La Comédie Humaine
Author : Honoré de Balzac
Publisher :
Page : 406 pages
File Size : 19,7 MB
Release : 1896
Category :
ISBN :
Author : Honoré de Balzac
Publisher :
Page : 406 pages
File Size : 19,7 MB
Release : 1896
Category :
ISBN :
Author : H. H. Walker
Publisher :
Page : 410 pages
File Size : 11,38 MB
Release : 1879
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ISBN :
Author : Diana Knight
Publisher : MHRA
Page : 133 pages
File Size : 26,47 MB
Release : 2007
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1905981066
Texts about paintings, painters and sculptors are obvious test cases for issues of representation. A significant corpus of artist stories is scattered through Honore de Balzac's Commedie humaine which, from Marx to Lukacs to Roland Barthes's enormously influential S/Z (1970), has been a key literary work for critical debates around French realism. In a series of close readings, Diana Knight explores Barthes's 'model of painting' - the metaphorical code of painting and sculpture that underpins realist discourse - in the context of Balzac's fictional representations of the relation between artists, their models and their works of art. Whereas critics have tended to denounce Balzac's realist aesthetic as complicit with the misogyny of the society he portrays, Balzac and the Model of Painting takes the artist-model relationship, variously gendered in these stories, as the focus of the author's powerful realist critique of the sexual politics of prostitution and marriage in nineteenth-century France.
Author : Peter Brooks
Publisher : New York Review of Books
Page : 281 pages
File Size : 24,74 MB
Release : 2020-10-06
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1681374501
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.
Author : Honoré de Balzac
Publisher : Dutton Books
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 48,46 MB
Release : 1973
Category :
ISBN : 9780460001694
Saumur, the setting for Eugenie Grandet (1833), one of the earliest and most famous novels in Balzac's great Comedie humaine. The Grandet household, oppressed by the exacting miserliness of Grandet himself, is jerked violently out of routine by the sudden arrival of Eugenie's cousin Charles, recently orphaned and penniless. Eugenie's emotional awakening, stimulated by her love for her cousin, brings her into direct conflict with her father, whose cunning and financial success are matched against her determination to rebel. Eugenie's moving story is set against the backdrop of provincial oppression, the vicissitudes of the wine trade, and the workings of the financial system in the aftermath of the French Revolution. It is both a poignant portrayal of private life and a vigorous fictional document of its age. Book jacket.
Author : Honoré de Balzac
Publisher :
Page : 572 pages
File Size : 34,43 MB
Release : 1897
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ISBN :
Author : Honoré de Balzac
Publisher :
Page : 336 pages
File Size : 42,72 MB
Release : 1902
Category : Fiction, French
ISBN :
Author : Honoré de Balzac
Publisher :
Page : 312 pages
File Size : 35,45 MB
Release : 1895
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ISBN :
Author : Owen Heathcote
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 249 pages
File Size : 27,63 MB
Release : 2017-01-16
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1316867382
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.
Author : Honore De Balzac
Publisher : Northwestern University Press
Page : 278 pages
File Size : 30,65 MB
Release : 1993-12-14
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0810109875
The Bureaucrats (Les Employes) stands out in Balzac's immense Human Comedy by concentrating precisely and penetratingly on a distinctive "modern" institution: France's state bureaucracy. Rabourdin, aided by his unscrupulous wife, attempts to reorganize and streamline the entire system. Rabourdin's plan will halve the government's size while doubling its revenue. When the plan is leaked, Rabourdin's rival—an utter incompetent—gains the overwhelming support of the frightened and desperate body of low-ranking functionaries. The novel contains the recognizable themes of Balzac's work: obsessive ambition, conspiracy and human pettiness, and a melodramatic struggle between the social good and the evils of folly and stupidity. It is also an unusual, dramatized analysis of a developing political institution and its role in shaping social class and mentality.