Crossings and Interconnections

In this special issue we honour the remarkable academic career and prolific scholarship of Barbara Wright (1935–2019) who significantly impacted the field of nineteenth-century French studies. Her twenty-two books and ninety-five articles testify to her far-ranging academic interests and her authoritative command of interdisciplinarity. Her combination of a well-honed critical eye with a depth of historical knowledge provided a frame for a variety of studies on Honoré de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Moreau, Hector Berlioz, Marcel Proust, Edgar Quinet, Théophile Gautier, Théodore de Banville and Gustave Courbet, to name a few in the panorama of major figures whose works transformed the literary and visual landscape of nineteenth-century France. Her primary focus and most prolific work focused on the career of Eugène Fromentin. Her 1966 edition of his novel Dominique is considered definitive while the 1995 edition of his correspondence, running to some two and a half thousand pages, remains unsurpassed. Her 1987 edition of his paintings and drawings had to be expanded to two volumes in 2008 because of all the discoveries she had made in the meantime. Her highly praised critical biography of Fromentin ran to over 600 pages and was awarded the Prix Roger Bonniot by the Académie de Saintonge for its French translation. In recognition, the city of La Rochelle made her an honorary citizen and dedicated a pathway in her name (Figure 1).

Figure 1. La Rochelle pathway. Photograph: Jason McElligott.

This special issue seeks, similarly, to honour a remarkable academic path-maker, on behalf of her immediate colleagues and former students at Trinity College Dublin (four former students of Trinity’s French Department are included in this volume), and on behalf of her extensive and intersecting circles of academic friends in French studies (some of whom contributed to Conroy and Gratton eds. 2005), particularly those associated with the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes and its North American counterpart, Nineteenth-Century French Studies. In her prologue to the issue, Claire Moran, writing as Wright’s former PhD student, highlights the qualities that distinguish preeminent role models and mentors who open doors to their fields and the people in them. The subsequent two articles, by Robert Lethbridge and Mary Orr respectively, turn to the painter and writer to whom Wright devoted the bulk of her career: Fromentin. The following four pieces, by Sarah Gubbins, Maria C. Scott, Michael Tilby and Therese Dolan, all share a more or less direct focus on Baudelaire, who was a major research and teaching interest of Wright’s. Elizabeth Geary Keohane's article, like others in the volume, bears witness to Wright's stimulating work on the visual arts, including her interest in word-image relations. Finally, Roger Little, as a longstanding Trinity colleague of Wright’s, and as the facilitator of her last scholarly publication, offers a brief epilogue and tribute.

Moran’s ‘A Legacy of Care, Curiosity and Connecting: A Personal Tribute to Prof. Barbara Wright’ reminds us how central care, respect and intellectual curiosity were to Wright’s work as an academic, and how important these qualities are to her legacy. She writes that ‘Barbara cared for the nineteenth century and its scholars because she was insatiably curious about the past and about people’. Moran suggests that modern-day scholars and their universities could benefit from taking on board some of the personal and intellectual qualities that defined Barbara as an academic.

Lethbridge’s ‘Opposing Frames: Zola and Fromentin’ and Orr’s ‘“Nous sommes tous nés nomades”: the Pictorial Compasses of Fromentin’s Dominique and Flaubert’s Salammbô of 1862’ both take their cue directly from Wright’s pioneering interdisciplinary research on Fromentin in her study of word and image intersections (and long before the term ‘intermediality’ was in critical usage). Through the lenses of Émile Zola’s art criticism, Lethbridge investigates why Fromentin’s medal-winning art works, submitted to Paris Salons from 1866, elicited consistently lukewarm and ‘opposing’ responses by Zola. For Lethbridge, differences of taste concerning ‘Orientalist’ subjects do not explain Zola’s antipathy. Rather, the lenses of Fromentin’s art draw out more clearly what are Zola’s ‘self-consciously militant’ stances with regard to Second Empire conservatism, whether political, cultural or aesthetic. Orr, in a parallel move, investigates Fromentin’s fiction by drawing for the first time upon the reciprocally fulsome and immediate responses of Flaubert to Dominique and Fromentin to Salammbô, when neither author had hitherto been part of the other’s circles. But it is through engaging with Mlle Leroyer de Chantepie’s informed contemporary critical responses to both these major fictions of 1862 that Orr locates beneath their clear generic differences surprisingly similar pictorial poetics and compositional perspectives at work.

