Kelly Publishes Book
Dorothy Kelly, Professor of French, has published a new book, The Living Death of Modernity: Balzac, Baudelaire, Zola (Cambridge UK: Legenda, 2021). In a Spotlight piece on the RS website earlier this year, Prof. Kelly talked about how she arrived at this topic:
“Several years ago, I noticed something strange in the novels and stories by Balzac and Zola. These authors both famously made clear that they wanted to represent the realities of their time in their novels, which they did. Nonetheless, in my years of reading, I noted that both authors also frequently represented their realist or naturalist characters as being both alive and dead. It was not a case of ghosts or vampires, but rather of human beings who were described more metaphorically as living and dead. I wondered what this meant.”