Abstract
Marshall discusses the important but under-researched corpus of francophone literature written in the nineteenth century in Louisiana. Focusing on the literary life of New Orleans, he pinpoints French-Atlantic influences which shape authors’ responses to the political tumult and racial tensions of the epoch. Locating adjacencies with melodrama and Romanticism which characterise the gothic elements of this output, he leads the reader to four key motifs—the house, skin, capitalism and the Jew, and blood—and discusses their treatment by Victor Séjour, Alfred Mercier, and Sidonie de la Houssaye.
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Notes
- 1.
In fact he wrote a scientific booklet about yellow fever, La Fièvre jaune, sa manière d’être à l’égard des étrangers à La Nouvelle-Orléans et dans les campagnes, quelques mots sur son passé et son avenir en Europe, published in 1860.
- 2.
It should be noted that tanner/tanné in standard French does not principally mean to be sunburned, but can indicate a ‘tan’ colour, or even convey the idea of tanning leather, so that a face becomes ‘leathery’ with the sun.
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Marshall, B. (2016). Francophone Gothic Melodramas. In: Castillo Street, S., Crow, C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of the Southern Gothic. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-47774-3_17
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