Photojournalism and the Origins of the French Writer House Museum is the first book to emphasize the house museum as a modern construct, and to trace the history of ideas and images leading to its institutionalization in twentieth-century France. This study analyzes newspaper and magazine representations of the homes of Corneille, Hugo, Balzac, Dumas, Sand, Zola, Loti, Montesquiou, Mallarmé, and Proust, among others, arguing that the writer's home became an important part of the French patrimony in the last decades of the nineteenth century.

Contents: Introduction; La Maison d'un artiste: the writer's Home as self-portrait; Writers at home and in the popular press: truth and fiction; From home to habitat: Bricabracomania and la Nouvelle Psychologie; Home life as fiction; Photo-interviews as narrative acts; Literary pilgrimage and the cult of the writer house museum; Conclusion; Works cited; Index.

Elizabeth Emery is Professor of French in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Montclair State University, USA.