Research Statement

As part of my Master’s thesis, I studied the representation of the national education system in France during the Third Republic. In particular, I studied the education system as represented in the novel Vérité by Emile Zola and Les Déracinés by Maurice Barrès. These novels represent national education as a crucial aspect of perceived shortcomings and failures of the French Republican system, even while establishing the novel as its own form of national education. In the current scholarship on these two authors, there has been little written on the connection between the narrative strategies and representations of students and teachers within the education system. During the course of writing this thesis, I became most intrigued by what I perceive as the influence of journalistic narrative strategies in each text. To date, there has been very little literature on this narrative influence in these novels, despite the fact that both authors were prolific journalists and both fictionalized true events in order to engage with the Republican system and its perceived failures.

I am continuing to research the influence that journalism and widespread literacy had on the novel. In so doing, my research has led me toward a discursive analysis of the literary and journalistic representations of female criminals between 1880-1910. Authors of interest include Emile Gaboriau, Simon Boubée, Marcelle Tinayre, Emile Zola and Maurice Leblanc. While there has been extensive studies of crime in fiction in the nineteenth century, I am interested in shifting the literary analysis toward a dialogue between the press and popular fiction of the time period, especially in regards to female criminals.

Curriculum Vitae