Dr Tim Farrant
Tim Farrant is Senior Fellow in Modern Languages, Reader in Nineteenth-Century French Literature in the University of Oxford, and an internationally-recognized specialist in his area. His research centres on prose fiction, poetry, processes of composition, and press, publishing and historical contexts, notably literature and the visual arts, translation, and cultural exchange. His publications include Balzac’s Shorter Fictions: Genesis and Genre (2002), An Introduction to Nineteenth-Century French Literature (2007), and Jules Verne, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, Round the World in Eighty Days (2013). He initiated and co-organized the 2018 Maison Française d’Oxford conference Balzac et l’Angleterre, since developed in articles on Balzac criticism in Britain and E.T.A. Hoffmann in France from the nineteenth-century to the present. Current projects include a survey of nineteenth-century short fiction and a new edition in translation of Fromentin’s Dominique.
Tim Farrant is a member of the Society of French Studies, Society of Dix-neuviémistes, the Société d’Études romantiques et dix-neuviémistes, the Société Mérimée and the Société Théophile Gautier. He has been extensively engaged with Access, Outreach and Language Policy and serves on the Comité Directeur of the Groupe d’Études balzaciennes and the Committee of the Maison Française d’Oxford, with which Pembroke is now honoured to host an annual lecture with the Collège de France.
Undergraduate: Language and Literature, Prelims and Finals: Language: Translation, Advanced Translation; Short Texts, Prose Fiction, Topics in Literature, 1715 to the present; Romanticism, Balzac, Literature and the Visual Arts, Proust.
Postgraduate: Masters: ‘Reality, Representation, Reflexivity in Nineteenth-Century Prose Fiction’. Current and recent doctorates, many interdisciplinary and co-supervised, include theses on Balzac, the Classic and Adaptation, Palingenesis in the Nineteenth-Century, a Cognitive-Literary approach to the nineteenth-century Fantastic, Stendhal, Nodier and Plagiarism, and composition and economics in Balzac, Zola and Dostoevsky.
Selected Publications: Books
- Balzac’s Shorter Fictions: Genesis and Genre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)
‘The best English-language book on Balzac to appear for at least a generation […] one of the Top Ten of all time in any language, right up there with the work of Anthony Pugh or Stephane Vachon in terms of all-embracing, meticulous scholarship, yet as brim full of critical ideas per page as Maurice Bardèche or Pierre Barbéris at their vintage best.’ (Nineteenth-Century French Studies)
An Introduction to Nineteenth-Century French Literature (London: Duckworth, 2007
- Jules Verne, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, Round the World in Eighty Days (London: Everyman, Classics, 2013)
Articles:
- ‘The Reception of E.T.A. Hoffmann in France’, The Cambridge Companion to Hoffmann, ed. P. Dickson and J. Neilly, forthcoming.
- ‘Balzac, Gall, Lavater, merveilles médicales et trouvailles romanesques’, L’Année balzacienne 2025, forthcoming.
- Balzac, Contes drolatiques, comédie drolatique, forthcoming.
- ‘Balzac et la critique britannique, miroir de la creation, 1830-2023 II, suite et fin’, L’Année balzacienne 2024, 267-316.
- ‘Balzac et la critique britannique, miroir de la création, 1830-2023 I, 1830-1891’, L’Année balzacienne 2023, 177-213.
- ‘Commemoration and Forgetting: Lamartine’s Lost Afterlife’, in On Forgetting, ed. A. Prelec and E. Di Dodo, MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities, 17, 2022, p. 35-44.
- ‘Londres vu par Gautier’, Bulletin de la Société Théophile Gautier 2022. La Géographie de Gautier, ed. A. Guyot et S. Moussa, 2022, p. 63-78.
- ‘Balzac, lecteur de Scott’, L’Année balzacienne 2021, 43-74.
- ‘Colour matters in Balzac, from his beginnings to Séraphîta’, Nineteenth-Century Colour, ed. C. Ribeyrol, Word and Image. A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry, 36.1, 2020.
- ‘Balzac et l’Angleterre: une amitié armée?’, L’Année balzacienne 2019. Balzac et l’Angleterre, 2019, 7-42.
- Gautier, Leconte, Mallarmé: Gravity Redeeming Grace?’, in Gravity and Grace: Essays for Roger Pearson, ed. P. McGuinness and C. Louth, Cambridge, Legenda, 2019, p. 93-11.
