Florence Naugrette examines the genesis and legacy of the nineteenth century’s most celebrated movement, romanticism. Whereas romanticism is often susceptible to being cast at the opposite end of the spectrum to classicism, Naugrette argues that it took its cues from wherever it could find them: the noble classical and neoclassical genres of tragedy and comedy; opera and comic opera; the Elizabethans; bourgeois drama; and popular genres including pantomime, féerie and above all melodrama. Romantic theatre thus appeared in all registers from comic to tragic, realist to fantastical. Naugrette also dispels the myth that Victor Hugo and his best known contemporaries Dumas, Vigny and Musset, all consecrated by posterity, were romantic theatre’s sole figureheads. She affords due credit to a host of other playwrights who contributed to the movement, notably women such as George Sand, Virginie Ancelot and Delphine de Girardin; and offers visibility to the actors and actresses who contributed to the success of the romantic theatre not only by playing its characters but also by inspiring playwrights and inventing new acting methods. Naugrette concludes by positing that French romanticism, originating predominantly in the French Revolution’s ethos of democratization, was also a nascent form of national popular theatre.

Gabriel Fauré’s long career as a song composer, which stretched from 1861 to 1921, divides conveniently in half. Until 1890, he wrote individual mélodies; thereafter, he composed all but a handful within six carefully integrated cycles. (The lone outlier is Poème d’un jour, a short cycle composed in 1878.) Fauré’s turn to cyclic composition comes as little surprise as he had always tended to concentrate on individual poets. He confined himself to Victor Hugo in his early years, and then moved systematically through Charles Baudelaire and Théophile Gautier before immersing himself in the poets of the Parnassian school. With singleminded focus, he would set ten poems by Armand Silvestre (1878–84), seventeen by Paul Verlaine (1887–94), and eighteen by Charles van Lerberghe (1906–14).

The chapter describes the emergence of the personal novel in the first decade of the nineteenth century and its subsequent evolution thirty years later in parallel with the rise of the historical novel in France. These developments were shaped by changes in book production and readership after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, leading in the 1830s to the increasing professionalization of writing. While maintaining a narrative focus on the experience of insoluble personal conflicts, the personal novel is as much concerned with the transformations and conflicts of post-Revolutionary life as with an altered private domain. Though eclipsed by the realist novel in the middle part of the century, it exerted a prolonged influence, formal as well as thematic, on fiction in Europe and beyond for 100 years or more. The kinds of motivations to which the protagonists of the personal novel appeal, because these imply a break with received belief systems, tend to be sources of scandal. The fictions themselves border on scandal in representing the reasons for these outcomes and also show how challenging it is for those who witness such actions to evaluate or respond to them. The forms through which fiction performs this role would prove to be adaptable to the representation of quite different subsequent social changes. Thus, from the 1830s the novel displays increasing ideological militancy, notably in the work of Sand.

Between the last chapter and this, silence changes its sign. Compared to the ludicrous reading in of significance to the visual filler of screen text is the normal reading out of sound from visual signs. Clarified by audio theorist Michel Chion are the different time frames of cinematic montage and alphabetic signage on screen. Pursuing the theme of temporality and writing, a literary-critical debate between Michael Riffaterre and Paul de Man over a poem by Victor Hugo turns on the poem’s lack of book or page for its text/medium interface – with indirect consequences for its phonetic substrate as well. From there, discussion moves to a famous auditory passage in Virginia Woolf and to a debate in media and film theory that returns to Chion in explicating the difference between the filmic photogram and a linguistic “phonogram,” the latter on exhibit in such novelists as Tom McCarthy and Don DeLillo.