Colonel Chabert by Honoré de Balzac (Book Analysis)
Colonel Chabert by Honoré de Balzac (Book Analysis)

Author: Bright Summaries

Publisher: BrightSummaries.com

Published: 2017-05-24

Total Pages: 25

ISBN-13: 2806295505

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Unlock the more straightforward side of Colonel Chabert with this concise and insightful summary and analysis! This engaging summary presents an analysis of Colonel Chabert by Honoré de Balzac, which follows the titular character’s struggle to adapt to life in France after he was for years presumed dead. Chabert, a former war hero and a man of integrity, finds that there is no place for him in France’s new society, which is ruled by greed, selfishness and injustice, and is callously manipulated by his conniving ex-wife. The novel is one of the Scenes of Private Life in Balzac’s The Human Comedy, a hugely ambitious series of around 90 novels and novellas which aimed to depict the entirety of 19th-century French society. Balzac was one of France’s most prolific and influential writers, and his work played a major part in laying the groundwork for the modern realist novel. Find out everything you need to know about Colonel Chabert in a fraction of the time! This in-depth and informative reading guide brings you: • A complete plot summary • Character studies • Key themes and symbols • Questions for further reflection Why choose BrightSummaries.com? Available in print and digital format, our publications are designed to accompany you on your reading journey. The clear and concise style makes for easy understanding, providing the perfect opportunity to improve your literary knowledge in no time. See the very best of literature in a whole new light with BrightSummaries.com!

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.

The Infatuations
The Infatuations

Author: Javier Marías

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2013-08-13

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0307960730

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INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE FINALIST • From the award-winning, internationally bestselling Spanish author of A Heart So White comes an immersive, provocative novel propelled by a seemingly random murder. "Sometimes startling, sometimes hilarious, and always intelligent ... Marías [has] a penetrating empathy."—The New York Times Book Review Each day before work María Dolz stops at the same café. There she finds herself drawn to a couple who is also there every morning. Observing their seemingly perfect life helps her escape the listlessness of her own. But when the man is brutally murdered and María approaches the widow to offer her condolences, what began as mere observation turns into an increasingly complicated entanglement. Invited into the widow's home, she meets—and falls in love with—a man who sheds disturbing new light on the crime. As María recounts this story, we are given a murder mystery brilliantly encased in a metaphysical enquiry, a novel that grapples with questions of love and death, chance and coincidence, and above all, with the slippery essence of the truth and how it is told.

Balzac, Grandville, and the Rise of Book Illustration
Balzac, Grandville, and the Rise of Book Illustration

Author: Keri Yousif

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-15

Total Pages: 213

ISBN-13: 1317176359

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Examining how the rise of book illustration affected the historic hegemony of the word, Keri Yousif explores the complex literary and artistic relationship between the novelist Honoré de Balzac and the illustrator J. J. Grandville during the French July Monarchy (1830-1848). Both collaborators and rivals, these towering figures struggled for dominance in the Parisian book trade at the height of the Romantic revolution and its immediate aftermath. Both men were social portraitists who collaborated on the influential encyclopedic portrayal of nineteenth-century society, Les Français peints par eux-mêmes. However, their collaboration soon turned competitive with Grandville's publication of Scènes de la vie privée et publique des animaux, a visual parody of Balzac's Scènes de la vie privée. Yousif investigates Balzac's and Grandville's individual and joint artistic productions in terms of the larger economic and aesthetic struggles within the nineteenth-century arena of cultural production, showing how writers were forced to position themselves both in terms of the established literary hierarchy and in relation to the rapidly advancing image. As Yousif shows, the industrialization of the illustrated book spawned a triadic relationship between publisher, writer, and illustrator that transformed the book from a product of individual genius to a cooperative and commercial affair. Her study represents a significant contribution to our understanding of literature, art, and their interactions in a new marketplace for publication during the fraught transition from Romanticism to Realism.

