Professor Nicholas White

Nicholas White’s research focuses on 19th century French literature, and he coordinates work in this field in Cambridge. He is particularly interested in the issues of war, friendship, love, marriage, and the family, and in the methods of cultural and literary history. In addition to writing over fifty journal articles and book chapters, nearly one hundred talks and presentations, and reviews of more than one hundred books, he has authored or edited eleven book-length publications.

He is now engaged on a book project on the 'war before the First World War': in other words, the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune (1870-71). This has been supported by a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship. His work on French war literature and painting before 1914 focuses on fiction, in particular Zola's 1892 novel La Débâcle, as well as art by the likes of Neuville and Detaille. Under the EU's Horizon2020 scheme, he has worked with Dr Marion Glamaud-Carbonnier on a research project (2020-23) on The Family at War in French Culture, 1870-1914, under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions scheme. He has given invited lectures and papers on representations of 1870-71 at Harvard, Yale, Penn, NYU, ENS Paris, the Sorbonne and Sorbonne-Nouvelle, ENS Lyon, and Oxford.

He has also worked with Irene Fabry-Tehranchi of the Cambridge University Library on the digitization of its collection of illustrated plates entitled Collection de caricatures et de charges pour servir à l’histoire de la guerre et de la révolution de 1870-1871. In 2021 he co-produced a short film on these caricatures and in 2022 co-curated an exhibition for the University Library.

His earlier publications focused on the fictional representation of personal and social relations in the early and middle decades of the French Third Republic (from the Franco-Prussian War until World War One). As well as writing books on The Family in Crisis in Late Nineteenth-Century French Fiction (1999) and French Divorce Fiction from the Revolution to the First World War (2012), he has edited the translations of two novels -- Zola’s L’Assommoir and Huysmans’s A Rebours (winner of the Scott Moncrieff Prize) -- and co-edited three books of essays on Scarlet Letters: Fictions of Adultery from Antiquity to the 1990s (1997), Currencies: Fiscal Fortunes and Cultural Capital in Nineteenth-Century France (2005), and After Intimacy: The Culture of Divorce in the West since 1789 (2007).

He has also edited three journal special numbers, one in France, and two in the US, starting with a special double number on Zola for the New York journal, Romanic Review (2011). He was also the principal investigator of the Cambridge-Paris Sciences & Lettres network on Zola au pluriel, co-ordinating (with Claire White) symposia in the summer of 2015 at Emmanuel College and the ENS rue d'Ulm, Paris (which brought into collaboration the Cambridge group and the Zola ITEM seminar from Paris). This culminated in a special number of the leading French journal in the field, Les Cahiers naturalistes, no. 91 (2017).

His 2011 piece in Romanic Review on Pot-Bouille and Au Bonheur des dames sketched out a new project on the ways in which French men and women of the late 19th and early 20th centuries interact in public space in a manner that is not necessarily romantic or sexual (in other words what we might call Third Republic "heterosociability"). In this vein, he was the principal investigator from 2016-18 of the AHRC-sponsored Research Network on The Art of Friendship in France, from 1789 to 1914, which he co-ordinated with Andrew Counter. The Fitzwilliam Museum exhibition Degas: A Passion for Perfection (3 October 2017 to 14 January 2018), curated by Jane Munro, was related to this project. This project led to two outputs: a special number (ed. with A. Counter) of fourteen new essays in Romanic Review (2019); and (with Rebecca Sugden) a digital teaching resource for schools centred around Degas's painting Au café.

He founded the Cambridge Research Seminar on Nineteenth-Century France, which Dr Rebecca Sugden has directed since 2020.  

He has published in article and chapter format on a wide range of male and female authors from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including Émile Zola, Guy de Maupassant, Anatole France, J.-K. Huysmans, Colette, Marcelle Tinayre, Marie-Anne de Bovet, Jules Lemaître, André Léo (aka Mme de Champseix), Camille Pert, Claire Vautier, Paul Bourget, Lucien Descaves, Léon Hennique, Édouard Rod, Alphonse Daudet, Janvier & Ballot, and Armand Charpentier. He has also dabbled in other domains such as the relationship between literature and Grand Opera.

