Download or read book The Wild Ass s Skin written by Honoré de Balzac and published by . This book was released on 1908 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Balzac James and the Realistic Novel written by William W. Stowe and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-14 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book has a double purpose: to compare the literary projects, theories, and careers of Balzac and Henry James, and to develop a theory of realism that can account for their unabashed mimetic intentions and for their novels' sophisticated textuality. Originally published in 1983. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Download or read book Balzac s Lives written by Peter Brooks and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Balzac written by Owen Heathcote and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-16 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Realism s Others written by Eva Aldea and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2010-07-12 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For at least a century, scholarship on realist narrative, and occasional polemics against realist narrative, have assumed that realism promotes the values of sameness against those of otherness, and that it does so by use of a narrative mode that excludes certain epistemologies, ideologies, and ways of thinking. However, the truth is more complex than that, as the essays in this volume all demonstrate. Realism’s Others examines the various strategies by which realist narratives create the idea of difference, whether that difference is registered in terms of class, ethnicity, epistemology, nationality, or gender. The authors in this collection examine in detail not just the fact of otherness in some canonical realist and canonical magical-realist and postmodern novels, but the actual means by which that otherness is established by the text. These essays suggest that neither realist narrative nor narratives positioned as anti-realist take otherness for granted; rather, the texts discussed here actively create difference, and this creation of difference often occasions severe difficulties for the novels’ representational schema. How does one represent different types of knowledge, other aesthetic modes or other spaces, for example, in texts whose epistemology has long been seen as secular and empirical, whose aesthetic mode has always been approached as pure descriptive mimesis, and whose settings are largely domestic? These essays all begin with a certain collision—of nationalities, of classes, of representational matrices, of religions—and go on to chart the challenges that this collision presents to our ideas or stereotypes of realism, or to the possibilities of writing against and beyond realism. This question motivates examination of key realist or social-realist texts, in some of these essays, by Honoré de Balzac, George Eliot, Franz Grillparzer, Theodor Storm, Gottfried Keller, Theodor Fontane, Wilhelm Raabe, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Henry James, William Dean Howells, Charles Chesnutt, Theodore Dreiser, H. T. Tsiang, Alan Sillitoe, and Richard Yates. However, it is no less central a question in certain non-realist texts which engage realist aims to a surprising degree, often to debate them openly; some of these essays discuss, in this light, fantastic, magical realist, and postmodern works by Abram Tertz, Paul Auster, Alejo Carpentier, Toni Morrison, Gabriel García Márquez, Salman Rushdie, and A. S. Byatt. Realism becomes more than an aesthetic aim or narrative mode. It becomes, rather, a value evoked and discussed by all of the works analyzed here, in order to reveal its impact on fiction’s treatment of ethnicity, nationality, ideology, space, gender, and social class.
Download or read book The Antinomies Of Realism written by Fredric Jameson and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2013-10-08 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Antinomies of Realism is a history ofthe nineteenth-century realist novel and its legacy told without a glimmer of nostalgia for artistic achievements that the movement of history makes it impossible to recreate. The works of Zola, Tolstoy, Pérez Galdós, and George Eliot are in the most profound sense inimitable, yet continue to dominate the novel form to this day. Novels to emerge since struggle to reconcile the social conditions of their own creation with the history of this mode of writing: the so-called modernist novel is one attempted solution to this conflict, as is the ever-more impoverished variety of commercial narratives – what today’s book reviewers dub “serious novels,” which are an attempt at the impossible endeavor to roll back the past. Fredric Jameson examines the most influential theories of artistic and literary realism, approaching the subject himself in terms of the social and historical preconditions for realism’s emergence. The realist novel combined an attention to the body and its states of feeling with a focus on the quest for individual realization within the confines of history. In contemporary writing, other forms of representation – for which the term “postmodern” is too glib – have become visible: for example, in the historical fiction of Hilary Mantel or the stylistic plurality of David Mitchell’s novels. Contemporary fiction is shown to be conducting startling experiments in the representation of new realities of a global social totality, modern technological warfare, and historical developments that, although they saturate every corner of our lives, only become apparent on rare occasions and by way of the strangest formal and artistic devices. In a coda, Jameson explains how “realistic” narratives survived the end of classical realism. In effect, he provides an argument for the serious study of popular fiction and mass culture that transcends lazy journalism and the easy platitudes of recent cultural studies.
