Victims of the Book: Reading and Masculinity in Fin-de-Siècle France

"In our own century, it is hard to imagine parents and teachers wanting to discourage boys from reading. As educators debate the problem of how to engage boys who ‘won't read,’ and parents bemoan the fact that children today spend too much time indoors in front of a screen, it is hard to imagine a time when it was a problem that boys were enthusiastic about literature. But in Victims of the Book, François Proulx makes the case clearly and illustrates, with close textual analysis, how reading could be a dangerous activity for young and impressionable male minds. Whether it is giving boys ideas ‘above their station’ that threaten class stability, or encouraging male-centered identifications that disrupt the heteronormative social order, books are a powerful resource to be respected."

Melanie C. Hawthorne, Department of International Studies, Texas A&M University

"Among men in late-nineteenth-century France, we knew the poet, the priest, the warrior, the scientist, the physician, the philosopher, the journalist, and so on; but we barely knew the reader of fiction, whose passivity and impressionability are stereotypically associated with women like Madame Bovary. Victims of the Book makes us better acquainted with this figure who challenges many assumptions about masculinity, in the nineteenth century as well as today."

Nicolas Valazza, Department of French and Italian, Indiana University Bloomington