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"'If Furetiere (1619-1688) hadn't been friends with Racine and Boileau, if he hadn't been famous for his Dictionary and for his battle with the Academie Francaise, it is unlikely that we would still be speaking of the Roman bourgeois (1666). Its qualities are decidedly few. One cannot even say in its favour that it bears witness to a period and a moment in our literary history.' So writes Antoine Adam in his magisterial history of 17th-century French literature. But whatever one might feel about the aesthetic value of the Roman bourgeois - and following Adam it is usually classified as a precocious though failed example of narrative realism, sadly out of step with the classicism of its time ...
The now-forgotten genre of the bellum grammaticale flourished in the sixteenth- and seventeenth centuries as a means of satirizing outmoded cultural institutions and promoting new methods of instruction. In light of works written in Renaissance Italy, ancien régime France, and baroque Germany (Andrea Guarna's Bellum Grammaticale [1511], Antoine Furetière's Nouvelle allégorique [1658], and Justus Georg Schottelius' Horrendum Bellum Grammaticale [1673]), this study explores early modern representations of language as war. While often playful in form and intent, the texts examined address serious issues of enduring relevance: the relationship between tradition and innovation, the power of language to divide and unite peoples, and canon-formation. Moreover, the author contends, the "language wars" illuminate the shift from a Latin-based understanding of learning to the acceptance of vernacular erudition and the emergence of national literature.
A comprehensive examination of the meaning, history, and evolution of the basic notion of "literature" from antiquity to the seventeenth century.
Though Honore d'Urfe/s L'Astree (1607-28) and Charles Sorel's Le berger extravagant (1627-28) use similar imagery of death, entombment, and renewal, Hinds (French language and literature, Indiana U.) argues that they use them to different ends. Indeed, he says, the latter is a parody of the first, and between them lies a watershed between romanticism and the reaction against it. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
DIVA study of the seamstresses of late 17th and 18th-century France, who developed a quintessentially feminine occupation that became a major factor in the urban economy./div
As the end of the 20th century approaches, many predict that it will mirror the 19th-century decline into decadence. The author of this text finds a closer analogy with the culture wars of France in the 1690s - the time of a battle of the books known as the Quarrel between the Ancients and Moderns.
Designed for the general reader, this splendid introduction to French literature from 842 A.D.—the date of the earliest surviving document in any Romance language—to the present decade is the most compact and imaginative single-volume guide available in English to the French literary tradition. In fact, no comparable work exists in either language. It is not the customary inventory of authors and titles but rather a collection of wide-angled views of historical and cultural phenomena. It sets before us writers, public figures, criminals, saints, and monarchs, as well as religious, cultural, and social revolutions. It gives us books, paintings, public monuments, even TV shows. Written by ...
A distinguished group of international scholars from the disciplines of history, philosophy, literature and art history offer a reconsideration of the ideas and the impact of the abbé Henri Grégoire, one of the most important figures of the French Revolution and a contributor to the campaigns for Jewish emancipation, rights for blacks, the reform of the Catholic Church and many other causes
“There is no better way to open the mind than curiosity.” — Abbot Pluche Discover the marvellous history of popular science! Today, everyone enjoys the results of science… but it took so long to get there. Cicero was the first to translate scientific language so that his fellow citizens could understand it. Then, Galileo used dialogue to try convincing the Aristotelians that Earth moved. He failed, but his example lived on and inspired other scientists to do the same, until the scientific revolution started by Copernicus was accepted. And finally, Charles Darwin’s idea of evolutionism was matter of an heated debate in Oxford, and Victorian satirical periodicals made even fun of it; but because of all of this, the theory of the tree of life became widely spread and known. And there’s even more: the first scientific community, the origin of the peer review process and also the most famous scientific journals, like Nature… This and much more!
An in depth study of the most superlative violin performers and teachers in history. The result of more than eleven years of deep investigation on the subject, this New History is by far the best available in the 21st century. It studies specifically the vibrato and its evolution. A study of the main violin schools of the world, with special emphasis in their evolution, and the direct conexión teacher-pupil. In the course of this history we will see how the great performers became, often, the great masters of new great violinists, who, in their turn, became the teachers of new superlative performers, and so on, in an uninterrupted chain of teacher-pupil intercommunication, the interrelation...