Lost Souls

Lost Souls PDF Author: Honoré de Balzac
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452965129
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 699

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Book Description
The first new translation of Balzac’s 1847 novel Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes in half a century, fully annotated and with an extensive introduction In Lost Souls, Honoré de Balzac’s brilliant evocation of nineteenth-century Paris, we enter a world of glittering wealth and grinding poverty, teeming with strivers, poseurs, and pleasure seekers along with those who struggle merely to survive. Between the heights of Parisian society and the criminal world lurking underneath, fate is about to catch up with Lucien de Rubempré, last seen in Lost Illusions, as his literary aspirations, his love for the courtesan Esther van Gobseck, and his scheme to marry the wealthy Clotilde become entangled in the cunning and ultimately disastrous ambitions of the Abbé Herrera, a villain for the ages. An extraordinary volume in Balzac’s vast Human Comedy (in which he endeavored to capture all of society), Lost Souls appears here in its first new English translation in half a century. Keenly attuned to the acerbic charm and subtleties of Balzac’s prose, this edition also includes an introduction presenting thorough biographical, literary, and historical context, as well as extensive notes throughout the text—an invaluable resource for today’s readers as they navigate Balzac’s copious allusions to classical and contemporaneous politics and literature.

Lost Souls

Lost Souls PDF Author: Honoré de Balzac
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452965129
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 699

Get Book Here

Book Description
The first new translation of Balzac’s 1847 novel Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes in half a century, fully annotated and with an extensive introduction In Lost Souls, Honoré de Balzac’s brilliant evocation of nineteenth-century Paris, we enter a world of glittering wealth and grinding poverty, teeming with strivers, poseurs, and pleasure seekers along with those who struggle merely to survive. Between the heights of Parisian society and the criminal world lurking underneath, fate is about to catch up with Lucien de Rubempré, last seen in Lost Illusions, as his literary aspirations, his love for the courtesan Esther van Gobseck, and his scheme to marry the wealthy Clotilde become entangled in the cunning and ultimately disastrous ambitions of the Abbé Herrera, a villain for the ages. An extraordinary volume in Balzac’s vast Human Comedy (in which he endeavored to capture all of society), Lost Souls appears here in its first new English translation in half a century. Keenly attuned to the acerbic charm and subtleties of Balzac’s prose, this edition also includes an introduction presenting thorough biographical, literary, and historical context, as well as extensive notes throughout the text—an invaluable resource for today’s readers as they navigate Balzac’s copious allusions to classical and contemporaneous politics and literature.

The Misfit of the Family

The Misfit of the Family PDF Author: Michael Lucey
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822385163
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
In more than ninety novels and novellas, Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) created a universe teeming with over two thousand characters. The Misfit of the Family reveals how Balzac, in imagining the dense, vividly rendered social world of his novels, used his writing as a powerful means to understand and analyze—as well as represent—a range of forms of sexuality. Moving away from the many psychoanalytic approaches to the novelist's work, Michael Lucey contends that in order to grasp the full complexity with which sexuality was understood by Balzac, it is necessary to appreciate how he conceived of its relation to family, history, economics, law, and all the many structures within which sexualities take form. The Misfit of the Family is a compelling argument that Balzac must be taken seriously as a major inventor and purveyor of new tools for analyzing connections between the sexual and the social. Lucey’s account of the novelist’s deployment of "sexual misfits" to impel a wide range of his most canonical works—Cousin Pons, Cousin Bette, Eugenie Grandet, Lost Illusions, The Girl with the Golden Eyes—demonstrates how even the flexible umbrella term "queer" barely covers the enormous diversity of erotic and social behaviors of his characters. Lucey draws on the thinking of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu and engages the work of critics of nineteenth-century French fiction, including Naomi Schor, D. A. Miller, Franco Moretti, and others. His reflections on Proust as Balzac’s most cannily attentive reader suggest how the lines of social and erotic force he locates in Balzac’s work continued to manifest themselves in twentieth-century writing and society.

The Girl with the Golden Eyes and Other Stories

The Girl with the Golden Eyes and Other Stories PDF Author: Honoré de Balzac
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191633380
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
'What holds sway over this country without morals, beliefs, or feelings? Gold and pleasure.' Sexual attraction, artistic insight, and the often ironic relationship between them is the dominant theme in the three short works collected in this volume. In Sarrasine an impetuous young sculptor falls in love with a diva of the Roman stage, but rapture turns to rage when he discovers the reality behind the seductiveness of the singer's voice. The ageing artist in The Unknown Masterpiece, obsessed with his creation of the perfect image of an ideal woman, tries to hide it from the jealous young student who is desperate for a glimpse of it. And in The Girl with the Golden Eyes, the hero is a dandy whose attractiveness for the mysterious Paquita has an unexpected origin. These enigmatic and disturbing forays into the margins of madness, sexuality, and creativity show Balzac spinning fantastic tales as profound as any of his longer fictions. His mastery of the seductions of storytelling places these novellas among the nineteenth-century's richest explorations of art and desire. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Le Trésor Du Bibliophile Romantique Et Moderne, 1801-1875

Le Trésor Du Bibliophile Romantique Et Moderne, 1801-1875 PDF Author: Léopold Carteret
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Books
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description


Balzac: Old Goriot

Balzac: Old Goriot PDF Author: David Bellos
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521327992
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 102

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Book Description
A new account of the novel's composition, structure and achievement provides readers with detailed literary and historical background and an explanation of how Balzac challenged prevailing expectations of the novel.

Scenes from a Courtesan's Life

Scenes from a Courtesan's Life PDF Author: Honoré de Balzac
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 840

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Book Description


The Wild Ass's Skin

The Wild Ass's Skin PDF Author: Honoré de Balzac
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199579504
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Set in early 19th-century Paris, it tells the story of a young man who finds a magic piece of shagreen that fulfills his every desire. For each wish granted, however, the skin shrinks and consumes a portion of his physical energy.

The Order of Mimesis

The Order of Mimesis PDF Author: Christopher Prendergast
Publisher: CUP Archive
ISBN: 9780521369770
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Drawing on a range of theoretical perspectives developed in and around the work of Barthes, Kristeva, Genette and Derrida, Dr Prendergast explores approaches to the concept of mimesis and relates these to a number of narrative texts produced in the period which literary history familiarly designates as the age of realism.

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.

Selling the Story

Selling the Story PDF Author: Jonathan Paine
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674988434
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
A literary scholar and investment banker applies economic criticism to canonical novels, dramatically changing the way we read these classics and proposing a new model for how economics can inform literary analysis. Every writer is a player in the marketplace for literature. Jonathan Paine locates the economics ingrained within the stories themselves, revealing how a text provides a record of its author’s attempt to sell the story to his or her readers. An unusual literary scholar with a background in finance, Paine mines stories for evidence of the conditions of their production. Through his wholly original reading, Balzac’s The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans becomes a secret diary of its author’s struggles to cope with the commercializing influence of serial publication in newspapers. The Brothers Karamazov transforms into a story of Dostoevsky’s sequential bets with his readers, present and future, about how to write a novel. Zola’s Money documents the rise of big business and is itself a product of Zola’s own big business, his factory of novels. Combining close readings with detailed analyses of the nineteenth-century publishing contexts in which prose fiction first became a product, Selling the Story shows how the business of literature affects even literary devices such as genre, plot, and repetition. Paine argues that no book can be properly understood without reference to its point of sale: the author’s knowledge of the market, of reader expectations, and of his or her own efforts to define and achieve literary value.