Sara Pappas is an associate professor of French and visual culture at the University of Richmond. She lives in Richmond.
""Sara Pappas deftly navigates the debates concerning the vexed definitions of realism and naturalism, along with academic and vanguard, as they evolved in the nineteenth-century French critical discourse of major novelists and art critics. Her keen parsing of the subtleties of language and her profound grasp of the range of art history and museum studies combine to produce analyses that brim with significant new insights. This is one of the best books that illustrates the bon mot that hardening of the categories produces art disease.""--Therese Dolan, Professor Emerita, Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University ""For anyone dissatisfied by simplistic accounts of the shift from Salon academy traditionalism to Impressionist modernity, Sara Pappas's deeply interdisciplinary book provides an invaluable service. With expert attention to the novelistic worlds of the Goncourts, Zola, and Huysmans, Naturalism's Imaginary Museum, French Art, and the Eclectic Nineteenth Century artfully disentangles key terms of art criticism in order to 're-entangle' them in ways faithful to the nineteenth century's aesthetic of mixing and multiplicity.""--Andrea Goulet, Professor of French and Francophone Studies, University of Pennsylvania