Balzac's Recurring Characters
Author: Anthony R. Pugh
Publisher:
Published: 1974
Total Pages: 510
ISBN-13:
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Balzac's Recurring Characters [By] Anthony R. Pugh
Author: Anthony R. Pugh
Publisher:
Published: 1974
Total Pages: 510
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKReappearing Characters in Nineteenth-Century French Literature
Author: Sotirios Paraschas
Publisher: Springer
Published: 2018-04-19
Total Pages: 291
ISBN-13: 3319692909
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book examines the phenomenon of the reappearance of characters in nineteenth-century French fiction. It approaches this from a hitherto unexplored perspective: that of the twin history of the aesthetic notion of originality and the legal notion of literary property. While the reappearance of characters in the works of canonical authors such as Honoré de Balzac and Émile Zola is usually seen as a device which transforms the individual works of an author into a coherent whole, this book argues that the unprecedented systematisation of the reappearance of characters in the nineteenth century has to be seen within a wider cultural, economic, and legal context. While fictional characters are seen as original creations by their authors, from a legal point of view they are considered to be ‘ideas’ which are not protected and can be appropriated by anyone. By co-examining the reappearance of characters in the work of canonical authors and their reappearances in unauthorised appropriations, such as stage adaptations and sequels, this book discusses a series of issues that have shaped our understanding of authorship, originality, and property.
Theatre in Balzac's La Comedie humaine
Author: Linzy Erika Dickinson
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2021-11-08
Total Pages: 380
ISBN-13: 9004490655
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis is the first study of Balzac's work to examine theatre in La Comédie humaine both as a theme in itself and for its influence on Balzac's techniques and modes of presentation in his novels, and to demonstrate the symbiotic influence of novel and stage on Balzac's work as a playwright and novelist. It will be of interest not only to students of Balzac, but also to students of nineteenth-century theatre and history. The introduction gives an account of Balzac's experience of the theatre; the first three chapters examine the historicity of Balzac's portrayal of the theatre world and how this portrayal serves his wider narrative purpose; the two following chapters demonstrate how and why Balzac relies on the theatre to provide a rich tissue of metaphor and bank of expressive devices with which to communicate his critique of society; finally the work shows how Balzac succeeded in bringing to the stage the same scrutiny of the capitalist ethos which underpins La Comédie humaine. An index of references to playwrights, plays, actors and stage characters in La Comédie humaine is given in an appendix.
Weaving Balzac's Web
Author: James Madden
Publisher: Summa Publications, Inc.
Published: 2003
Total Pages: 288
ISBN-13: 9781883479411
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis study explores the process by which Balzac made use of the unique structure of his fictional world to create subtlety and complexity both within and between the individual works of "La Comedie humaine." Internal narrations--scenes of story-telling--offer a particularly rich field of study as characters tell each other stories about other characters. Because of the system of recurring characters, Balzac's narrative framing creates layers of meaning, thus raising questions that resonate throughout the whole textual edifice. "Weaving Balzac's Web" shows how story-telling scenes can serve as windows into the depths of Balzac's masterpiece and reveal the carefully construction complexities and ambiguities that lie enmeshed in its vast narrative web.
The One vs. the Many
Author: Alex Woloch
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2009-02-09
Total Pages: 402
ISBN-13: 140082575X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKDoes a novel focus on one life or many? Alex Woloch uses this simple question to develop a powerful new theory of the realist novel, based on how narratives distribute limited attention among a crowded field of characters. His argument has important implications for both literary studies and narrative theory. Characterization has long been a troubled and neglected problem within literary theory. Through close readings of such novels as Pride and Prejudice, Great Expectations, and Le Père Goriot, Woloch demonstrates that the representation of any character takes place within a shifting field of narrative attention and obscurity. Each individual--whether the central figure or a radically subordinated one--emerges as a character only through his or her distinct and contingent space within the narrative as a whole. The "character-space," as Woloch defines it, marks the dramatic interaction between an implied person and his or her delimited position within a narrative structure. The organization of, and clashes between, many character-spaces within a single narrative totality is essential to the novel's very achievement and concerns, striking at issues central to narrative poetics, the aesthetics of realism, and the dynamics of literary representation. Woloch's discussion of character-space allows for a different history of the novel and a new definition of characterization itself. By making the implied person indispensable to our understanding of literary form, this book offers a forward-looking avenue for contemporary narrative theory.
