Lecturer in French and scholar of nineteenth-century France, Kathryn Haklin, has published a new edited volume on critical interiority. 

The book, titled "Spatial Imagination and Modernity in European Francophone Culture During the Long Nineteenth Century. Critical Interiority," explores the concept of critical interiority within European francophone culture, namely in the realms of literature, art, and architecture. Edited in collaboration with Dominique Bauer (KU Leuven), Alexandre Dubois (Regis University), and Jill Cornish (Baylor University), the book offers an engaging and interdisciplinary perspective on space, particularly illuminating the instability of spatial divisions (interior/exterior, public/private, real/ideal, etc.) dominating modern life in francophone Europe. Through it's eight essays—preceded by an introduction—the volume engages with the paradoxes embedded in the binaries of spatial divisions and, rather than seeking to resolve the tension of their boundaries, embraces their relational complexities as "productive aporias that offer deeper insight into modernity and its spatial dynamics." (4). 

Kathryn's chapter, "Disenchanting Enchantments. Zola, Manet, and the Erotics of the Conservatory," puts in conversation Éduard Manet's 1879 painting, Dans la serre,  and Émile Zola's 1872 novel, La Curée. Kathryn examines how their representation of the domestic conservatory, or greenhouse, reveals seduction and transgression and enchantment and disenchantment as coexisting forces and interdependent categories inhabiting a continuum. 

The book, published by Routledge as part of their Spatial Imageries in Historical Perspective series, is available for the WashU community via the WashU Libraries. Others interested may purchase the book via Routledge's official webstore.