Mutating Idylls

Mutating Idylls examines the surprising presence of the antique literary topos of the idyllic landscape, the locus amoenus , in European literature from the latter half of the nineteenth century. The book sets out to identify how this topos, which generally has no place in politically and socially realistic and naturalist literature, actually does have a role to play. Chapters on central nineteenth-century authors such as Flaubert, Zola, Fontane, Verga, Hamsun, Austen, Eliot, Wilde, Jiménez, Cer