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‘Night Air: The Miasmic City in Balzac’s La Cousine Bette’ | Dr Charlotte Berkery, French Department, UCC | Friday 7th March 2025, 10.00-11.00am | Room 1.24, O’Rahilly Building,
This paper analyses the connection between night time and the cold, humid and muddy landscape which is Balzac’s Paris through the prism of one of his final works, La Cousine Bette (1846)
This paper analyses the connection between night time and the cold, humid and muddy landscape which is Balzac’s Paris through the prism of one of his final works, La Cousine Bette (1846), where the motif of nocturnal miasma stands in for contemporary anxieties about social change, spatial segregation and urbanisation. By replacing the novel in an ecological context, I advance a new understanding of the relations between Balzac’s writing, environmental thought, medical humanities and night studies.
Dr Charlotte Berkery is a lecturer in French at UCC. Her work on nineteenth-century French literature, visual culture and nocturnal history has appeared or is forthcoming in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes including Nineteenth-Century French Studies, the Routledge Handbook of the History of Paris since 1789, and The Balzac Review. She is also co-editing a special issue on ‘Passages’ for the Irish Journal of French Studies which is due for publication later this year.
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