Jean-Michel Ganteau, Christine Reynier and Isabelle Brasme (eds.), The Humble in 19th- to 21st-Century British Literature and Arts

Description: Through its take on ‘the humble’, this volume attempts to reveal the depth and philosophical relevance of literature, its ethical and political dimension as well as its connection to life. Because it can be associated with social class, religion, psychology or ethics, the notion of ‘the humble’ lends itself to diverse types of studies. The papers collected in this volume argue that in the course of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, artists and writers have revisited the term ‘humble’ and, far from treating it as a simple motif, have raised it to the status of an aesthetic category. This category can first foster a better understanding of fiction, poetry, painting, and their representation of precarious lives through various genres and modes. It may also draw attention to neglected or depreciated humble novels or art forms that developed from the Victorian to the contemporary period, through the Edwardian and the modernist eras. Finally, it helps revise assumptions about the literature and art of the period and signals to a poetics of the humble. The works of art examined here explore the humble as a possible capacity and ethical force, a way of being and acting.

Contents:

Introduction: Isabelle Brasme, Jean-Michel Ganteau, Christine Reynier

Humble Art Forms

• Laurence Roussillon-Constant: Artful Humility: A Pre-Raphaelite Ideal?
• Sophie Aymes: Autographic Wood Engraving: Modernist D. I. Y.
• Claudia Tobin: ‘The Humbleness of all his Objects’: Cézanne, Still Life, and Modern Writers

Aestheticizing Religious Humility

• Stéphane Sitayeb: From Humbleness to Humiliation: Physical Losses and Spiritual Gains in The Hill of Dreams, by Arthur Machen
• Shirley Bricout: The Humble Touch of the Good Samaritan in D.H. Lawrence’s Aaron’s Rod
• José Mari Yebra: The Humble Side of Motherhood in Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary

Gendering the Humble

• Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz: The Humble, Gender and the Local in Recent British and Irish Narratives
• Susana Onega: Lesbian Invisibility and the Politics of Representation of the Lady and the Humble Servant in Sarah Waters’ Affinity

Precariousness

• Angela Locatelli: ‘The Humble/d’ in Literature and Philosophy: Precariousness, Vulnerability, and the Pragmatics of Social Visibility
• Corina Stan: A Ship of Fools: Precarious Lives in 1660s / 1980s England
• Silvia Pellicer-Orti : Writing and Loving: Strategies to Overcome Humbleness in Lynne Reid Banks’ Children at the Gate

Self-effacement

• Pascale Tollance:  From Humiliation to Humility: Swift’s Aesth/et(h)ics of Self-Effacement in The Light of Day
• Xavier LeBrun: Leaving Jacob Room: Narratorial Humility in Jacob’s Room
• Aude Haffen: “In a tactful, impersonal way, we have become quite intimate”: Christopher Isherwood’s Humble Persona and Inoperative Narratives in Goodbye to Berlin (1939)
• Adeline Arniac: ‘We can’t start again. We can end again.’ Humble Inchoation in a Selection from Harold Pinter’s Memory Plays

The British Humble Abroad 

• Leila Haghshenas: The Aesthetics of Humility in Leonard Woolf’s The Village in the Jungle
• Laurent Mellet: The British Humble Abroad: Humanism in Practice in E. M. Forster’s First Novel (Where Angels Fear to Tread) and Jonathan Coe’s Latest (Expo 58)

Further details: https://www.pulm.fr/index.php/9782367812489.html