He was one of the founding editors of Dix-Neuf (the journal of the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes, the UK and Irish professional body in nineteenth-century French studies), and is now a member of their Editorial Board. He was from 2013 to 2016 the nineteenth-century literature reviews editor of H-France, an organization based in North America for academics working on French history and culture that includes over 4000 subscribers from some 40 nations. He is on the advisory board of three major North American journals in the field, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Symposium and Romanic Review; and is correspondant britannique for the French journal Les Cahiers naturalistes. He has also spoken at Leicester City Football Club, Manchester United Football Club, Merchant Taylors’ Hall London, and Somerset House; written for the Globe Theatre; consulted for the Folio Society (French Short Stories; Adventures of the Three Musketeers); and translated for the City of London Sinfonia, and, most frequently, the Philharmonia Orchestra. For a couple of decades from the late 1990s on, he wrote from time to time for the Times Literary Supplement.

Published works: 

1. Book-length projects  

(xi) Lendemains de défaite: 1870-1871 dans l’imaginaire de la IIIe République, ed. with Marion Glaumaud-Carbonnier  (Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 2024), 236 pp. 

(x) Guest-edited special number with A. Counter on “The Art of Friendship in France, from the Revolution to the Great War” for Romanic Review,110.1-4 (2019), 285 pp. 

(ix) Guest-edited special number with C. White on “Zola au pluriel” for Les Cahiers  naturalistes, 91 (2017), 134 pp.   

(viii) Author, French Divorce Fiction from the Revolution to the First World War (Oxford: Legenda, 2012), x + 200 pp. 

(vii) Guest-edited special double number on Zola for Romanic Review, 103.1-2 (2012), 250 pp. 

(vi) After Intimacy: The Culture of Divorce in the West since 1789, ed. with Karl Leydecker (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007), 295 pp. 

(v) Currencies: Fiscal fortunes and Cultural Capital in Nineteenth-Century France, ed. with S. Capitanio, L. Downing, P. Rowe (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005), 211 pp. 

(iv) Author, The Family in Crisis in Late Nineteenth-Century French Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 1999), xii + 214 pp. [paperback 2006] 

(iii) Edition of J-K Huysmans, A Rebours (Oxford University Press, 1998), xxxiv + 227 pp. Winner of the 1999 Scott Moncrieff Prize.  

(ii) Scarlet Letters: Fictions of Adultery from Antiquity to the 1990s, ed. with Naomi Segal (Macmillan, 1997), xi + 232 pp. 

 (i) Edition of Emile Zola, L’Assommoir (Everyman, 1995), xv + 437 pp. 

2.      Book-chapters & journal articles 

(lvii) ‘« La fougue de commencement » : entre ébauche et débauche’, forthcoming in Les Cahiers naturalistes, 98 (2024), pp. 147-58 (12 pages) 

(lvi) ‘L’enstrasbourgeoisement de la mémoire nationale :  une statue alsacienne sur la place de la Concorde’, in Lendemains de défaite (2024; see above), pp. 129-40 (12)  

(lv)    ‘De Sedan à Rome : une tétralogie zolienne des reliques’, forthcoming in Les Cahiers naturalistes, 97 (2023), pp.127-49. (23) 

(liv)   ‘Napoléon III, le « fantôme » de La Débâcle’, Les Cahiers naturalistes, 96 (2022), pp. 33-49 (17) 

(liii)   ‘Zola’s “champ limité de la réalisation”: La Débâcle and the Commune’, Nineteenth- Century French Studies, 49.3-4 (2021), pp. 477-98 (22) 

(lii)    ‘La Débâcle et la voix de la nation’, Les Cahiers naturalistes, 95 (2021), pp. 265-73 (9) 

(li)     ‘Philémon (1913) de Lucien Descaves et la fiction du rapatriement : une communauté de revenants’, Autour de Vallès, 50 (2020), pp. 205-33. (19) 

(l)      ‘L’aire anglophone : cinq contextes de lecture’, Les Cahiers naturalistes, 94 (2020), pp. 261-65. (5) 

(xlviii + ix) ‘Introduction: The Soul’s Sentiment: Friendship in Nineteenth-Century France’ (with A. Counter), 1-14, and ‘Between Men and Women: Making Friends in Guy de Maupassant’s Bel-Ami’, in Special Number of Romanic Review, 203-21 (see  above). (35)  

(xlvii) ‘« La débâcle de la débâcle » : esthétique et idéologie dans la réception de la  conclusion historique des Rougon-Macquart’, in Olivier Lumbroso, Jean-Sébastien Macke, Jean-Michel Pottier (eds.), Mélanges pour Alain Pagès (Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2019), pp. 223-32. (10) 