Download or read book Balzac s Comedy of Words written by Martin Kanes and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-08 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although Balzac's work has been much studied, practically nothing has been written on his use of linguistic concepts. Applying a new approach, this perceptive book demonstrates that the theme and theory of language were central to Balzac's fiction. In considering how the novelist was influenced by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century speculation on language, Martin Kanes traces the development of Balzac's own linguistic ideas from his early to his later writings. Originally published in 1976. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Download or read book Vision in the Novels of George Sand written by Manon Mathias and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The nineteenth-century novelist, George Sand, is most famous today for her tumultuous love life and trouser-wearing days in Paris, but she achieved major commercial and critical success in her day and has gradually made her way back into the literary canon. Mainly known for her pastoral tales and allegedly simplistic idealism, Sand in fact produced around ninety novels which experiment with a wide range of themes, forms and aesthetic models. This book offers thefirst study of vision in Sand's works. It argues that, rather than rejecting reality in favour of the ideal, Sand integrates physical observation with internal forms of seeing such as the imaginationand visionary insights. The study maintains that Sand's understanding of vision provides the basis for her distinctive style and challenges conventional categorisations of the novel in this period.
Download or read book The Magic Skin written by Honoré de Balzac and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2018-09-27 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Magic Skin (La Peau de chagrin) is set in early 19th-century Paris and 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. Although the novel uses fantastic elements, its main focus is a realistic portrayal of the excesses of bourgeois materialism. Balzac's renowned attention to detail is used to describe a gambling house, an antique shop, a royal banquet, and other locales. He also includes details from his own life as a struggling writer, placing the main character in a home similar to the one he occupied at the start of his literary career. The central theme of La Peau de chagrin is the conflict between desire and longevity. The magic skin represents the owner's life-force, which is depleted through every expression of will, especially when it is employed for the acquisition of power. Ignoring a caution from the shopkeeper who offers him the skin, the protagonist greedily surrounds himself with wealth, only to find himself miserable and decrepit at the story's end. (source: Wikipedia)
Download or read book Writing Realism written by Armine Kotin Mortimer and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Each of these texts allows Mortimer to explore how the mimetic illusion operates on readers, both in French literature and in narrative as a genre."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Realist Fiction and the Strolling Spectator Routledge Revivals written by John Rignall and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-01-29 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The classic realist text has long been derided by post-structuralist critics as an unsophisticated and reactionary form. In this study, first published in 1992, John Rignall makes a powerful case for the rehabilitation of realism as a self-aware and reflexive genre. Using the novels of Scott, Balzac, Dickens, George Eliot, Flaubert, James, Ford and Conrad, Rignall argues for an understanding of realism through the recurrent figure of the flâneur. The flâneur is the strolling spectator whose problematic vision both of and in the novel makes him the representative figure of the realist text. A significant contribution to the field, this title will be of particular view to students of realism, literary theory, and comparative literature.
Download or read book Aspects of History and Class Consciousness written by Istvan Meszaros and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-31 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The various contributions in this book, originally published in 1971, discuss many aspects of the complex subject of history and class consciousness, and the themes that are dealt with are all inter-related. The papers range from history and sociology, through political theory and philosophy, to art criticism and literary criticism. Georg Lukács’ classic work History and Class Consciousness, is discussed in several of the essays, and the volume is prefaced by a letter from Georg Lukács to István Mészáros.
