Memoirs of an Egotist


Book Description

This book contains the memoirs of Stendahl or in his own words the 'chatter about his private life' between 1821 and 1830. It was between these dates that he moved to Paris and here looks back on his life as an eccentric bachelor. 'As well as Beyle the clairvoyant self-investigator, the sardonic analyst of Parisian salon society and deliberate cultivator of wit, here emerges Beyle the despairing lover, the shakespearean enthusiast, whose romantic sentiment run always parallel with his eighteenth-century logic'. Marie-Henri Beyle - better-known by his pen name, Stendhal - was born in Grenoble, France in 1783. He turned to writing after the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815, notable works include A Life of Rossini (1824), A Life of Napoleon (1929) and The Red and the Black published in 1830. A number of works were published posthumously, including Lamiel (1889), Memoirs of an Egotist (1892) and Lucien Leuwen (1894). Stendhal is now regarded as one of the earliest and foremost practitioners of literary realism.




Black Cosmopolitans


Book Description

This book examines the life and intellectual contributions of three extraordinary black men--Jacobus Capitein, Jean-Baptiste Belley, and John Marrant--whose experiences and writing helped shape racial, social, and political thought throughout the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.




The Calendar in Revolutionary France


Book Description

One of the most unusual decisions of the leaders of the French Revolution - and one that had immense practical as well as symbolic impact - was to abandon customarily-accepted ways of calculating date and time to create a Revolutionary calendar. The experiment lasted from 1793 to 1805, and prompted all sorts of questions about the nature of time, ways of measuring it and its relationship to individual, community, communication and creative life. This study traces the course of the Revolutionary Calendar, from its cultural origins to its decline and fall. Tracing the parallel stories of the calendar and the literary genius of its creator, Sylvain Maréchal, from the Enlightenment to the Napoleonic era, Sanja Perovic reconsiders the status of the French Revolution as the purported 'origin' of modernity, the modern experience of time, and the relationship between the imagination and political action.




Les Tragiques...


Book Description




Farewell, Revolution


Book Description

How the Revolution should be remembered has been the focus of debates concerned as much with France's future as with its past. Kaplan both reviews these debates and reconstructs - in sometimes hilarious detail - events leading up to the official commemoration. Bringing to bear the skills of the archival historian and the ethnographer, he masterfully explains how a particular political culture attempts to come to terms with its past.




Orestes


Book Description

Orestes was produced in 1750, an experiment which intensely interested the literary world and the public. In his Dedicatory Letters to the Duchess of Maine, Voltaire has the following passage on the Greek drama: "We should not, I acknowledge, endeavor to imitate what is weak and defective in the ancients: it is most probable that their faults were well known to their contemporaries. I am satisfied, Madam, that the wits of Athens condemned, as well as you, some of those repetitions, and some declamations with which Sophocles has loaded his Electra: they must have observed that he had not dived deep enough into the human heart. I will moreover fairly confess, that there are beauties peculiar not only to the Greek language, but to the climate, to manners and times, which it would be ridiculous to transplant hither. Therefore I have not copied exactly the Electra of Sophocles-much more I knew would be necessary; but I have taken, as well as I could, all the spirit and substance of it."




Collected Works


Book Description




The French Revolution Seen from the Right


Book Description

This book is the first product of an investigation of the conflicting social theories of the French Revolution. The writings of these men disclosed several unexplored connections between the old regime and the contemporary world. Their testimony offered an unaccustomed view of the French Revolution and an illustration of the revolution's interaction with the main currents of European thought. Contents: (1) Who will defend the old regime?; (2) The shock of 1789; (3) Deputies of the right; (4) Resistance to the constitutional monarchy; (5) Adversity; (6) Joseph de Maistre; (7) Louis de Bonald; (8) Rene de Chateaubrand; (9) Troubled orthodoxy; (10) Social theories in motion; References. This is a print on demand edition of an important, hard-to-find publication.