Esquisses/ebauches : Projects and Pre-Texts in Nineteenth-Century French Culture

Esquisses/ébauches assembles a cast of international scholars to debate the role of the esquisse (the sketch) and the ébauche (the lay-in or the draft) in the works of key nineteenth-century French writers and artists. These new readings, with their wide-ranging approaches to the question of the finished work, uncover a cultural context in which forms of the unfinished become privileged and highlight both the existence of an esthetic of the unfinished and an emerging poetics of process.