Balzac and Violence

Balzac and Violence PDF Author: Owen Heathcote
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783039105519
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
Violence is one of the main themes in the novels of Hanore de Balza. Executions, muders, savagery and death accompany the conspiracies and the turbulence that characterise his post-Revolutionary times, from the terror to Napoleonic campaigns and then to the upheavals of 1830 and 1848. Despite the importance of violence in Balzac, this is the first book-length study of the topic. The book begins by tracing the links between violence and Balzac's approach to the novel, not merely in terms of violent content, but, equally importantly, in terms of the form associated with that content. From and content combine to perpetuate and naturalise violence and suffering. After charting examples of this combination in one of Balzac's earliest fictions, the books moves on to the links between violence and place violence and history (Catherine de Medicis; the Terror), between violence and place(from his native Touraine to sickness in Paris), and between violence and gender/sexuality. It alos examines the representiation of violence in the form of spoken or written death. Throughout the analysis, the bokk asks the following question: do Balzac's novels reinforce or counteract the literary text's apparent love-affair with violence?

Balzac and Violence

Balzac and Violence PDF Author: Owen Heathcote
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783039105519
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
Violence is one of the main themes in the novels of Hanore de Balza. Executions, muders, savagery and death accompany the conspiracies and the turbulence that characterise his post-Revolutionary times, from the terror to Napoleonic campaigns and then to the upheavals of 1830 and 1848. Despite the importance of violence in Balzac, this is the first book-length study of the topic. The book begins by tracing the links between violence and Balzac's approach to the novel, not merely in terms of violent content, but, equally importantly, in terms of the form associated with that content. From and content combine to perpetuate and naturalise violence and suffering. After charting examples of this combination in one of Balzac's earliest fictions, the books moves on to the links between violence and place violence and history (Catherine de Medicis; the Terror), between violence and place(from his native Touraine to sickness in Paris), and between violence and gender/sexuality. It alos examines the representiation of violence in the form of spoken or written death. Throughout the analysis, the bokk asks the following question: do Balzac's novels reinforce or counteract the literary text's apparent love-affair with violence?

The Violent Mystique

The Violent Mystique PDF Author: Joyce O. Lowrie
Publisher: Librairie Droz
ISBN: 9782600035354
Category : Atonement in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description


The Cambridge Companion to Balzac

The Cambridge Companion to Balzac PDF Author: Owen Heathcote
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316867382
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
One of the founders of literary realism and the serial novel, Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) was a prolific writer who produced more than a hundred novels, plays and short stories during his career. With its dramatic plots and memorable characters, Balzac's fiction has enthralled generations of readers. 'La Comédie humaine', the vast collection of works in which he strove to document every aspect of nineteenth-century French society, has influenced writers from Flaubert, Zola and Proust to Dostoevsky and Oscar Wilde. This Companion provides a critical reappraisal of Balzac, combining studies of his major novels with guidance on the key narrative and thematic features of his writing. Twelve chapters by world-leading specialists encompass a wide spectrum of topics such as the representation of history, philosophy and religion, the plight of the struggling artist, gender and sexuality, and Balzac's depiction of the creative process itself.

Balzac, Literary Sociologist

Balzac, Literary Sociologist PDF Author: Allan H. Pasco
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319393332
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Melding the fields of literature, sociology, and history, this book develops analyses of the ten novels in Balzac's Scènes de la vie de province. Following the order of the novels projected in La Comédie humaine, Allan H. Pasco investigates how Balzac used art as a tool of social inquiry to obtain startlingly accurate insights into the relationships that defined his turbulent society. His repeated claim to be an "historian of manners" was more than an empty boast. Though Balzac was first and foremost a great novelist, he was also a trailblazing sociologist, joining Henri de Saint-Simon and the subsequent Auguste Comte in considering the relationships that represent society as an interacting, interlocking web. Using a methodology that combines close analysis with a broad cultural context, Pasco demonstrates that Balzac's sociological vision was extraordinarily pertinent to both his and our days.

Orientation in European Romanticism

Orientation in European Romanticism PDF Author: Paul Hamilton
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009268244
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Exploring the experiments in individual and national self-consciousness conducted during the Romantic period, this essential comparative study of European literature, philosophy and politics makes original and often surprising connections and contrasts to reveal how personal and social identities were re-orientated and disorientated from the French Revolution onwards. Reviving a contested moment in the history of aesthetic theory, this study shows how the growing awareness of irresolution in Kant's third Kritik allowed Romantic writers to put the aesthetic to radical uses not envisaged by its parent philosophy. It also recounts how they would go on to force philosophy to revise received notions of authority, empowering women and subordinated ethnic groups to re-orientate existing hierarchies. The sheer range and variety of writers covered is testament both to the breadth of writing that Kant's philosophy so rashly legitimated and to the wider importance of philosophy to the understanding of Romantic literature.