The Girl with the Golden Eyes and Other Stories
The Girl with the Golden Eyes and Other Stories

Author: Honoré de Balzac

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2012-11-08

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 0191633380

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'What holds sway over this country without morals, beliefs, or feelings? Gold and pleasure.' Sexual attraction, artistic insight, and the often ironic relationship between them is the dominant theme in the three short works collected in this volume. In Sarrasine an impetuous young sculptor falls in love with a diva of the Roman stage, but rapture turns to rage when he discovers the reality behind the seductiveness of the singer's voice. The ageing artist in The Unknown Masterpiece, obsessed with his creation of the perfect image of an ideal woman, tries to hide it from the jealous young student who is desperate for a glimpse of it. And in The Girl with the Golden Eyes, the hero is a dandy whose attractiveness for the mysterious Paquita has an unexpected origin. These enigmatic and disturbing forays into the margins of madness, sexuality, and creativity show Balzac spinning fantastic tales as profound as any of his longer fictions. His mastery of the seductions of storytelling places these novellas among the nineteenth-century's richest explorations of art and desire. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

The Cambridge Companion to Balzac
The Cambridge Companion to Balzac

Author: Owen Heathcote

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2017-01-16

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 1316867382

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One of the founders of literary realism and the serial novel, Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) was a prolific writer who produced more than a hundred novels, plays and short stories during his career. With its dramatic plots and memorable characters, Balzac's fiction has enthralled generations of readers. 'La Comédie humaine', the vast collection of works in which he strove to document every aspect of nineteenth-century French society, has influenced writers from Flaubert, Zola and Proust to Dostoevsky and Oscar Wilde. This Companion provides a critical reappraisal of Balzac, combining studies of his major novels with guidance on the key narrative and thematic features of his writing. Twelve chapters by world-leading specialists encompass a wide spectrum of topics such as the representation of history, philosophy and religion, the plight of the struggling artist, gender and sexuality, and Balzac's depiction of the creative process itself.

The Physiology of Marriage and Pierre Grassou
The Physiology of Marriage and Pierre Grassou

Author: Honore De Balzac

Publisher: Cosimo, Inc.

Published: 2005-12-01

Total Pages: 341

ISBN-13: 1596057092

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Who is the husband who can now sleep quietly beside his young and pretty consort, after learning that at least three bachelors are on the lookout to rob him; that, if they have not already encroached upon his property, they regard his bride as their legitimate prey, who, sooner or later, will fall victim to them, whether by force, by ruse, or by her own free will, and that it is impossible that, some day, they will not be victorious!-from "Meditation IV: On the Virtuous Woman""I am not deep," Honor de Balzac is reported have quipped, "but very wide." His satiric width is on full display in The Physiology of Marriage, a sociological essay on matrimony masquerading as a novel... or is it a novel masquerading as a sociological essay on matrimony? Bold and cynical-or so his contemporaries perceived-this 1829 work is startling modern in its spirit and approach, a dryly witty expose of the underlying tensions of the enduring battle of the sexes.Also in this volume: Balzac's short tale "Pierre Grassou," an 1840 story about a terrible painter who uses marriage to the daughter of a wealthy art collector as a stepping stone to success.French writer HONOR DE BALZAC (1799-1850) is generally credited with the invention of realism in fiction, and his novels are considered among the greatest ever written in any language. His grand La Com die Humaine consists of a vast array of novels and short stories depicting French society of his time, among them Louis Lambert (1832), Les Illusions perdues (1837), and La Cousine Bette (1847).

Absentees
Absentees

Author: Daniel Heller-Roazen

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2021-03-09

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 1942130481

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An intellectually adventurous account of the role of nonpersons that explores their depiction in literature and challenges how they are defined in philosophy, law, and anthropology In thirteen interlocking chapters, Absentees explores the role of the missing in human communities, asking an urgent question: How does a person become a nonperson, whether by disappearance, disenfranchisement, or civil, social, or biological death? Only somebody can become a “nobody,” but, as Daniel Heller-Roazen shows, the ways of being a nonperson are as diverse and complex as they are mysterious and unpredictable. Heller-Roazen treats the variously missing persons of the subtitle in three parts: Vanishings, Lessenings, and Survivals. In each section and with multiple transhistorical and transcultural examples, he challenges the categories that define nonpersons in philosophy, ethics, law, and anthropology. Exclusion, infamy, and stigma; mortuary beliefs and customs; children’s games and state censuses; ghosts and “dead souls” illustrate the lives of those lacking or denied full personhood. In the archives of fiction, Heller-Roazen uncovers figurations of the missing—from Helen of Argos in Troy or Egypt to Hawthorne’s Wakefield, Swift’s Captain Gulliver, Kafka’s undead hunter Gracchus, and Chamisso’s long-lived shadowless Peter Schlemihl. Readers of The Enemy of All and No One’s Ways will find a continuation of those books’ intense intellectual adventures, with unexpected questions and arguments arising every step of the way. In a unique voice, Heller-Roazen’s thought and writing capture the intricacies of the all-too-human absent and absented.