as suggesting avenues for future research. The characteristic common to these rewritings is an insistent self-consciousness. Paratexts impinge on texts and become, in an irreverent parody of their own conventions, complicit in the mystification of the reader. Extra-diegetic phenomena, such as the emergence of the detective character, the rise of an eclectic, indeterminate group of popular readers, and the conflation of reading and writing activities encouraged by the serial form, are reproduced en abyme within the novels. Similarly, geographical and temporal transpositions transcend their diegetic category, repeatedly proving themselves to have a meta-diegetic resonance. American-set mystères reflect the Americanization of culture, while temporal transpositions cultivate confusion between Histoire and histoire. The reader’s attention is deliberately diverted from the mysteries of the cities to the machinations of the text itself. This self-reflexivity is characteristic of literary modernity, but especially prominent in these mystères urbains, where the relationship between text and context is a significant one. The city provides not only the subject matter of the mystères, but also the forum for the production, consumption, reception and rewriting of the texts

'Their grosser degrees of infidelity' : deists, politics, natural philosophy, and the power of God in eighteenth-century England

In this dissertation I demonstrate that the political views and use of natural philosophy by deists—heretics who denied revelation, active providence, and the authority of priests—in early-modern England were not as subversive as past scholarship suggests. Like other erudite endeavours in the period, a deist conception of God was the foundation for their interpretation of contemporary natural philosophy and political writings. Though many scholars have noted that deists employed contemporary natural philosophy in many of their works, the way deists actually used these writings has not been explored in a comprehensive manner. Moreover, when many historians engage deism, they frequently stop at one deist in particular, John Toland. My dissertation reveals how theology informed deist natural philosophy which in turn was inseparably joined to their political works. The two goals of this study are to remove deists from the sidelines of intellectual debates in early-modern England and place them squarely in the centre alongside other political and natural philosophical authors and to demonstrate that deism cannot be reduced to or encapsulated in the person of John Toland