Pere Goriot and Eugenie Grandet

Pere Goriot and Eugenie Grandet PDF Author: Honore de Balzac
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 516

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Book Description


Balzac's Lives

Balzac's Lives PDF Author: Peter Brooks
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681374501
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Enter the mind of French literary giant Honoré de Balzac through a study of nine of his greatest characters and the novels they inhabit. Balzac's Lives illuminates the writer's life, era, and work in a completely original way. Balzac, more than anyone, invented the nineteenth-century novel, and Oscar Wilde went so far as to say that Balzac had invented the nineteenth century. But it was above all through the wonderful, unforgettable, extravagant characters that Balzac dreamed up and made flesh—entrepreneurs, bankers, inventors, industrialists, poets, artists, bohemians of both sexes, journalists, aristocrats, politicians, prostitutes—that he brought to life the dynamic forces of an era that ushered in our own. Peter Brooks’s Balzac’s Lives is a vivid and searching portrait of a great novelist as revealed through the fictional lives he imagined.

The Wrong Side of Paris

The Wrong Side of Paris PDF Author: Honoré de Balzac
Publisher: Modern Library
ISBN: 0812966759
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
The Wrong Side of Paris, the final novel in Balzac’s The Human Comedy, is the compelling story of Godefroid, an abject failure at thirty, who seeks refuge from materialism by moving into a monastery-like lodging house in the shadows of Notre-Dame. Presided over by Madame de La Chanterie, a noblewoman with a tragic past, the house is inhabited by a remarkable band of men—all scarred by the tumultuous aftermath of the French Revolution—who have devoted their lives to performing anonymous acts of charity. Intrigued by the Order of the Brotherhood of Consolation and their uplifting dedication to virtuous living, Godefroid strives to follow their example. He agrees to travel—incognito—to a Parisian slum to save a noble family from ruin. There he meets a beautiful, ailing Polish woman who lives in great luxury, unaware that just outside her bedroom door her own father and son are suffering in dire poverty. By proving himself worthy of the Brotherhood, Godefroid finds his own spiritual redemption. This vivid portrait of the underbelly of nineteenth-century Paris, exuberantly rendered by Jordan Stump, is the first major translation in more than a century of Balzac’s forgotten masterpiece L’Envers de l’histoire contemporaine. Featuring an illuminating Introduction by Adam Gopnik, this original Modern Library edition also includes explanatory notes.

Rendering French Realism

Rendering French Realism PDF Author: Lawrence R. Schehr
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804780161
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
Realist novels are usually seen as verisimilar representations of the world, and even when that verisimilitude is critically examined (as it has been by Marxist and feminist critics), the criticism has referred to extra-literary matters, such as bourgeois ideology or defects in the portrayal of women. This book takes as its thesis that the point defining realism is the point at which the processes of representation break down, a sort of black hole of textuality, a rent in the tissue. The author argues that our notions of continuity, of readability, of representability, or our ideas about unity and ideological shift—or even our notions of what is hidden, occulted, or absent—all come from the nineteenth-century realist model itself. Instead of assuming representability, the author argues that we should look at places where the texts do not continue the representationalist model, where there is a sudden falling off, an abyss. Instead of seeing that point as a shortcoming, the author argues that it is equal to the mimetic successes of representation. After an initial chapter dealing with the limits and ruptures of textuality, the book considers the work of Stendhal, from its early state as a precursor to the later realism to La Chartreuse de Parme, which shows how the act of communication for Stendhal is always made of silences, gaps, and interruptions. The author then reads several works of Balzac, showing how he, while setting up the praxes of continuity on which his oeuvre depends, ruptures the works at various strategic points. In a chapter entitled "Romantic Interruptions," works of Nerval and the younger Dumas, seemingly unrelated to the realist project, are shown to be marked by the ideological, representational, and semiotic assumptions that produced Balzac. The book concludes with Flaubert, looking both at how Flaubert incessantly makes things "unfit" and how critics, even the most perspicacious postmodern ones, often try to smooth over the permanent crisis of rupture that is the sign of Flaubert's writing.

Honore de Balzac

Honore de Balzac PDF Author: Harold Bloom
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 1438113102
Category : Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
Presents critical essays on the works of French author Honore de Balzac.