- ‘Balzac’s Shorter Fiction’, The Cambridge Companion to Balzac, ed. O. Heathcote and A. Watts, Cambridge, CUP, 2017, 140-156.
- ‘L’Animal a peu de mobilier. Meubles, mobiles et moeurs chez Balzac’, L’Année balzacienne 2017, 157-180.
- ‘From “The Raven” to “Le Cygne”, The Edgar Allan Poe Review, 15. 2 (Autumn 2014), 156-174 (with A. Urakova).
- ‘Can a tale be telling without a plot? Daudet and the Perils of the Popular’, Finding the Plot: On the Importance of Storytelling in Popular Fiction, ed. D. Holmes and D. Platten, Cambridge Scholars Press, 2013.
- ‘Topographie et idéologie: image et texte dans les Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France’, Image et voyage : Représentations iconographiques du voyage, de la méditerranée aux Indes orientales et occidentales, de la fin du moyen âge au XIXe siècle, ed. L. Guyon & S. Requemora-Gros, Presses Universitaires d’Aix-en-provence, 2012.
- ‘Remémorer Rabelais en France au XIXe siècle’, Mapping Memory in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Culture, ed. S. Harrow and A. Watts, 2012.
- ‘Burying the past: De-reading Dominique’, Re-reading / La Relecture, ed. R. Falconer and A. Oliver, Cambridge Scholars Press, 2012.
- La Vue d’en face : Balzac et l’illustration’, L’Année balzacienne 2011.
- Baudelaire’s Poe: an influential misreading ?’, Loxias 28 : Edgar Poe et la Traduction, Centre Transdisciplinaire d’Epistémologie de la Littérature, Université de Nice 2010.
- ‘Fantastique et Science : Les Savants fous de Balzac’, Otrante, revue du Groupe d’Etude des Esthétiques de l’Etrange et du Fantastique de Fontenay , 2009.
- ‘Definition, Repression, and the Oral/Literary interface in the French literary conte from the folie du conte to the Second Empire’, The Conte: Written and Oral Dynamics, ed. J. Carruthers and M. McCusker, Oxford, Bern, New York, Peter Lang, 2009.
Dr Tim Farrant
Tim Farrant is Senior Fellow in Modern Languages, Reader in Nineteenth-Century French Literature in the University of Oxford, and an internationally-recognized specialist in his area. His research centres on prose fiction, poetry, processes of composition, and press, publishing and historical contexts, notably literature and the visual arts, translation, and cultural exchange. His publications include Balzac’s Shorter Fictions: Genesis and Genre (2002), An Introduction to Nineteenth-Century French Literature (2007), and Jules Verne, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, Round the World in Eighty Days (2013). He initiated and co-organized the 2018 Maison Française d’Oxford conference Balzac et l’Angleterre, since developed in articles on Balzac criticism in Britain and E.T.A. Hoffmann in France from the nineteenth-century to the present. Current projects include a survey of nineteenth-century short fiction and a new edition in translation of Fromentin’s Dominique.
Tim Farrant is a member of the Society of French Studies, Society of Dix-neuviémistes, the Société d’Études romantiques et dix-neuviémistes, the Société Mérimée and the Société Théophile Gautier. He has been extensively engaged with Access, Outreach and Language Policy and serves on the Comité Directeur of the Groupe d’Études balzaciennes and the Committee of the Maison Française d’Oxford, with which Pembroke is now honoured to host an annual lecture with the Collège de France.
Undergraduate: Language and Literature, Prelims and Finals: Language: Translation, Advanced Translation; Short Texts, Prose Fiction, Topics in Literature, 1715 to the present; Romanticism, Balzac, Literature and the Visual Arts, Proust.
Postgraduate: Masters: ‘Reality, Representation, Reflexivity in Nineteenth-Century Prose Fiction’. Current and recent doctorates, many interdisciplinary and co-supervised, include theses on Balzac, the Classic and Adaptation, Palingenesis in the Nineteenth-Century, a Cognitive-Literary approach to the nineteenth-century Fantastic, Stendhal, Nodier and Plagiarism, and composition and economics in Balzac, Zola and Dostoevsky.
