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Best known for the short novel Manon Lescaut, Antoine-Francois Prevost was also the author of a dictionary, several important translations, an extensive corpus of historical writing, a dozen novels, and more than twenty volumes of journalism. While much of his fiction is reminiscent of the adventure stories of baroque novelists, Prevost's nonfiction expresses an encyclopedic ambition that prefigures the intellectual enterprises of the philosophes. In her exploration of the tension between his novelistic and journalistic writing, Rori Bloom argues that Prevost's novels employ established and even archaic attitudes toward authorship, while his newspaper elaborates a new understanding of the roles of author and public. By juxtaposing Prevost's novels and newspaper, Bloom analyzes the sophisticated literary strategies through which this author constructed his complex professional identity. Rori Bloom is an Assistant Professor of French in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Florida.
The Hotel Transylvania is my third novel set in the eighteenth century. Together with Child of Europe and An Outsider Among the Thespians, they form a trio. I propose to call it The Enlightenment Trilogy. I first became interested in the person of Franois II Rkczi, Prince of Transylvania, when I read Gyula Szckfs 1909 monograph, The Exiled Rkczi. (See the appendix.) I was very impressed with Szekfs unmatched scholarship (Sz. was an archivist in Vienna and had unlimited access to the primary sources.) Equally, I was captivated by the novelistic possibilities. The juxtaposition of Rkczi, the Jansenist recluse, and the gambling house at the Hotel fascinated me. However, I sensed that Szekf had ...
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An updated new edition of a classic history of the Hungarians from their earliest origins to today In this absorbing and comprehensive history, Paul Lendvai tells the fascinating story of how the Hungarians, despite a string of catastrophes and their linguistic and cultural isolation, have survived as a nation for more than one thousand years. Now with a new preface and a new chapter that brings the narrative up to the present, the book describes the evolution of Hungarian politics, culture, economics, and identity since the Magyars first arrived in the Carpathian Basin in 896. Through colorful anecdotes of heroes and traitors, victors and victims, revolutionaries and tyrants, Lendvai chronicles the way progressivism and economic modernization have competed with intolerance and narrow-minded nationalism. An unforgettable blend of skilled storytelling and scholarship, The Hungarians is an authoritative account of this enigmatic and important nation.