Treatise on Elegant Living
Treatise on Elegant Living

Author: Honoré de Balzac

Publisher: Wakefield Handbooks

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 84

ISBN-13: 9780984115501

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Honoré de Balzac's 1830 Treatise on Elegant Living was a keystone text on dandyism, preceding Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly's Anatomy of Dandyism (1845) and Charles Baudelaire's "The Dandy" (in The Painter of Modern Life, 1863), and marking an important shift from the early dandyism of the British Regency to the intellectual and artistic dandyism of nineteenth-century France. The Treatise is the first true philosophical expression of dandyism, and is full of well-crafted aphorisms: "Elegant living is, in the broad acceptance of the term, the art of animating repose," runs one classic definition of dandyism, and "One must have studied at least as far as rhetoric to lead an elegant life" asserts the importance of verbal pirouette and dexterous quipping to the dandy. Further embellished with anecdotes and historical and personal illustrations, Balzac's Treatise even features a fictitious encounter with the original dandy himself, Beau Brummell. Never before translated into English, this witty tract makes for an illuminating cornerstone to Balzac's Human Comedy (which was originally to have included a never-completed four-part philosophical "Pathology of Social Life"). Above all, it represents a decisive moment in the history of dandyism, and an entertaining exposition on the profundities of what lies deepest within all of us: our appearance.

Treatise on Modern Stimulants
Treatise on Modern Stimulants

Author: Honoré de Balzac

Publisher:

Published: 2018-09-25

Total Pages: 80

ISBN-13: 9781939663382

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Honoré de Balzac's Treatise on Modern Stimulants is a meditation on five stimulants--tea, sugar, coffee, alcohol and tobacco--by an author very conscious of the fact that his gargantuan output of work was driven by an excessive intake (his bouts of writing typically required 10 to 15 cups of coffee a day) that would ultimately shorten his life. First published in French in 1839 as an appendix to Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin's Physiology of Taste, this Treatise was at once Balzac's effort at addressing what he perceived to be an oversight in that cornerstone of gastronomic literature; a chapter toward his never-completed body of analytic studies (alongside such essays as Treatise on Elegant Living) that were to form an overarching "pathology of social life"; and a meditation on the impact of pleasure and excess on the body and the role they play in shaping society. Balzac here describes his "terrible and cruel method" for brewing a coffee that can help the artist and author find inspiration; explains why tobacco can be credited with having brought peace to Germany; and describes his first experience of alcoholic intoxication (which required seventeen bottles of wine and two cigars). Beyond its braggadocio and whimsy, though, this treatise ultimately speaks to Balzac's obsession with death and decline, and attempts to confront in capsule form the broader implications of dissipating one's vital forces. This edition includes illustrations to an earlier French edition by Pierre Alechinsky.

Balzac's Omelette
Balzac's Omelette

Author: Anka Muhlstein

Publisher: Other Press, LLC

Published: 2012-02-14

Total Pages: 197

ISBN-13: 1590514742

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“Tell me where you eat, what you eat, and at what time you eat, and I will tell you who you are. ”This is the motto of Anka Muhlstein’s erudite and witty book about the ways food and the art of the table feature in Honoré de Balzac’s The Human Comedy. Balzac uses them as a connecting thread in his novels, showing how food can evoke character, atmosphere, class, and social climbing more suggestively than money, appearances, and other more conventional trappings. Full of surprises and insights, Balzac’s Omelet invites you to taste anew Balzac’s genius as a writer and his deep understanding of the human condition, its ambitions, its flaws, and its cravings.

A Book Forged in Hell
A Book Forged in Hell

Author: Steven Nadler

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2011-10-09

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 069113989X

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When it appeared in 1670, Baruch Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise was denounced as the most dangerous book ever published. Religious and secular authorities saw it as a threat to faith, social and political harmony, and everyday morality, and its author was almost universally regarded as a religious subversive and political radical who sought to spread atheism throughout Europe. Steven Nadler tells the story of this book: its radical claims and their background in the philosophical, religious, and political tensions of the Dutch Golden Age, as well as the vitriolic reaction these ideas inspired. A vivid story of incendiary ideas and vicious backlash, A Book Forged in Hell will interest anyone who is curious about the origin of some of our most cherished modern beliefs--Jacket p. [2].

Misreading Anita Brookner
Misreading Anita Brookner

Author: Peta Mayer

Publisher: Liverpool English Texts and St

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1789620597

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Anita Brookner was known for writing boring books about lonely, single women. Misreading Anita Brookner unlocks the mysteries of the Brookner heroine by creating entirely new ways to read six Brookner novels. Drawing on diverse intertextual sources, Peta Mayer illustrates how Brookner's solitary twentieth-century women can also be seen as variations of queer nineteenth-century male artist archetypes.

