The Art of Friendship in France, 1789-1914

友谊无处不在。几乎无法想象一个没有它的社会或文化。然而，作为一个对几乎所有人都有直接、直观意义的概念，友谊一直是一个出了名的棘手的学术问题。非正式的，未成文的，不受管制的（更不用说，经常是未说出口的），友谊没有明确的理论定义；过去的友谊也不一定会留下痕迹，使我们能够根据证据详细阐述历史友谊的模型。毫无疑问，正是友谊的这些问题所带来的挑战和可能性，使得它在过去的二十年里成为一个横跨多个学科的富有成效的研究领域。历史学家和文学评论家因不同的原因被这个主题所吸引，并以不同的方式讨论它——但他们很少有机会比较他们对友谊的基本假设，从而弄清楚他们是否在谈论同一件事。我们的跨学科网络鼓励国际学者小组研究法国在革命和拿破仑时代，19世纪，美好时代直到第一次世界大战，考虑什么关于友谊的假设在他们自己的领域（也许，他们自己的国家学术背景）运作，以及他们可以从其他学科的学者对这一概念的使用中学到什么，特别是，他们可能通过跨学科的对话获得哪些新形式的证据，以及这些证据如何丰富他们自己对这个核心文化问题的解释。我们的网络将汇集来自法国、加拿大、英国和美国的历史学家和文学学者，他们将合作研究友谊作为公共和私人问题，作为一种文化现象和生活事实，作为代表和现实。对我们来说特别重要的是友谊与性和欲望的关系：包括约翰·博斯韦尔（John Boswell）和艾伦·布雷（Alan Bray）在内的历史学家一直在争论“友谊”如何为过去的时代提供了一种语言来谈论同性欲望和关系，而19世纪文学评论家可能同样渴望一种语言来谈论某种程度上逃脱了“欲望”在20世纪阅读和解释理论中的垄断地位。19世纪的异性恋男女能成为“单纯的朋友”吗？无论现实生活中是否可能，19世纪的文学作品能表现出这样一种友谊吗？如果一部小说里的人物完全被友谊联系在一起，性欲被排除在外，那么这部小说还能读吗？所有这些问题都将融入我们的合作探索：友谊对19世纪法国不同的人意味着什么，对“友谊”的分析可以告诉我们关于这个本应熟悉的背景的新事物，此外，19世纪友谊观念的特殊性可以教给我们关于这个日常主题的假设和盲点。

Friendship is everywhere. It is almost impossible to imagine a society or culture without it. Yet for a concept that is so immediately, intuitively meaningful to virtually all human beings, friendship has been a famously intractable scholarly problem. Unofficial, uncodified and unregulated (not to mention, very often, unspoken), friendship does not lend itself to clear theoretical definition; nor do the friendships of the past necessarily leave traces that might allow us to elaborate a model of historical friendship from evidence. It is doubtless both the challenge and the possibilities promised by these problematic aspects of friendship that have made it such a productive field of research, across a number of disciplines, in the last twenty years. Historians and literary critics have been drawn to the theme for different reasons, and have addressed it in different ways - but they have rarely had the opportunity to compare their basic assumptions about friendship, and thus to work out if they are even talking about the same thing. Our interdisciplinary network encourages an international panel of scholars working on France in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras, the nineteenth century, and the Belle Epoque up to the Great War, to consider what presuppositions about friendship operate within their own field (and, perhaps, their own national academic context), and what they might learn from the use made of the concept by scholars in other disciplines - in particular, what new forms of evidence they might acquire through an interdisciplinary conversation, and how that evidence might enrich their own account of this central cultural question.Our network will bring together historians and literary scholars from France, Canada, the UK and the USA, who will collaboratively investigate friendship as a public and private issue, as a cultural phenomenon and a fact of life, as representation and reality. Of particular importance to us will be the relationship of friendship to sex and desire: for while historians including John Boswell and Alan Bray have debated how 'friendship' might have provided past ages with a language in which to talk about same-sex desire and relationships, critics of nineteenth-century literature might equally hanker after a language in which to talk about texts that somehow escapes the seeming monopoly of 'desire' on twentieth-century theories of reading and interpretation. Could nineteenth-century (heterosexual) men and women be 'just friends'? Could nineteenth-century literary texts represent such a friendship, whether possible or not in real life? Would a novel in which the characters were bound exclusively by friendship, and from which sexual desire was excluded, even be readable? All of these questions will flow into our collaborative exploration of what friendship meant to different people in nineteenth-century France, what new things an analysis of 'friendship' can tell us about this supposedly familiar context, and, in addition, what the peculiarities of nineteenth-century ideas on friendship can teach us of our own assumptions and blind spots about this everyday theme.