Authority in Crisis in French Literature, 1850–1880

Considering the crises of literary authority in nineteenth-century French literature against the backdrop of the Second Empire (1852-1870) and the aftermath of the bloody Paris Commune of 1871, Seth Whidden focuses on the phenomena-literary collaboration, parody, destabilized poetic form, the substitution of one poetic or narrative voice with that of the many-that enabled challenges to the traditional status of the writer and, by extension, the political authority that it reflected.