Demons of the Night


Book Description

An anthology of thrillers and chillers from 19th Century France. In Theophile Gautier's The Dead in Love, a man develops an obsessive passion for a woman who has returned from the grave, while Honore de Balzac's The Red Inn is on a crime which is committed by one person in thought and another in deed.




A Tale of the Wind


Book Description

Set in Paris and rich with historical detail, the characters in this title are lively and compelling.




Love, Power, and Gender in Seventeenth-Century French Fairy Tales


Book Description

Love is a key ingredient in the stereotypical fairy-tale ending in which everyone lives happily ever after. This romantic formula continues to influence contemporary ideas about love and marriage, but it ignores the history of love as an emotion that shapes and is shaped by hierarchies of power including gender, class, education, and social status. This interdisciplinary study questions the idealization of love as the ultimate happy ending by showing how the conteuses, the women writers who dominated the first French fairy-tale vogue in the 1690s, used the fairy-tale genre to critique the power dynamics of courtship and marriage. Their tales do not sit comfortably in the fairy-tale canon as they explore the good, the bad, and the ugly effects of love and marriage on the lives of their heroines. Bronwyn Reddan argues that the conteuses' scripts for love emphasize the importance of gender in determining the "right" way to love in seventeenth-century France. Their version of fairy-tale love is historical and contingent rather than universal and timeless. This conversation about love compels revision of the happily-ever-after narrative and offers incisive commentary on the gendered scripts for the performance of love in courtship and marriage in seventeenth-century France.




Women Writing Wonder


Book Description

Duggan, and Adrion Dula hope both to foreground women writers' important contributions to the genre and to challenge common assumptions about what a fairy tale is for scholars, students, and general readers.




French Decadent Tales


Book Description

'He had become the dandy of the unpredictable.' A quest for new sensations, and an avowed desire to shock possessed the Decadent writers of fin-de-siècle Paris. The years 1880-1900 saw an extraordinary, hothouse flowering of talent, that produced some of the most exotic, stylized, and cerebral literature in the French language. While 'Decadence' was a European movement, its epicentre was the French capital. On the eve of Freud's early discoveries, writers such as Gourmont, Lorrain, Maupassant, Mirbeau, Richepin, Schwob, and Villiers engaged in a species of wild analysis of their own, perfecting the art of short fiction as they did so. Death and Eros haunt these pages, and a polymorphous perversity by turns hilarious and horrifying. Their stories teem with addicts, maniacs, and murderers as they strive to outdo each other. This newly translated selection brings together the very best writing of the period, from lesser known figures as well as famous names. Provocative and unsettling, these extraordinary, corrosive little tales continue to cast a cold eye on the modern world. 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.




French Stories/Contes Francais


Book Description

Ten unusual stories: "Micromégas" by Voltaire; "The Atheist's Mass" by Balzac; "The Legend of St. Julian the Hospitaler" by Flaubert; "Spleen of Paris" by Baudelaire; and more. English translations appear on facing pages.




Great Nineteenth-century French Short Stories


Book Description

Seventeen imaginative selections by lesser-known writers: "Adolphe," Benjamin Constant; "Salome," Jules Laforgue; "The Anatomist," Petrus Borel, 14 more. Trends toward the fantastic, expressionism, surrealism. Introductory notes.




Nineteenth-Century French Short Stories (Dual-Language)


Book Description

French text and English translations on facing pages of six stories: Merimée's Mateo Falcone, Nerval's Sylvie, Daudet's La mule du Pape, Flaubert's Hérodias, Zola's L’attaque du moulin,, de Maupassant's Mademoiselle Perle.




Inventing the Israelite


Book Description

In this book, Maurice Samuels brings to light little known works of literature produced from 1830 to 1870 by the first generation of Jews born as French citizens. These writers, Samuels asserts, used fiction as a laboratory to experiment with new forms of Jewish identity relevant to the modern world. In their stories and novels, they responded to the stereotypical depictions of Jews in French culture while creatively adapting the forms and genres of the French literary tradition. They also offered innovative solutions to the central dilemmas of Jewish modernity in the French context—including how to reconcile their identities as Jews with the universalizing demands of the French revolutionary tradition. While their solutions ranged from complete assimilation to a modern brand of orthodoxy, these writers collectively illustrate the creativity of a community in the face of unprecedented upheaval.




French Jewelry of the Nineteenth Century


Book Description

La Bijouterie Française au XIXe Siècle by Henri Vever is an indispensable survey of the jewelry produced in Paris from the Empire to the Art Nouveau period. Since it was first published in three volumes nearly one hundred years ago, it has become the definitive source of information for the jewelry profession as well as for those who simply revel in the intricate beauty of fabulous jewels. Now, for the first time, the entire text is available in English in a single volume. Vever, himself a highly accomplished jeweler, compiled a study that charts the histories of both the humblest and the most famous of his colleagues, including Bapst, Boucheron, Falize, Fontenay, Pouquet, Froment-Meurice, Gaillard, Lalique, Mellerio, and Wièse. This vivid contemporary account is full of data gathered directly from the jewelers themselves or from their descendants. It contains fascinating anecdotes concerning Imperial and Royal commissions together with entertaining tales of workshop practices. In crediting the designers, chasers, engravers, and enamelers who collaborated with the famous jewelry houses, Vever acknowledged the talents of technicians who often worked anonymously. In identifying unrecorded craftsmen, he made his book a unique document. Political, economic, and industrial developments are discussed, as are their repercussions on society and fashion. With his intimate knowledge of techniques, Vever was able to analyze changes that were continually taking place in manufacturing processes. He also recorded the changing styles in jewelry and their sources of inspiration, ranging from the Antique to the Orient.