The Venial Sin

The Venial Sin

Author: Honore De Balzac

Publisher:

Published: 2008-05

Total Pages: 48

ISBN-13: 9781409920311

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Honore de Balzac (1799-1850) was a nineteenth-century French novelist and playwright. His Magnum Opus was a sequence of almost 100 novels and plays collectively entitled La Comedie Humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the fall of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1815. Due to his keen observation of detail and unfiltered representation of society, Balzac is regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature. He is renowned for his multi-faceted characters; even his lesser characters are complex, morally ambiguous and fully human. Inanimate objects are imbued with character as well; the city of Paris, a backdrop for much of his writing, takes on many human qualities. His writing influenced many famous authors, including the novelists Marcel Proust, Emile Zola, Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, Marie Corelli, Henry James and Jack Kerouac, as well as important philosophers such as Friedrich Engels. Many of Balzac's works have been made into films, and they continue to inspire other writers. His works also include: Jean-Louis (1822), Clotilde de Lusignan (1822) and Wann-Chlore (1826).


An Episode Under the Terror

An Episode Under the Terror

Author: Honoré de Balzac

Publisher: Lindhardt og Ringhof

Published: 2021-12-06

Total Pages: 28

ISBN-13: 8726668181

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A short story ushering the reader into the violent and horrifying events that took place during the Reign of Terror following the French Revolution. The tale follows an old ex-Carmelite nun who is hiding from Robespierre with abject fear of what tomorrow may bring. Oozing with mystery and suspense, Balzac's allegorical prose is at its very finest here. The French author who, along with Flaubert, is widely regarded to be one of the founding fathers of realism in European fiction. Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) was a French novelist and playwright, most famous for his collection of novels and plays, collectively called 'The Human Comedy'. His detailed observation of humanity and realistic depiction of society makes him one of the earliest representatives of realism in Europe. He was a master-creator of complex characters that often found themselves in ambiguous moral dilemmas.


Balzac's Comedy of Words

Balzac's Comedy of Words

Author: Martin Kanes

Publisher: Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press

Published: 1975

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13:

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Although Balzac's work has been much studied, practically nothing has been written on his use of linguistic concepts. Applying a new approach, this perceptive book demonstrates that the theme and theory of language were central to Balzac's fiction. In considering how the novelist was influenced by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century speculation on language, Martin Kanes traces the development of Balzac's own linguistic ideas from his early to his later writings. Originally published in 1976. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.


Ourika

Ourika

Author: Claire de Duras

Publisher: Modern Language Association

Published: 2014-01-01

Total Pages: 86

ISBN-13: 1603292292

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John Fowles presents a remarkable translation of a nineteenth-century work that provided the seed for his acclaimed novel The French Lieutenant's Woman and that will astonish and haunt modern readers. Based on a true story, Claire de Duras's Ourika relates the experiences of a Senegalese girl who is rescued from slavery and raised by an aristocratic French family during the time of the French Revolution. Brought up in a household of learning and privilege, she is unaware of her difference until she overhears a conversation that suddenly makes her conscious of her race--and of the prejudice it arouses. From this point on, Ourika lives her life not as a French woman but as a black woman who feels "cut off from the entire human race." As the Reign of Terror threatens her and her adoptive family, Ourika struggles with her unusual position as an educated African woman in eighteenth-century Europe. A best-seller in the 1820s, Ourika captured the attention of Duras's peers, including Stendhal, and became the subject of four contemporary plays. The work represents a number of firsts: the first novel set in Europe to have a black heroine; the first French literary work narrated by a black female protagonist; and, as Fowles points out in the foreword to his translation, "the first serious attempt by a white novelist to enter a black mind."