by means of the 1850s, the growth of printing and distribution applied sciences supplied writers with extra readers and literary retailers than ever ahead of, whereas the ever-changing political contexts occasioned by means of the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 led to differing levels of political, social, and literary censure and strain. Seth Whidden examines crises of literary authority in nineteenth-century French literature, either in keeping with the makes an attempt of the second one Empire (1852-1870) to revive the unquestioned imperial authority that have been confirmed through Napoleon I and within the aftermath of the bloody Paris Commune of 1871. In every one of his chapters, Whidden deals a consultant case learn highlighting one of many phenomena-literary collaboration, parody, destabilized poetic shape, the substitution of 1 poetic or narrative voice with that of the man-that enabled demanding situations to the normal prestige of the author and, by way of extension, the political authority that it mirrored. Whidden specializes in the play Le Supplice d’une femme (1865); the Cercle Zutiste, a gaggle of writers, musicians, and artists who met on a regular basis within the fall of 1871, merely months after the autumn of the second one Empire; Arthur Rimbaud’s Commune-era poems; and Jules Verne’s 1851 ’Un voyage en ballon,’ later reprinted as ’Un drame dans les airs’ in 1874. Whidden concludes with a futuristic examine authority and auctority because it relates to midcentury writers taking inventory of the weakened authority nonetheless attainable in a post-Second Empire France and envisioning what sort of auctority remains to be to come.