Download or read book Reconstructing Woman written by Dorothy Kelly and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reconstructing Woman explores a scenario common to the works of four major French novelists of the nineteenth century: Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, and Villiers. In the texts of each author, a &“new Pygmalion&” (as Balzac calls one of his characters) turns away from a real woman he has loved or desired and prefers instead his artificial re-creation of her. All four authors also portray the possibility that this simulacrum, which replaces the woman, could become real. The central chapters examine this plot and its meanings in multiple texts of each author (with the exception of the chapter on Villiers, in which only &“L&’Eve future&” is considered). The premise is that this shared scenario stems from the discovery in the nineteenth century that humans are transformable. Because scientific innovations play a major part in this discovery, Dorothy Kelly reviews some of the contributing trends that attracted one or more of the authors: mesmerism, dissection, transformism, and evolution, new understandings of human reproduction, spontaneous generation, puericulture, the experimental method. These ideas and practices provided the novelists with a scientific context in which controlling, changing, and creating human bodies became imaginable. At the same time, these authors explore the ways in which not only bodies but also identity can be made. In close readings, Kelly shows how these narratives reveal that linguistic and coded social structures shape human identity. Furthermore, through the representation of the power of language to do that shaping, the authors envision that their own texts would perform that function. The symbol of the reconstruction of woman thus embodies the fantasy and desire that their novels could create or transform both reality and their readers in quite literal ways. Through literary analyses, we can deduce from the texts just why this artificial creation is a woman.
Download or read book The Colonial Comedy Imperialism in the French Realist Novel written by Jennifer Yee and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-01 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nineteenth-century French Realism focuses on metropolitan France, with Paris as its undisputed heart. Through Jennifer Yee's close reading of the great novelists of the French realist and naturalist canon - Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant - The Colonial Comedy reveals that the colonies play a role at a distance even in the most apparently metropolitan texts. In what Edward Said called 'geographical notations' of race and imperialism the presence of the colonies off-stage is apparent as imported objects, colonial merchandise, and individuals whose colonial experience is transformative. Indeed, the realist novel registers the presence of the emerging global world-system through networks of importation, financial speculation, and immigration as well as direct colonial violence and power structures. The literature of the century responds to the last decades of French slavery, and direct colonialism (notably in Algeria), but also economic imperialism and the extension of French influence elsewhere. Far from imperialist triumphalism, in the realist novel exotic objects are portrayed as fake or mass-produced for the growing bourgeois market, while economic imperialism is associated with fraud and manipulation. The deliberate contrast of colonialism and exoticism within the metropolitan novel, and ironic distancing of colonial narratives, reveal the realist mode to be capable of questioning its own epistemological basis. The Colonial Comedy argues for the existence in the nineteenth century of a Critical Orientalism characterized by critique of its own discursive foundations. Using the tools of literary analysis within a materialist approach, The Colonial Comedy opens up the domestic Paris-Provinces axis to signifying chains pointing towards the colonial space.
Download or read book Balzac s Shorter Fictions written by Tim Farrant and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2002-02-14 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Balzac's reputation is as a novelist. But short stories make up over half La Comédie humaine, besides scores of other tales and articles. Short forms appear early in Balzac's output, and shape his work throughout his career. Balzac's Shorter Fictions looks at the whole of this corpus, at the nature of short fiction, and at how Balzac's novels developed from his stories - at the links between literary genesis and genre. It explores the roles of short fiction in Balzac's creation, its part in producing effects of virtuality and perspective, and reflects ultimately on the relationship between brevity and length in La Comédie humaine. This, the first complete English-language study of Balzac's work for over forty years, synthesizes recent research on Balzac's practice within the context of modern thought on the author. It is an indispensable book for students and scholars of Balzac, and for all those interested in prose fiction.
Download or read book Melville s Intervisionary Network written by John Haydock and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intervisionary Network explores a range of literary connections to reveal that Herman Melville was dependent on Honoré de Balzac's universal vision in more of his prose writing than previously recognized.
Download or read book South Atlantic Review written by and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
