Stealing Things Theft and the Author in Nineteenth-Century France [Paperback]

Provocative and fresh, this wide-ranging study offers a unique perspective on the anxieties and pressures of an increasingly commercial 19th-century French culture. Juxtaposing memoirs, moral codes, specialized dictionaries, and a children's novel with more conventional newspapers, literary texts, and theories, Peters (Louisiana State Univ.) explores a weary and suspicious century caught up in the throes of exchange and reinvention. Thoughtful and diverse early chapters on Balzac's Code des gens honn?tes, Vidocq's contemporaneous M?moirs and Les voleurs, and S?gur's Les Malheurs de Sophie give way to an analysis of pocket watchessymbol of the emergence of a new social order and the upheaval of commodificationin Zola and Balzac. Final chapters on urban spaces and socioeconomic transformation detail questions of intellectual property theft and the tensions of literary kleptomania. The thoroughness and originality of the introduction alone, with its presentation of the philosophical, legal, and literary conditions of the late 18th century, truly distinguish this volume. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.Stealing Things constitutes a fine performance and will be of interest to students of crime fiction and the nineteenth century.While cultural studies of crime in nineteenth-century France have generally focused on lurid murders, Stealing Things thoughtfully redirects our attention to thefta crime that Peters reveals as definitive of the key social issues at stake in an age of industrialization and commodification. This book deftly weaves readings of memoirs, sociological treatises, penal codes, copyright law, and literature for adults and children into a sustained reflection on the era's shifting attitudes toward propertyboth material and conceptual. Ribbons, pocket watches, and poems, purloined, make their appearance (and disappearance) in this lively account.This new volume traces the evolving notions of property, ownersl“ž