Philippa Lewis, Intimacy and Distance: Conflicting Cultures in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Legenda, Modern Humanities Research Association, 2017)

Recent years have seen a renewed interest in two aspects of literary studies that might seem, at first, to be unrelated if not antagonistic: the relationship of literature with interiority, on the one hand, and with interpersonal relations on the other. Focusing on the notion of intimacy and related literary and socio-cultural practices, this volume demonstrates the interdependency of subjectivity and the relational field in nineteenth-century France. Philippa Lewis focuses on the periods of the July Monarchy and Second Empire, taking into account both the literary products of the genre intime, which included controversial categories such as the roman intime, poésie intime, and intimate journal, as well as a wide range of cultural practices such as travel writing and literary and art criticism.