Longing to Belong: The Parvenu in Nineteenth-Century French and German Literature (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

An emblematic figure of the 'bourgeois century,' the parvenu represents the Other on which a society depends. This drama of exclusion is symptomatic of nineteenth-century society: ambivalent about social mobility, oscillating between a new sense of opportunity for all and a backward-looking retrenchment to rigid social structures.