Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Portrait of an Island
The once famous trading center of Gorée, Sénégal today lies in the busy harbor of the modern city of Dakar. From its beginnings as a modest outpost, Gorée became one of the intersections which linked African trading routes to the European Atlantic trade. Then, as now, people of all nationalities poured into the island; Dutch, English, French, and Portuguese came to trade with the Mande, Moor, Tukor, and Wolf tribes. Trading parties brought gold, horses, firewood, mirrors, books, and more. They built houses of various forms, using American lumber, French roof tiles, freshly‑cut straw, and pulverized seashells, and furnished them in as cosmopolitan a fashion as the city itself. Mark Hinc...
The Chevalier de Boufflers
We have been told a dozen times the story of Julie de Lespinasse and her love-affairs, of Madame de Sta?l and the victims of her amatory experiments, of Lauzun, Fersen, and Lafayette; yet one of the greatest romances of this enthralling period, the love-story of the Chevalier de Boufflers and the Comtesse de Sabran, has been allowed to pass into oblivion. Theirs was the ?grande passion? of the times, ?they loved each other, ? says Monsieur Victor du Bled, ?with a deep love, so different to the liaisons ? la mode, with a love such as we understand it we of today. Besides reconstructing the story, the author has endeavoured to reconstruct the background on which it was enacted?the Revolutionary Era. The French Revolution has been persistently misrepresented, and in consequence a host of popular delusions have grown up around it which must be dispelled if one would present fairly the point of view of those who played their part in that amazing drama.
Posthumous America
Benjamin Hoffmann’s Posthumous America examines the literary idealization of a lost American past in the works of French writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For writers such as John Hector St. John de Crèvecœur and Claude-François de Lezay-Marnésia, America was never more potent as a driving ideal than in its loss. Examining the paradoxical American paradise depicted in Crèvecœur’s Lettres d’un cultivateur américain (1784); the “uchronotopia”—the imaginary perfect society set in America and based on what France might have become without the Revolution—of Lezay-Marnésia’s Lettres écrites des rives de l’Ohio (1792); and the political and nationalistic...
Letters Written from the Banks of the Ohio
First published in French in 1792, Letters Written from the Banks of the Ohio tells the fascinating story of French aristocrat Claude-François de Lezay-Marnésia and the utopia he attempted to create in what is now Ohio. Looking to build a perfect society based on what France might have become without the Revolution, Lezay-Marnésia bought more than twenty thousand acres of land along the banks of the Ohio River from the Scioto Company, which promised French aristocrats a fertile, conflict-free refuge. But hostilities between the U.S. Army and the Native American tribes who still lived on the land prevented the marquis from taking possession. Ruined and on the verge of madness, Lezay-Marné...
The Last Libertines
This “rich . . . highly enjoyable portrait of an extraordinary moment in French history” introduces us to 7 dazzling aristocrats who rose and fell during the French Revolution (Guardian). Benedetta Craveri reveals the history of the Libertine generation “whose youth coincided with the French monarchy’s final moment of grace—a moment when . . . a style of life based on privilege and the spirit of caste might acknowledge the widespread demand for change, and . . . reconcile itself with Enlightenment ideals of justice, tolerance, and citizenship.” Here we meet 7 characters who Craveri singles out not only for their “romantic character” but also for “the keenness with which the...
First Letters in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
‘First letters’ can be understood in various ways: as the first letters written by a person, such as the letters of children, or of drafts which were preserved, amended and copied; as the first letter of a particular type, such as an experienced letter-writer’s first love letter; and as the first letter to a new correspondent, among many others. The idea of a first letter also suggests a link with the letters that follow: what is the connection between the first letter and those which come after it? Written by academics specializing in letter-writing internationally, this volume examines the letters of various authors, philosophers, and artists, including Benjamin Constant, José-Maria de Heredia, Voltaire, Diderot, Coleridge, De Quincey, and others. It is structured in four sections: letters from youth; first letters in fictional works; the writer’s persona; and first letters within correspondence.