The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Paris
Author: Anna-Louise Milne
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2013-08-01
Total Pages: 289
ISBN-13: 1107433886
DOWNLOAD EBOOKNo city more than Paris has had such a constant and deep association with the development of literary forms and cultural ideas. The idea of the city as a space of literary self-consciousness started to take hold in the sixteenth century. By 1620, where this volume begins, the first in a long line of extraordinary works of the human imagination, in which the city represented itself to itself, had begun to find form in print. This collection follows that process through to the present day. Beginning with the 'salon', followed by the hybrid culture of libertinage and the revolutionary hotbeds of working-class districts, it explores the continuities and changes between the pre-modern era and the nineteenth century, when Paris asserted itself as cultural capital of Europe. It goes on to explore how this vision of Paris as a key capital of modernity has shaped contemporary literature.
The Realist Author and Sympathetic Imagination
Author: Sotirios Paraschas
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-12-02
Total Pages: 432
ISBN-13: 1351191853
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"The nineteenth century realist author was a contradictory figure. He was the focus of literary criticism, but obscured his creative role by insisting on presenting his works as 'copies' of reality. He was a celebrity who found himself subservient to publishers and the public, in a newly-industrialised literary marketplace. He was the owner of his work who was divested of his property by imperfect copyright laws, playwrights who adapted his novels for the stage, and sequel-writers. This combination of a conspicuous yet precarious status with a self-effacing attitude was expressed by an image of the author as a plural, Protean subject, possessing the faculty of sympathetic imagination - which the realists incorporated in their works in the form of a series of fictional characters who functioned as 'doubles' of the author. Paraschas focuses on two realists, Honorede Balzac and George Eliot, and traces this authorial scenario from its origins in the late eighteenth century to its demise in the early twentieth century, examining its presence in the works of E.T.A. Hoffmann, Friedrich Schlegel, Charles Baudelaire and Andre Gide."
Balzac's Shorter Fictions
Author: Tim Farrant
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2002-02-14
Total Pages: 368
ISBN-13: 0191541427
DOWNLOAD EBOOKBalzac's reputation is as a novelist. But short stories make up over half La Comédie humaine, besides scores of other tales and articles. Short forms appear early in Balzac's output, and shape his work throughout his career. Balzac's Shorter Fictions looks at the whole of this corpus, at the nature of short fiction, and at how Balzac's novels developed from his stories - at the links between literary genesis and genre. It explores the roles of short fiction in Balzac's creation, its part in producing effects of virtuality and perspective, and reflects ultimately on the relationship between brevity and length in La Comédie humaine. This, the first complete English-language study of Balzac's work for over forty years, synthesizes recent research on Balzac's practice within the context of modern thought on the author. It is an indispensable book for students and scholars of Balzac, and for all those interested in prose fiction.
Old Goriot
Author: Honore de Balzac
Publisher: Everyman's Library
Published: 1991-11-26
Total Pages: 378
ISBN-13: 0679405356
DOWNLOAD EBOOKHonoré de Balzac’s great theme was money, and in his best-loved novel, Old Goriot, he explored its uses and abuses with the particularity of a poet. A shabby Parisian boarding house in 1819 is the setting where his colorful characters collide. These include an elderly retired merchant called Old Goriot, who has bankrupted himself for the sake of his two rapacious, social-climbing daughters, Delphine and Anastasie; a mysterious and sinister conspirator named Vautrin; Victorine, a disinherited heiress; and a naive and impoverished law student from the country, Eugène de Rastignac. Rastignac is appalled at first by the greed and corruption he finds in Paris, but he soon sets his sights on conquering high society. He joins forces with the array of schemers who surround him, while the suffering, self-sacrificing Goriot yearns in vain for his daughters’ love. The sprawling, vibrant, and turbulent Paris of the post-Napoleonic era is itself a major character in the novel, an emblem of the social upheaval that Balzac portrays so brilliantly. Old Goriot was the first of Balzac’s novels to employ his famous technique of recurring characters, and it has come to be seen as the keystone in his grand project, The Human Comedy. Translated by Ellen Marriage (Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)