Brolliology
Brolliology

Author: Marion Rankine

Publisher: Melville House

Published: 2017-11-07

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 1612196705

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A fun, illustrated history of the umbrella's surprising place in life and literature Humans have been making, using, perfecting, and decorating umbrellas for millennia--holding them over the heads of rulers, signalling class distinctions, and exploring their full imaginative potential in folk tales and novels. In the spirit of the best literary gift books, Brolliology is a beautifully designed and illustrated tour through literature and history. It surprises us with the crucial role that the oft-overlooked umbrella has played over centuries--and not just in keeping us dry. Marion Rankine elevates umbrellas to their rightful place as an object worthy of philosophical inquiry. As Rankine points out, many others have tried. Derrida sought to find the meaning (or lack thereof) behind an umbrella mentioned in Nietzsche's notes, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote essays on the handy object, and Dickens used umbrellas as a narrative device for just about everything. She tackles the gender, class, and social connotations of carrying an umbrella and helps us realize our deep connection to this most forgettable everyday object--which we only think of when we don't have one.

Design on the Land
Design on the Land

Author: Norman T. Newton

Publisher: La Editorial, UPR

Published: 1971

Total Pages: 756

ISBN-13: 9780674198708

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Resource added for the Landscape Horticulture Technician program 100014.

Self-Made
Self-Made

Author: Tara Isabella Burton

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Published: 2023-06-27

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1541789008

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An exploration into the curation of the self in Western civilization from Da Vinci to Kim Kardashian. In a technologically-saturated era where nearly everything can be effortlessly and digitally reproduced, we're all hungry to carve out our own unique personalities, our own bespoke personae, to stand out and be seen. As the forces of social media and capitalism collide, and individualism becomes more important than ever across a wide array of industries, "branding ourselves" or actively defining our selves for others has become the norm. Yet, this phenomenon is not new. In Self-Made, Tara Isabella Burton shows us how we arrived at this moment of fervent personal-branding. As attitudes towards religion, politics and society evolved, our sense of self did as well, moving from a collective to individual mindset. Through a series of chronological biographical essays on famous (and infamous) "self-creators" in the modern Western world, from the Renassiance to the Enlightenment to modern capitalism and finally to our present moment of mass media, Burton examines the theories and forces behind our never-ending need to curate ourselves. Through a vivid cast of characters and an engaging mix of cultural and historical commentary, we learn how the personal brand has come to be.

The Complete Lives of Camp People
The Complete Lives of Camp People

Author: Rudolf Mrázek

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2020-01-17

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 1478007362

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In The Complete Lives of Camp People Rudolf Mrázek presents a sweeping study of the material and cultural lives of twentieth-century concentration camp internees and the multiple ways in which their experiences speak to the fundamental logics of modernity. Mrázek focuses on the minutiae of daily life in two camps: Theresienstadt, a Nazi “ghetto” for Jews near Prague, and the Dutch “isolation camp” Boven Digoel—which was located in a remote part of New Guinea between 1927 and 1943 and held Indonesian rebels who attempted to overthrow the colonial government. Drawing on a mix of interviews with survivors and their descendants, archival accounts, ephemera, and media representations, Mrázek shows how modern life's most mundane tasks—buying clothes, getting haircuts, playing sports—continued on in the camps, which were themselves designed, built, and managed in accordance with modernity's tenets. In this way, Mrázek demonstrates that concentration camps are not exceptional spaces; they are the locus of modernity in its most distilled form.

The Suit
The Suit

Author: Christopher Breward

Publisher: Reaktion Books

Published: 2016-04-15

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1780235585

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A beautifully tailored history of this fashion staple—at once a garment of tradition, power, and subversion. The Suit unpicks the story of this most familiar garment, from its emergence in western Europe at the end of the seventeenth century to today. Suit-wearing figures such as the Savile Row gentleman and the Wall Street businessman have long embodied ideas of tradition, masculinity, power, and respectability, but the suit has also been used to disrupt concepts of gender and conformity. Adopted and subverted by women, artists, musicians, and social revolutionaries through the decades—from dandies and Sapeurs to the Zoot Suit and Le Smoking—the suit is also a device for challenging the status quo. For all those interested in the history of menswear, this beautifully illustrated book offers new perspectives on this most mundane, and poetic, product of modern culture.