Selected Publications: Books
- Balzac’s Shorter Fictions: Genesis and Genre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)
‘The best English-language book on Balzac to appear for at least a generation […] one of the Top Ten of all time in any language, right up there with the work of Anthony Pugh or Stephane Vachon in terms of all-embracing, meticulous scholarship, yet as brim full of critical ideas per page as Maurice Bardèche or Pierre Barbéris at their vintage best.’ (Nineteenth-Century French Studies)
An Introduction to Nineteenth-Century French Literature (London: Duckworth, 2007
- Jules Verne, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, Round the World in Eighty Days (London: Everyman, Classics, 2013)
Articles:
- ‘The Reception of E.T.A. Hoffmann in France’, The Cambridge Companion to Hoffmann, ed. P. Dickson and J. Neilly, forthcoming.
- ‘Balzac, Gall, Lavater, merveilles médicales et trouvailles romanesques’, L’Année balzacienne 2025, forthcoming.
- Balzac, Contes drolatiques, comédie drolatique, forthcoming.
- ‘Balzac et la critique britannique, miroir de la creation, 1830-2023 II, suite et fin’, L’Année balzacienne 2024, 267-316.
- ‘Balzac et la critique britannique, miroir de la création, 1830-2023 I, 1830-1891’, L’Année balzacienne 2023, 177-213.
- ‘Commemoration and Forgetting: Lamartine’s Lost Afterlife’, in On Forgetting, ed. A. Prelec and E. Di Dodo, MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities, 17, 2022, p. 35-44.
- ‘Londres vu par Gautier’, Bulletin de la Société Théophile Gautier 2022. La Géographie de Gautier, ed. A. Guyot et S. Moussa, 2022, p. 63-78.
- ‘Balzac, lecteur de Scott’, L’Année balzacienne 2021, 43-74.
- ‘Colour matters in Balzac, from his beginnings to Séraphîta’, Nineteenth-Century Colour, ed. C. Ribeyrol, Word and Image. A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry, 36.1, 2020.
- ‘Balzac et l’Angleterre: une amitié armée?’, L’Année balzacienne 2019. Balzac et l’Angleterre, 2019, 7-42.
- Gautier, Leconte, Mallarmé: Gravity Redeeming Grace?’, in Gravity and Grace: Essays for Roger Pearson, ed. P. McGuinness and C. Louth, Cambridge, Legenda, 2019, p. 93-11.
- ‘Balzac’s Shorter Fiction’, The Cambridge Companion to Balzac, ed. O. Heathcote and A. Watts, Cambridge, CUP, 2017, 140-156.
- ‘L’Animal a peu de mobilier. Meubles, mobiles et moeurs chez Balzac’, L’Année balzacienne 2017, 157-180.
- ‘From “The Raven” to “Le Cygne”, The Edgar Allan Poe Review, 15. 2 (Autumn 2014), 156-174 (with A. Urakova).
- ‘Can a tale be telling without a plot? Daudet and the Perils of the Popular’, Finding the Plot: On the Importance of Storytelling in Popular Fiction, ed. D. Holmes and D. Platten, Cambridge Scholars Press, 2013.
- ‘Topographie et idéologie: image et texte dans les Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France’, Image et voyage : Représentations iconographiques du voyage, de la méditerranée aux Indes orientales et occidentales, de la fin du moyen âge au XIXe siècle, ed. L. Guyon & S. Requemora-Gros, Presses Universitaires d’Aix-en-provence, 2012.
- ‘Remémorer Rabelais en France au XIXe siècle’, Mapping Memory in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Culture, ed. S. Harrow and A. Watts, 2012.
- ‘Burying the past: De-reading Dominique’, Re-reading / La Relecture, ed. R. Falconer and A. Oliver, Cambridge Scholars Press, 2012.
- La Vue d’en face : Balzac et l’illustration’, L’Année balzacienne 2011.
- Baudelaire’s Poe: an influential misreading ?’, Loxias 28 : Edgar Poe et la Traduction, Centre Transdisciplinaire d’Epistémologie de la Littérature, Université de Nice 2010.
- ‘Fantastique et Science : Les Savants fous de Balzac’, Otrante, revue du Groupe d’Etude des Esthétiques de l’Etrange et du Fantastique de Fontenay , 2009.
- ‘Definition, Repression, and the Oral/Literary interface in the French literary conte from the folie du conte to the Second Empire’, The Conte: Written and Oral Dynamics, ed. J. Carruthers and M. McCusker, Oxford, Bern, New York, Peter Lang, 2009.