(xlvi) ‘Style Wars: The Uniform and the Polymorphous in La Débâcle’, in H. Brevik-Zender (ed.), Fashion, Modernity and Materiality in France (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018), pp. 157-78. (22) 

(xlv)  ‘Gender Difference and Cultural Labour in French Fiction from Zola to Colette’, in M. Waithe and C. White (eds.), The Labour of Literature in Britain and France, 1830 - 1910 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 221-36 (16) 

(xliv)  ‘La Débâcle d’Émile Zola : une fiction républicaine de la fin du Second  Empire’, Autour de Vallès, 47 (2017), 227-38 (12) 

(xliii) ‘‘L’enclume toujours chaude’: Émile Zola’s Newspaper Trilogy’, Dix-Neuf 21.4 (2017), 10-37 (28)   

(xlii) ‘Zola and the Physical Geography of War’, Dix-Neuf 21.2-3 (2017), 10-29 (20) 

(xl + xli) ‘Avant-propos’ (with C. White), pp. 5-10, and ‘L’homos et l’heteros des Rougon- Macquart’, pp. 11-24, in Special Number of Les Cahiers naturalistes (see above) (20) 

(xxxix) ‘The Fog of War: Impressionism and Zola Revisited’, in I. James and E.  Wilson, Lucidity: Essays in Honour of Alison Finch (Oxford: Legenda, 2016), pp. 86- 96 (11) 

(xxxviiii)‘La relecture de l’histoire’, in A. Pagès and P. Glaudes (eds.), Relire “La Fortune des Rougon” (Paris: Garnier, 2015), pp. 299-309 (11) 

(xxxvii) Foreward to Susie Hennessy, on Consumption, Domesticity and the Female Body in Emile Zola’s Fiction (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 2015), pp.i-vi (6) 

(xxxvi) ‘Le papier mâché dans L’Argent’, Les Cahiers naturalistes 87 (2013), 151-68 (18) 

(xxxv) ‘Introduction: Zola, Cultural Historian avant la lettre?’, pp.295-303, and ‘The Lost Heroine of Zola’s Octave Mouret Novels’, pp.369-390, in Special Number of Romanic Review (see above) (31) 

(xxxiv) ‘Fidelity and Invention: Jules Lemaître and Action française Revisit La Princesse de Clèves’, in N. Hammond and M. Moriarty, Evocations of Eloquence: rhetoric, literature and religion in early modern France (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2012), pp.315-36 (22) 

(xxxiiii) ‘Postface: Écrire l’hétéros’, in F. Grenaudier-Klijn et al. (eds), Écrire les  hommes (Saint-Denis: Presses universitaires de Vincennes, 2012), pp.267-70 (4) 

(xxxii) ‘Naturalism’, in W. Burgwinkle et al. (eds), The Cambridge History of French  Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp.522-30 (9) 

(xxxi) ‘Transmission romanesque et transposition familiale à la fin du XIXe siècle’, in C. Chelebourg et al. (eds), Héritage, filiation, transmission: Configurations littéraires (XVIIIe-XXIe siècles) (Louvain-la-Neuve: Presses universitaires de Louvain, 2011), pp.87-98 (12) 

(xxx) ‘La Débâcle d’Émile Zola: une fraternité d’armes?’, in C. Bernard et al.  

(eds), Adelphiques: Soeurs et frères dans la littérature française du XIXe siècle (2010), pp.253-66 (14) 

(xxix) ‘Introduction’ in D. Holton (ed), Cambridge in Athens (Athens: Periplous 2009), pp.7-9 (3) 

(xxviii) ‘Marriage, Identity and Epistemology in Third Republic Fiction’, Dix-Neuf, 11.1  (2008), 135-48 (14) 

(xxvii) ‘Family histories and family plots’, in G. Nelson (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Zola(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp.19-38 (20) 

(xxv + vi) ‘Introduction: After Intimacy’, pp.7-10, and ‘Parallel Lives and Novel Series: French Women’s Writing on Divorce from the Second Empire to the First World War’, pp.57-91, in After Intimacy (see above) (39) 

(xxiv) ‘Narrative Closure and the Question of Divorce in Late-Nineteenth-Century Fiction’, in S. Stephens (ed), Esquisses/Ébauches: Projects and Pre-Texts in Nineteenth-Century French Culture (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), pp.200-10 (11) 

