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Controversy surrounded Zola during his life-time, and controversy has followed him ever since. No other French writer was so violently attacked by contemporaries, none had a more devoted following. This high priest of Naturalism scandalized France by the frankness of his treatment of the seamier side of human nature and electrified the whole of Europe and America by his denunciation of the military establishment of his country over the Dreyfus case. His reputation has remained in dispute ever since his mysterious death in 1902, some critics arguing his work's consistently high and original literary quality, others its undue reliance on cheap sensationalism. This biography, which at was the f...
The last of Alexandre Dumas's many mistresses, the American actress Adah Menken, called him "the king of romance." She was not thinking only of his immensely popular novels The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo - everything about Dumas was touched with the spirit of romance, and it is that spirit which this exhilarating biography captures. There was romance in Dumas's origins. He grew up in the country, the son of a general who fought under Napoleon in Egypt and Italy and whose own parents were a French marquis and a slave from Haiti. As a boy, Dumas's closest friends were local poachers and a gardener whom he once watched cut open a grass snake to liberate a frog. The world was full of magical possibilities, and, in his twenties, after moving to Paris and working as a clerk under the Duc d'Orleans, Dumas established himself, with Victor Hugo, as one of the leading Romantic playwrights. In its scope and richness, Dumas's life bears comparison to those of his fictional heroes. Drawing on Dumas's memoirs and surviving correspondence, Professor Hemmings constructs a fascinating story, first published in 1979, of a writer whose novels continue to excite our imagination.
This book, first published in 1987, complements the author's earlier volume on Culture and Society in France 1848-1898. It deals with the interaction of social history and cultural history, covering in succession the Revolutionary period, the Napoleonic Empire, the Restoration and the July Monarchy. The scope of the book embraces literature (the drama, poetry and the novel), the art of the Revolution and of Romanticism, and to a lesser extent music (including the opera), sculpture and architecture. Influential figures such as Jacques-Louis David, Stendhal, Berlioz, Victor Hugo and others have their place in the survey, together with others prominent in their time hut less well known today. Attention is drawn to phenomena such as the rise of the commercial theatre, and the assembling under Napoleon's aegis of the first public art gallery in Europe, the Musée du Louvre. The survey brings together all the disparate strands to present a coherent picture of the cultural life of France as it evolved during the sixty momentous years between the French Revolution and the upheaval of 1848.
Relations between theatre and state were seldom more fraught in France than in this period. F. W. J. Hemmings traces the vicissitudes of this perennial conflict.
By illuminating the working of one of the most prominent opera houses of the period, Everist reveals how the opera scene in Paris shaped the history of opera.
The Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing contains over 800 entries ranging from Lord Acton and Anna Comnena to Howard Zinn and from Herodotus to Simon Schama. Over 300 contributors from around the world have composed critical assessments of historians from the beginning of historical writing to the present day, including individuals from related disciplines like Jürgen Habermas and Clifford Geertz, whose theoretical contributions have informed historical debate. Additionally, the Encyclopedia includes some 200 essays treating the development of national, regional and topical historiographies, from the Ancient Near East to the history of sexuality. In addition to the Western tradition, it includes substantial assessments of African, Asian, and Latin American historians and debates on gender and subaltern studies.