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 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 The Fatal Skin written by Honoré de Balzac and published by Signet Classics. This book was released on 1949 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. Bent on killing himself by throwing himself into the Seine after losing his shirt at the gaming tables, Raphael de Valentin, the romanticised, doomed young hero of Balzac's early novel, 'La Peau de chagrin' (1831), turns into an antiques shop to while away the hours till darkness (when he can be sure not to be rescued). There he finds himself in an emporium of civilisation's treasures, from all over the world and in every marvellous material, executed to the highest degree of human art. Eventually, the eerie, wizened keeper appears and shows Valentin the magic skin which gives the novel its title. It's the hide of a wild ass and, like the ring of the Nibelungen, has the power to grant its owner every wish. But in return it will take possession of Valentin, body and soul. Every time it performs, it will shrink and Valentin's life will shorten in accord.
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 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 Biological Time Historical Time written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-11-26 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Biological Time, Historical Time presents a new approach to 19th century thought and literature: by focussing on the subject of time, it offers a new perspective on the exchanges between French and German literary texts on the one hand and scientific disciplines on the other. Hence, the rivalling influences of the historical sciences and of the life sciences on literary texts are explored, texts from various scientific domains – medicine, natural history, biology, history, and multiple forms of vulgarisation – are investigated. Literary texts are analysed in their participation in and transformation of the scientific imagination. Special attention is accorded to the temporal dimension: this allows for an innovative account of key concepts of 19th century culture.
Download or read book The Best of Balzac written by Honoré de Balzac and published by . This book was released on 1902 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Lost Souls written by Honoré de Balzac and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2021-03-23 with total page 699 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Paratextuality in Balzac s La Peau de Chagrin written by Jeri DeBois King and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work is several studies in one, beginning with a positivistic examination of the paratext (subtitles, epigraphs, both editorial and authorial) that surrounds Balzac's first signed novel. It yields several readings. Numerous references to critics like Barthes and Greenblatt support the author's attempt at a deconstructive reading of Balzac, subverting the positivistic approach to the text by focusing on extra-textual elements, with the help of Genette. This study, is an exercise in post-structuralist criticism, a celebration of Balzac, and a demonstration of the implications of Genette's work in contemporary literary criticism, useful to both the beginner and the graduate student of Balzac.
Download or read book Unwrapping Balzac written by Samuel Weber and published by . This book was released on 1979 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This radically new reading of La peau de charin presents a case for Balzac as a modern rather than a traditional, realist writer. Using the principles and languages of Marx, Derrida, Freud, Barthea, and others who have contributed to a redefinition of modern criticism, Samuel Weber presents a detailed and intricate explication of the text that challenges all standard interpretations of the novel. Traditional readings of La peau de chagrin, and of Balzac in general, have pursued a message in the novel, a reality beneath the allegory. Weber demonstrates that Balzac's text can be grasped both as a mise en scène and as a play of representations that reflects no original truth, reality, or meaning beneath the text to which the representation can be referred and by which they can be authenticated. To unwrap Balzac in this manner is to discover that there is no thing inside, that there is only the 'wrapping.' Weber's conclusions are not only startingly original, but they also solve problems which have puzzled traditional readers of the novel since the earliest commentators of 1831. Unwrapping Balzac is a brilliant tour de force that will create controversy among Balzac scholars for years to come.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to European Novelists written by Michael Bell and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-14 with total page 475 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A survey of 25 major European novelists from Cervantes to Kundera, highlighting their contributions to the genre.
Download or read book Cousin Bette written by Honore De Balzac and published by . This book was released on 1958 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book La Com die Humaine written by Honoré de Balzac and published by . This book was released on 1896 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Cambridge Introduction to French Literature written by Brian Nelson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-11 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An engaging, highly accessible and informative introduction to French literature from the Middle Ages to the present.
Download or read book Prometheus the Life of Balzac written by André Maurois and published by . This book was released on 1965 with total page 618 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 The Works of Honor de Balzac written by Honoré de Balzac and published by . This book was released on 1901 with total page 632 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
