You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The work of French writer and essayist Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003) is without doubt among the most challenging the twentieth century has to offer. Contemporary debate in literature, philosophy, and politics has yet to fully acknowledge its discreet but enduring impact. Arising from a conference that took place in Oxford in 2009, this book sets itself a simple, if daunting, task: that of measuring the impact and responding to the challenge of Blanchot's work by addressing its engagement with the Romantic legacy, in particular (but not only) that of the Jena Romantics. Drawing upon a wide range of philosophers and poets associated directly or indirectly with German Romanticism (Kant, Fichte, ...
In this book, the author discusses the sheer improbability of Mallarmé's joint concern with concepts, or ideas, on the one hand, and with language as it behaves within the constraints of poetic convention on the other.
This book deals with the important and hitherto neglected relationship between the works of Stendhal and Plutarch's Parallel Lives. Stendhal's readings of Plutarch are shown to inform his literary representations of Revolution and Empire, Restoration and Orleanism, as well as his theorizations of Romanticism. In particular, the Plutarchan concept of Parallel Lives is used to analyse one of the major themes of Stendhal's writing: the self-construction of individual identity, whether (auto)biographical or fictional, by means of the emulation (as distinct from the imitation) of heroic exemplars. As a consequence, the balance between irony and idealism often identified by critics in Stendhal's work is shown rather to be an imbalance, weighted in favour of an idealism derived from Plutarchan conceptions of heroism, particularly as they are represented in the Lives of Julius Caesar and Marcus Brutus.
Romanticism and after in France is a series designed to publish research monographs or longer works of high quality whether by established scholars or recent graduates, dealing with French literature in the period from pre-Romanticism to the turn of the twentieth century.
This first comparative study of the Symbolist use of myth in France, Germany, and Russia closely examines a selected range of poetic and pictorial works created between c. 1860 and 1910. The focus of the discussion is on a constellation of five artists, linked by a complex network of influences: Gustave Moreau, José-Maria de Heredia, and Jean Moréas (France); Stefan George (Germany); and Valerii Bryusov (Russia). By analysing myth in painting and poetry, the book gives a new insight into the significance of heroic and aesthetic ideals in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European culture. International and interdisciplinary in its comparative approach, the study reassesses the d...
L'Éducation sentimentale, begun in 1843 and finished after two substantial interruptions in 1845, was Flaubert's first attempt at a full-scale novel. Though overshadowed by the 1869 novel of the same title, it is a crucially important text in Flaubert's literary development. Alan Raitt provides a controversial new reading of the book's genesis and development, and addresses many of the misapprehensions that have grown up around this pivotal work.
It is well known that Flaubert harboured an obsessive hatred of the bourgeois and his mentality which erupts constantly and explosively in his correspondence, informs large parts of the works set in his own time, Madame Bovary, L'Education sentimentale, Un Coeur simple and Bouvard et Pecuchet and even overflows into Salammbo and his theatrical experiments. Since most of his thought and writing is so visibly and vitally affected by this obsession, it seems valuable to investigate its origins, its development and its significance for his art. That is the aim of this study which begins with a look at representations of the bourgeois in French literature before Flaubert and goes on to examine in detail what proves to be a more complex phenomenon than might at first sight appear.
Focusing on the Paris book world of this period, Allen reveals how the rise of a new popular literature—jolly chansonniers, the roman-feuilletons or serial novels, melodramas, gothic and sentimental novels, dramatic nationalistic histories—by such authors as Dumas, Sand, Lamennais, Ancelot, Desnoyer, and de Kock coincided with remarkable developments in the production, distribution, and consumption of books. Allen's research ranges from a survey of the then-popular romantic titles and authors and the trade catalogs of booksellers and lending libraries, to the police records of their activities, diaries and journals of working people, and military conscript records and ministerial literacy statistics. The result is a remarkable picture of the exchange between elite and popular culture, the interaction between ideas and their material reality, and the relationship between the literature and the history of France in the romantic period.
Cet ouvrage collectif, qui rassemble les travaux d'un colloque tenu à la Maison Française d'Oxford en 2002 sous le titre 'Henri Petit et son cercle', a deux buts: mieux comprendre la contribution apportée par Daniel Halévy et sa collection Les Cahiers verts à la vie littéraire des années 20 et étudier les débuts littéraires d'Henri Petit et de son cercle en rapport avec le volume collectif Écrits (Grasset, Les Cahiers verts, 1927), à l'occasion des soixante-quinze ans de celui-ci. L'année 1927 est une année charnière. C'est celle du centenaire de la publication de la Préface de Cromwell, et le Romantisme est de nouveau à la mode. Le dernier numéro des Cahiers verts avant É...