Twentieth-century French thinkers such as Marcel Mauss, Georges Bataille, Jean Baudrillard, and Alain Caille (a member of the MAUSS group, an acronym for Mouvement Anti-Utilitariste dans les Sciences Sociales) have launched repeated attacks on economism and have proposed the gift as an alternative form of social regulation. In this book, a selection of writings by Stendhal and Balzac is studied to see how gift exchange functions in these authors' representations of France in the early nineteenth century, a period during which money emerged as a universal social mediator. The gift is studied from two main perspectives: true gift as a means of establishing a positive relationship and gift as a facade masking and facilitating commercial transactions.
Product Identifiers
Publisher
Peter Lang
ISBN-13
9780820448824
eBay Product ID (ePID)
128912370
Product Key Features
Number of Pages
264 Pages
Language
English
Publication Name
The Function of Gift Exchange in Stendhal and Balzac
Publication Year
2000
Subject
Archaeology, Sociology, Zoology
Type
Textbook
Subject Area
Ancient Literature
Author
Doreen Thesen
Series
The Age of Revolution and Romanticism Interdisciplinary Studies