These dialogic articles therefore differently and together demonstrate the inspirational force of Wright’s far-reaching examination of nineteenth-century French pictorial and poetic arts for the cross-fertilization of informed cultural, creative and critical perspectives. Readers of this special issue therefore have much to tease out from this pairing of articles, as they surely will in the case of other pairings and clusters in the volume. For example, do Zola’s and Flaubert’s very different reactions to Fromentin – and to his art and fiction respectively – better locate the latter as a locus for renewed debate in critical nineteenth-century French/Francophone word and image studies? How might the prompts of Lethbridge’s and Orr’s new engagements with Fromentin’s fiction stimulate a differently nuanced reappraisal of ‘orientalism’, of the civic and political missions of artists and the arts in Second Empire France and of the value of travel as a means to broaden or to dislocate the modern artistic (and critical) mind? To seek out similarity within difference, as in Gubbins’s article on Baudelaire and Gérard de Nerval, and difference within similarity, as in Tilby’s article on Édouard Manet and Baudelaire, can reveal elements and connective synergies that would be occluded from view if investigated only through author- or artist-centred lenses. The monocular vision becomes richly stereoscopic.

Central to Wright’s critical work and legacy is her disciplined and invigorating critical and creative knowledge of a key period. It seems fitting then that the year 1862 should play a role in many of the contributions (by Orr, Gubbins, Scott, Tilby, Dolan). For Orr, 1862 is the publication date of ‘mature’ works by Flaubert and Fromentin that offer larger benchmarks that effectively test positivist, scientific and utilitarian values associated with ‘modernity’ and progress. Gubbins lays bare the inventive strategies that censorship and newsprint cultures provoked in the poetry of Baudelaire in 1862. Scott reads the 1862 prose poem ‘Le Joujou du pauvre’ as part of her analysis of Baudelaire’s 1853 essay ‘Morale du joujou’, while Tilby’s article focuses on Manet’s 1862 painting La Musique aux Tuileries. For Dolan, 1862 is the year of Baudelaire’s and Manet’s closest involvement. The painter’s rendering of the poet’s mistress at a vexed time in the poet’s life serves as a key instance of a relationship that nourished both men whose shared aesthetic interests enriched the discursive relays between word and image. Apparent serendipities, such as the recurrence of a particular year in a volume devoted to crossings and interconnections, can establish launch points for further interdisciplinary and multi-medial investigation.

Wright’s deep love of Baudelaire served as a stimulus to contributors to this issue. The 1987 Flammarion edition of La Fanfarlo and Le Spleen de Paris, which Wright produced with her colleague David Scott, was republished as recently as 2013. The Grant and Cutler critical guide to La Fanfarlo that Wright published in 1984 continues to be appreciated by undergraduate students as well as their tutors. It is therefore no accident that four of the nine articles in this volume are devoted to Baudelaire. In ‘Journalistic Intermediation: The Newspaper Poetics of Nerval and Baudelaire’, Gubbins explores the way in which both Baudelaire and Nerval treated the newspaper as a ‘kind of laboratory for literary innovation’, creatively responding to restrictions on press and artistic freedom in a way that reinvigorated their own poetic practice. In ‘What is the Moral of “Morale du joujou”? Toys and the Interconnections between Human and Thing’, Scott writes about how Baudelaire’s essay on toys echoes and anticipates his writing about art by representing the imagination as something that complicates subject-object hierarchies. Tilby’s contribution, ‘Baudelaire, Manet and the Visual Object’, examines what he presents as a reciprocally catalyzing aesthetic interest, on the part of both Baudelaire and his friend, the painter Manet, in prompting the self-conscious involvement of the spectator or reader in conjuring up the visual object. Dolan, in ‘A Black Life Mattered: Jeanne Duval Then and Now’, exposes ‘the fierce racial bias and profound sexism’ that pervades many past (and to some extent even present) readings of Jeanne Duval. Her article goes on to explore far more fitting and approbatory counter-narratives by, among others, the visual artists and writers Maud Sulter and Lorraine O’Grady. All of these essays foreground the idea of creative participation, whether on the part of the academic or artistic interpreter who fills in the blanks left by incomplete archives (Dolan and Tilby), or by artists who enter into a transformative dialogue with the world as they find it (Gubbins and Scott). The idea of dynamic process is prominent in Wright’s work on Baudelaire also, whether she was writing about the pervasiveness of duality and ambivalence in La Fanfarlo, the power of suggestion to produce ‘the ultimate communion’ and ‘symbiosis’ (Wright and Scott 1984, 33) between author and reader, or about the different kinds of ‘poetic journey’ (Wright 2006) that play out in Les Fleurs du Mal.

