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Misanthropic Tales
Misanthropic Tales, first published in 1831, is the first collection of stories in a genre that was given numerous other titles--all equally inappropriate--by various practitioners before and after the one that eventually caught on to a greater extent than its rivals: Contes cruels. These are stories that set out to oppose the conventions of fiction that encourage embellishments of various sorts, including and especially the contrivance of "happy endings," deliberately violating the ordinary reader's hope and expectation that a story will end "well." In this, S. Henry Berthoud's seminal volume, translated into English for the first time by Brian Stableford, we are offered thirty-four such tales of disenchantment, not so much stories as anti-stories to be enjoyed, in a connoisseur fashion, by discriminating readers possessed of refined taste, who are aware of the essential hypocrisy of the fictional conventions the tales defy and deny.
Writers' Letters
Writer’s Letters is a collection of fascinating letters written by great writers, from Dickens to De Beauvoir
Fire in the Stone
The genre of prehistoric fiction contains a surprisingly large and diverse group of fictional works by American, British, and French writers from the late nineteenth century to the present that describe prehistoric humans. Nicholas Ruddick explains why prehistoric fiction could not come into being until after the acceptance of Charles Darwin's theories, and argues that many early prehistoric fiction works are still worth reading even though the science upon which they are based is now outdated. Exploring the history and evolution of the genre, Ruddick shows how prehistoric fiction can offer fascinating insights into the possible origins of human nature, sexuality, racial distinctions, langua...
The Pride of Place
Nineteenth-century France grew fascinated with the local past. Thousands of citizens embraced local archaeology, penned historical vignettes and monographs, staged historical pageants, and created museums and pantheons of celebrities. Stéphane Gerson's rich, elegantly written, and timely book provides the first cultural and political history of what contemporaries called the "cult of local memories," an unprecedented effort to resuscitate the past, instill affection for one's locality, and hence create a sense of place. A wide range of archival and printed sources (some of them untapped until now) inform the author's engaging portrait of a little-known realm of Parisian entrepreneurs and mi...
The Omnibus
The introduction of omnibus services in the late 1820s revolutionised urban life in Paris, London and many other cities. As the first form of mass transportation—in principle, they were ‘for everyone’—they offered large swaths of the population new ways of seeing both the urban space and one another. This study examines how the omnibus gave rise to a vast body of cultural representations that probed the unique social experience of urban transit. These representations took many forms—from stories, plays and poems to songs, caricatures and paintings—and include works by many well-known artists and authors such as Picasso and Pissarro and Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins and Guy de Maupassant. Analysing this corpus, the book explores how the omnibus and horse-drawn tram functioned in the cultural imagination of the nineteenth century and looks at the types of stories and values that were projected upon them. The study is comparative in approach and considers issues of gender, class and politics, as well as genre and narrative technique.
Art of the Everyday
Realist novels are celebrated for their detailed attention to ordinary life. But two hundred years before the rise of literary realism, Dutch painters had already made an art of the everyday--pictures that served as a compelling model for the novelists who followed. By the mid-1800s, seventeenth-century Dutch painting figured virtually everywhere in the British and French fiction we esteem today as the vanguard of realism. Why were such writers drawn to this art of two centuries before? What does this tell us about the nature of realism? In this beautifully illustrated and elegantly written book, Ruth Yeazell explores the nineteenth century's fascination with Dutch painting, as well as its d...
