Lunch Pail Lecture: Modern Nature: France and New Definitions of the Natural, 1860-1900

During the second half of the 19th century, France’s literature and visual arts redefined the representation of nature and of the human being. From the previous tradition, the artists of the period retained a few major tropes: the interest in the natural environment and the genres related to it, such as the landscape and the verbal description of places; the representation of the female body, mostly through the genre of the nude and the verbal description of a woman’s appeal for a male character and narrator; the rendering of contemporary life, through the genre of the urban scene or in the sketching of urban dialogues and vignettes. In her presentation, Giuseppina Mecchia will talk about the works of the writer Emile Zola, the famous “naturalist” writer, who talked about the French environment and the reality of women’s lives in a revolutionary way, parallel to the work of his painter friends, especially the painter Gustave Courbet and Edouard Manet.