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Originally published in 1994, this pioneering study looks empirically at the way allusion works in specific fictions and affects the reading process. Clear, concise definitions and distinctions are illustrated by close readings of Flaubert, Stendhal, Balzac, Zola, Proust, and Robbe-Grillet.
Melding the fields of literature, sociology, and history, this book develops analyses of the ten novels in Balzac's Scènes de la vie de province. Following the order of the novels projected in La Comédie humaine, Allan H. Pasco investigates how Balzac used art as a tool of social inquiry to obtain startlingly accurate insights into the relationships that defined his turbulent society. His repeated claim to be an "historian of manners" was more than an empty boast. Though Balzac was first and foremost a great novelist, he was also a trailblazing sociologist, joining Henri de Saint-Simon and the subsequent Auguste Comte in considering the relationships that represent society as an interacting, interlocking web. Using a methodology that combines close analysis with a broad cultural context, Pasco demonstrates that Balzac's sociological vision was extraordinarily pertinent to both his and our days.
As one of the 16th century's most brilliant writers, Montaigne formed his ethical self and his eventual theories of physical and spiritual skepticism. Zalloua explores this enlightened thinker's mind. (Literary Criticism)
Making use of new research materials, Sick Heroes offers fresh insight into the romantic spirit. It sheds light on the particular creations of the romantic world, on the causes for Romanticism, on French Romanticism as an aesthetic and social reality, and on the period's collective mentality.
Pasco analyzes innovative nineteenth- and twentieth-century French works to suggest a definition of the novel, in all of its variations and difficulties: a relatively long, artistically designed, prose fiction. He permits literary aficionados to reevaluate novels through comparisons with other genres and both recent and former traditions.
Victims of the Book uncovers a long-neglected but once widespread subgenre: the fin-de-si?cle novel of formation in France. Novels about and geared toward adolescent male readers were imbued with a deep worry over young Frenchmen's masculinity, as evidenced by titles like Crise de jeunesse (Youth in Crisis, 1897), La Crise virile (Crisis of Virility, 1898), La Vie st?rile (A Sterile Life, 1892), and La Mortelle Impuissance (Deadly Impotence, 1903). In this book, Fran?ois Proulx examines a wide panorama of these novels, many of which have rarely been studied, as well as polemical essays, pedagogical articles, and medical treatises on the perceived threats posed by young Frenchmen's reading ha...
Indiana, George Sand's first solo novel, opens with the eponymous heroine brooding and bored in her husband's French countryside estate, far from her native Île Bourbon (now Réunion). Written in 1832, the novel appeared during a period of French history marked by revolution and regime change, civil unrest and labor concerns, and slave revolts and the abolitionist movement, when women faced rigid social constraints and had limited rights within the institution of marriage. With this politically charged history serving as a backdrop for the novel, Sand brings together Romanticism, realism, and the idealism that would characterize her work, presenting what was deemed by her contemporaries a f...
Leading specialists shed new light on key narrative and thematic features of the writings of Honoré de Balzac.
The Thesis and the Book: A Guide for First-Time Academic Authors, revised and expanded in this second edition, will continue to provide the best overview of the process of revising a dissertation for publication.