(xxiii) ‘Introduction’, pp.7-12, in Currencies, with co-editors (see above) (6) 

(xxii) ‘Green Eyes and Purple Prose: Late Nineteenth-Century French Divorce Literature’, in R. Langford (ed), Depicting Desire. Gender, Sexuality and the Family in Nineteenth Century Europe: Literary and Artistic Perspectives (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2004), pp. 243- 57 (15) 

(xxi)  Articles on Stendhal, Le Rouge et le Noir and George Sand in The Encyclopaedia of the Romantic Era, 1760-1850, ed. C. Murray (London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2004) (2) 

(xx)   ‘Comment écrire le roman du divorce? A propos de Rose et Ninette’, in C. Chelebourg (ed), Alphonse Daudet: pluriel et singulier (Paris: Minard, 2003), pp. 139-54 (16) 

(xix)  ‘Fictions and librettos’, in Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera, ed. David Charlton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 43-57 (15) 

(xviii) ‘Anglo-Saxon Attitudes: The Shared Centenary of Zola and The Times Literary  Supplement’, preface to New Approaches to Zola, ed. H. Thompson (London: The Emile Zola Society, 2003), pp. 9-17 (9) 

 (xvii) ‘The Name of the Divorcée: Janvier and Ballot’s Theatrical Critique, Mon Nom!’, Romance Quarterly, 49 (2002), 215-27 (13) 

 (xvi) ‘Paternal Perspectives on Divorce in Alphonse Daudet’s Rose et Ninette’, Nineteenth- Century French Studies, 30.1/2 (2001-2), 131-47 (17) 

(xv)   ‘Divorce and Political Scandal in Edouard Rod’s Michel Teissier Novels’, Modern Language Review, 96 (2001), 667-78 (12) 

(xiv)  ‘L’économie narrative du plaisir et de la politique: L’Accident de Monsieur Hébert de Léon Hennique’ in Relecture des «petits» naturalistes, ed. Colette Becker and Anne- Simone Dufief, coll. RITM (Université Paris-X, 2000), pp. 221-30 (10) 

(xiii)  ‘Relire la préface d’A Rebours, ou revisiter le musée de production culturelle’, in Le texte préfaciel, ed. Laurence Kohn-Pireaux (Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 2000), pp.133- 41 (9) 

(xii)   ‘Designations and Destinations: The Carriage in French Naturalist Fiction’, New Readings, 4(1999), 51-60 (9) 

(xi)    ‘Dying for Flaubert: Two Naturalist Versions of the Death of the Subject’, New Zealand Journal of French Studies, 18(1997), 20-29 (10) 

(x)     ‘Reconstructing the City in Zola’s Paris’, Neophilologus, 81(1997), 201-14 (14) 

(viii + ix) ‘The Present State of Affairs’, pp.1-10, and ‘Carnal Knowledge in French Naturalist Fiction’, pp.123-33, in Scarlet Letters (see above) (21) 

(vii)   ‘A Rebours et la “Préface écrite vingt ans après le roman”: écoles, influences,  intertextes’, in Le Champ littéraire, Paris 1860-1900, eds. James Kearns and Keith Cameron (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), pp. 105-12 (8) 

(vi)    ‘Dining out with Léon Hennique’, Essays in French Literature, 32-33 (1995-96), 41- 63 (23) 

(v)     ‘Fin-de-siècle Exchanges: Arthur Symons, Translator of Emile Zola’, Emile Zola  Society Bulletin, 12(1995), 11-22 (12) 

(iv)    ‘Le Docteur Pascal: entre l’inceste et l’“innéité”, Cahiers naturalistes, 68(1994), 77- 88 (12) 

(iii)    ‘The Work in Art: Zola, Cézanne and Cabaner’, Emile Zola Society Bulletin, 7(1994), 3- 8 (5) 

(ii)     ‘Narcissism, Reading and History: Freud, Huysmans and Other Europeans’, Paragraph, 16 (1993), 261-73 (13) 

(i)      ‘Zola and the Rites of Paternity: The Dedications of Le Docteur Pascal’, French Studies Bulletin, 47(1993), 12-14 (3) 

Over 100 book reviews for the following publications: Times Literary Supplement; Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France; Modern and Contemporary France; Modern Language Review; Nineteenth-Century French Studies; Romance Quarterly; French Studies; European Review of History/ Revue européenne d’histoire; The Journal of European Studies; H-France; Young Minds.