This 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.
Melding the fields of literature, sociology, and history, this book develops analyses of the ten novels in Balzac's Scènes de la vie de province. Following the order of the novels projected in La Comédie humaine, Allan H. Pasco investigates how Balzac used art as a tool of social inquiry to obtain startlingly accurate insights into the relationships that defined his turbulent society. His repeated claim to be an "historian of manners" was more than an empty boast. Though Balzac was first and foremost a great novelist, he was also a trailblazing sociologist, joining Henri de Saint-Simon and the subsequent Auguste Comte in considering the relationships that represent society as an interacting, interlocking web. Using a methodology that combines close analysis with a broad cultural context, Pasco demonstrates that Balzac's sociological vision was extraordinarily pertinent to both his and our days.
A new annotated translation of the keystone of Balzac’s Comédie Humaine—a sweeping narrative of corrupted idealism in a cynical urban milieu Lost Illusions is an essential text within Balzac’s Comédie Humaine, his sprawling, interconnected fictional portrait of French society in the 1820s and 1830s comprising nearly one hundred novels and short stories. This novel, published in three parts between 1837 and 1843, tells the story of Lucien de Rubempré, a talented young poet who leaves behind a scandalous provincial life for the shallow, corrupt, and cynical vortex of modernity that was nineteenth-century Paris—where his artistic idealism slowly dissipates until he eventually decides to return home. Balzac poured many of his thematic preoccupations and narrative elaborations into Lost Illusions, from the contrast between life in the provinces and the all-consuming world of Paris to the idealism of poets, the commodification of art, the crushing burden of poverty and debt, and the triumphant cynicism of hack journalists and social climbers. The novel teems with characters, incidents, and settings, though perhaps none so vivid as its panoramic and despairing view of Paris as the nexus of modernity’s cultural, social, and moral infection. For Balzac, no institution better illustrates the new reality than Parisian journalism: “amoral, hypocritical, brazen, dishonest, and murderous,” he writes. In this new translation, Raymond N. MacKenzie brilliantly captures the tone of Balzac’s incomparable prose—a style that is alternatingly impassioned, overheated, angry, moving, tender, wistful, digressive, chatty, intrusive, and hectoring. His informative annotations guide the modern reader through the labyrinth of Balzac’s allusions.
Critics, theologians, philosophers, and psychoanalysts have written several thousand books, theses, and articles about Camus' fiction. His first published novel, L'Etranger, had a unique impact on a whole generation of readers, and is other fiction, although not as well known, has also been influential. However, Camus' fiction so far has not been judged by contemporary critical methods, and 'inter-textuality,' or the study of the interrelationship between Camus' own texts, has not been examined. The Narcissistic Text: A Reading of Camus' Fiction is the first book devoted to the whole of Camus' fiction to adopt this approach. Brian Fitch uses the critical tools elaborated in the writings of such French formalists as Barthes, Ricardou, and Todorov and draws upon the hermeneutic theory of literature developed by Gadamer and Ricoeur. As a result, the self-generating word-play or linguistic narcissism of 'Jonas' and the textual narcissism of La Peste are seen to give way, in L'Etranger, to a situation where the hermeneutic circle is itself contained within the circularity of autoreprésentation. As for the narcissism of La Chute, it concerns the reader himself, since what the text provides is a model of the hermeneutic process. Fitch thus demonstrates that Camus' fiction occupies a significant place in modern literature. This volume will be of particular interest to those involved in Camus studies or concerned with contemporary critical methodology and literary theory.
As the subtitle indicates, Bingeing It is an account of the author's leisure reading between 2016 and 2022, when it was no longer possible to pursue his academic research. The "binges" in question were often a matter of chance--a trip to Italy, a Christmas present, a hospital visit--but they aim to show how and why the books became life-long friends.
This canon of French literature, Honore de Balzac (1799-1850) is also a major European figure in the development of realism. His work is dominated by an inter-related sequence of novels and short stories, La Comedie Humanine, which charts the idiosyncrasies of French society from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the 1840's. Among the most famous of these are Le Pierre Goriot and La Cousine Bette. Iin this study, Dr Tilby concentrates on the main approaches in practice and discusses some of the earliest responses to Balzac's work. His introduction and headnotes set Balzac's work in context. This book will be of interest to students of French language and literature and also to those studying French in combined studies or humanities courses.
"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."
The Encyclopedia of the Novel is the first reference book that focuses on the development of the novel throughout the world. Entries on individual writers assess the place of that writer within the development of the novel form, explaining why and in exactly what ways that writer is importnant. Similarly, an entry on an individual novel discusses the importance of that novel not only form, analyzing the particular innovations that novel has introduced and the ways in which it has influenced the subsequent course of the genre. A wide range of topic entries explore the history, criticism, theory, production, dissemination and reception of the novel. A very important component of the Encyclopedia of the Novel is its long surveys of development of the novel in various regions of the world.