Colonial Comedy: Imperialism in the French Realist Novel

Nineteenth-century French Realism focuses on metropolitan France, with Paris as its undisputed heart. Through Jennifer Yee''s close reading of the great novelists of the French realist and naturalist canon - Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant - The Colonial Comedy reveals that the colonies play a role at a distance even in the most apparently metropolitan texts. In what Edward Said called ''geogra...