UC Berkeley

This dissertation analyzes nineteenth-century novels by George Sand, Patrice Lacombe, Antoine Gérin-Lajoie, Nikolai Karamzin, and Alexander Pushkin to investigate how literary representations of multilingualism register and expose increasingly rigid nationalist demands for linguistic unity. It focuses on Sand’s Mauprat (1837) and Jeanne (1844), Karamzin’s Письма русского путешественника (Letters of a Russian Traveler, 1791–92), Pushkin’s Евгений Онегин (Eugene Onegin, 1833), and two romans du terroir – Patrice Lacombe’s La terre paternelle (1846) and Antoine Gérin-Lajoie’s Jean Rivard, le défricheur (1862). Though Russia, France, and Quebec differ profoundly in their political and cultural histories, each grappled with the symbolic power of the French language during moments of national redefinition. As France pursued linguistic unification in the wake of the 1789 revolution, Russia developed a national literary language amidst increasing resentment towards French literature and language, and French-speaking Canadians in Quebec faced growing pressure and assimilation under British colonial rule. Read together, these contexts reveal how similar linguistic pressures shaped the formation of supposedly singular national identities across different cultural settings.Many of the texts examined here belong to what I term the sentimental-idealist social novel, a genre that offers idealized visions of the linguistic, national, and moral communities it seeks to define. Over the course of the century, nationalism became increasingly tied to ideals of linguistic homogeneity. Informed by the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Benedict Anderson, and Mikhail Bakhtin, this dissertation focuses on how sentimental and idealist literature engages multilingualism through metatextual strategies in the narrative voice. Each chapter centers on a specific language pair and traces recurring narratorial strategies for framing linguistic diversity, including decisions about glossing, typographical marking, and the allocation or denial of direct speech.Across these case studies, multilingualism is repeatedly staged only to be contained, translated, or neutralized. Linguistic diversity is rendered legible in ways that ultimately only reinforce dominant language ideologies of monolingualism. Together, these chapters demonstrate the limits of sentimental and idealist literary forms to protect or preserve linguistic diversity in the face of increasingly standardized national languages.