Dr Francesco Manzini

Junior Research Fellow in French

Address: Oriel College, Oxford, OX1 4EW
Email: francesco.manzini@oriel.ox.ac.uk

Biography

I studied French and History at Magdalen College, Oxford (1988-1992) before researching my Ph.D. in French at University College London (1995-1999). I was then awarded a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship (2000-2003), staying at University College London, where I taught in the Departments of French and Italian for a total of nine years. I then spent a year as a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies (2005-2006) and three years as a Visiting Research Associate in the Department of French at King’s College London (2006-2009). More recently, I was appointed to a Stipendiary Lectureship in French at Christ Church, Oxford (2009-2010) before arriving at Oriel as a Junior Research Fellow in September 2010. In 2011, I was elected to serve a three-year term as Treasurer of the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes.

Teaching

I teach the eighteenth century for Paper VII and Paper VIII, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for Paper VIII, Voltaire and Diderot as Special Authors for Paper X and Stendhal, Baudelaire, Flaubert and Gide as Special Authors for Paper XI. I also teach the literature course for Prelims, as well as French grammar and translation classes.

Research

My research interests span the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. My doctoral thesis, published as a book in 2004, looks at the various ways in which Stendhal uses Plutarch's Parallel Lives as a model for his fictional, biographical, autobiographical and travel writings. More broadly, it provides new readings of many of Stendhal’s major works - especially Le Rouge et le Noir, Lucien Leuwen, La Chartreuse de Parme and the Vie de Henry Brulard - from the point of view of their engagement with exemplary history and biography. I have recently completed a second book on freneticism and the motif of fever in the Counter-Enlightenment writings of Joseph de Maistre and in a corpus of fevered novels by Balzac, Barbey d’Aurevilly, Zola, Huysmans, Bloy and Bernanos. I am curently taking my interest in Maistre further by analysing his polemical and theoretical writings on capital punishment as part of a broader project on execution and sacrifice in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French literature and thought. I am also currently preparing chapters on Stendhal and Frenetic Romanticism for The Oxford Handbook of European Romanticism, to be edited by Paul Hamilton. I write reviews for French Studies, Modern Language Review and Nineteenth-Century French Studies.

Publications

Books:

Stendhal’s Parallel Lives (Bern: Peter Lang, 2004)

The Fevered Novel from Balzac to Bernanos: Frenetic Catholicism in Crisis, Delirium and Revolution (London: IGRS, 2011)

Articles and Chapters in Books:

‘Fever as Fervour: Mesmerism, Religion, Gender and Class in Balzac’s Ursule Mirouët’, eSharp, 7 (Spring 2006), www.sharp.arts.gla.ac.uk/issue7/Manzini.pdf

‘Execution and Sacrifice: Joseph de Maistre and Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir’, Journal of Romance Studies, 6:3 (Winter, 2006), 71-86

‘Fever, Blood and Frenetic Romanticism: Pétrus Borel’s ‘Don Andréa Vésalius’ and Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly’s Un prêtre marié’, Dix-Neuf, 8 (April, 2007), 39-55

‘The Zero-Sum Game of Providential Pain: Balzac’s L'Envers de l’histoire contemporaine’, in Pleasure and Pain in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Culture, ed. by David Evans and Kate Griffiths (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), 73-85

‘Doctors, Priests, Magistrates: Stendhal, Cabanis and the Power of Medical Practitioners’, in Institutions and Power: Nineteenth-Century France, ed. by David Evans and Kate Griffiths (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011), 69-82

‘The Secularization of Execution: Heresy, Sacrifice and the Inquisition from Montesquieu to Maistre’, in Fragments of Religion: Sacred and Secular Agency in Early Modern France, ed. by Sanja Perovic (London: Continuum, 2012), 144-59

‘Prophesying the Past: Memory and Sacrifice in Barbey d’Aurevilly’s Un prêtre marié', in Memories in/of the 19th Century, ed. by Susan Harrow and Andrew Watts (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012), 315-28

‘Work, Idleness and Play in Stendhal’s Lucien Leuwen’, Dix-Neuf, 16 (March, 2012), 28-37

‘Stendhal, Imagination and Inconsequentiality: the Dirt of Politics and the Politics of Dirt in the Vie de Henry Brulard, Lucien Leuwen and La Chartreuse de Parme’, Dix-Neuf, forthcoming

‘Stendhal’s Allers-Retours: Matrifugal and Matripetal Narratives in Le Rouge et le Noir, Lucien Leuwen and La Chartreuse de Parme’, in Allers-Retours, ed. by Loïc Guyon and Andrew Watts, forthcoming