This volume observes a similarly dynamic approach to nineteenth-century visual art. Drawing upon a range of interconnections between word and image, articles by Dolan, Geary Keohane, Lethbridge and Tilby offer exciting new perspectives and insights into the work of well-known artists like Fromentin, Manet and Maurice Denis and into their artistic links with literary figures such as Baudelaire, Zola and André Gide. Lethbridge’s essay sets the tone and is focused on the topic of criticism itself, via a discussion of Zola’s writings on Fromentin. The article reveals how seeing Zola's (negative) criticism of Fromentin from another perspective actually contradicts perceived viewpoints and how this reframing of perspectives illuminates those that are, in fact, shared by Fromentin and Zola. This re-framing, which word and image discussions do so well, allows the shift in perspective that is essential to any original criticism. Tilby’s article is a case in point. Via a sensitive and imaginative reading, the chairs in Manet’s La Musique aux Tuileries echo the thyrsus in the Baudelaire poem of the same name, both sets of objects leaving behind their concrete starting points to forge multiple associations and parallels, and reveal a modernist aesthetic prowess, hitherto unacknowledged and unseen. Visibility, in its many forms (ways of seeing, shifting perspectives, hidden aesthetics …), is at the core of word and image scholarship. In ‘(Dé)doublement as Radical Aesthetic in Le Voyage d’Urien: Gide, Denis and Latour’, Geary Keohane shows how the spectator or reader finds a voice through book illustration, and how what appears to be secondary to the text may radically act to question its reception: ‘The reader is therefore invited to embrace, on their own terms, the ludic potentiality of uncooperative, non-traditional illustration.’ Scholarship on the French nineteenth century often daringly ventures into unfamiliar terrain, jostling disciplinary boundaries which can make its readers uncomfortable, but it is this lack of comfort, this lack of ease which brings it closest to a successful retelling of nineteenth-century cultural and artistic history.

Geary Keohane’s piece firmly reminds dix-neuviémistes of the importance of the spirit of collaboration, not only in the process of textual production, but also in the production of textual meaning, even where there is, or can be, no active working relationship among the key parties. The epilogue to this special issue highlights Wright’s transversally informed and constantly roving intellectual-critical endeavour. As the ‘production editor’ for Wright’s last scholarly publication, Little offers a promotional résumé of Wright’s first critical edition of Édouard de Tocqueville’s Voyage en Angleterre, en Écosse et en Irlande. This volume offers precious tasters for important critical work enabled by definitive editions, whether by dix-neuviémistes working directly on this text, or by those working through it to better-known or related works in nineteenth-century travel writing.

These essays reflect the impact of Wright’s vast body of work. Her vitality, her wide-ranging intelligence and her skill in examining works with subtlety and depth, combined with her ability to illuminate a gamut of scholarly initiatives, have served as models for the authors of these articles in their individual attempts to reframe and expand our understanding of key texts and images. In tapping into Wright’s unique academic qualities this special issue offers in its collection of different and complementary articles a florilegium of responses to her work that in turn hand critical batons on to others.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.