Esther Happy
Esther Happy

Author: Honoré de Balzac

Publisher: Good Press

Published: 2021-04-10

Total Pages: 143

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"Esther Happy" is one of the four parts of the serial novel, "The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans (also known as, "A Harlot High and Low,") a novel by French novelist Honoré de Balzac. Lucien de Rubempré and Carlos Herrera (Vautrin) have made a pact, in which Lucien will arrive at success in Paris if he agrees to follow Vautrin's instructions blindly. Esther van Gobseck throws a wrench into Vautrin's best-laid plans, however, because Lucien falls in love with her and she with him. One night, however, the incredibly rich banker Baron de Nucingen spots Esther and falls deeply in love with her. When Vautrin realizes that Nucingen's obsession is with Esther, he decides to use her power as a tool to help advance Lucien by extrapolating the maximum amount of money from the Baron as possible. Something that will result in a series of tragic results...

Prince of Europe
Prince of Europe

Author: Philip Mansel

Publisher: Orion Publishing Company

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 414

ISBN-13: 9780753818558

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Habsburg courtier Charles-Joseph Prince de Ligne seduced and symbolized eighteenth-century Europe. Speaking French, the international language of the day, he travelled between Paris and St Petersburg, charming everyone he met. He stayed with Madame du Barry, dined with Frederick the Great and travelled to the Crimea with Catherine the Great. But Ligne was more than a frivolous charmer. He participated in and recorded some of the most important events and movements of his day: the Enlightenment; the struggle for mastery in Germany; the decline of the Ottoman Empire; the birth of German nationalism; and the wars to liberate Europe from Napoleon. He had surprisingly radical views, believing for example in property rights for women, legal rights for Jews and the redistribution of wealth. He was also a highly respected writer and his books on gardens, his letters from the Crimea and his epigrams are considered minor classics of French literature.

Epic and Empire
Epic and Empire

Author: David Quint

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2021-01-12

Total Pages: 444

ISBN-13: 0691222959

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Alexander the Great, according to Plutarch, carried on his campaigns a copy of the Iliad, kept alongside a dagger; on a more pronounced ideological level, ancient Romans looked to the Aeneid as an argument for imperialism. In this major reinterpretation of epic poetry beginning with Virgil, David Quint explores the political context and meanings of key works in Western literature. He divides the history of the genre into two political traditions: the Virgilian epics of conquest and empire that take the victors' side (the Aeneid itself, Camoes's Lusíadas, Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata) and the countervailing epic of the defeated and of republican liberty (Lucan's Pharsalia, Ercilla's Araucana, and d'Aubigné's Les tragiques). These traditions produce opposing ideas of historical narrative: a linear, teleological narrative that belongs to the imperial conquerors, and an episodic and open-ended narrative identified with "romance," the story told of and by the defeated. Quint situates Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained within these rival traditions. He extends his political analysis to the scholarly revival of medieval epic in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and to Sergei Eisenstein's epic film, Alexander Nevsky. Attending both to the topical contexts of individual poems and to the larger historical development of the epic genre, Epic and Empire provides new models for exploring the relationship between ideology and literary form.

Conversations with Cézanne
Conversations with Cézanne

Author: Paul Cézanne

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 9780520225176

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book gathers the commentary of people who knew the painter Paul Cezanne, especially in his later years. Now seen as one of the most influential of modern painters, in his 40s he returned to his village of Aix-en-Provence where, he worked in near obscurity and with great dedication until his death in 1906.

The Poems in Verse
The Poems in Verse

Author: Stéphane Mallarmé

Publisher: Miami University Press Poetry

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781881163503

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Poetry. Translated from the French by Peter Manson. THE POEMS IN VERSE is Peter Manson's translation of The Poésies of Stéphane Mallarmé. Long overshadowed by Mallarmé's theoretical writings and by his legendary visual poem "Un coup de Dés jamais n'abolira le Hasard," the Poésies are lyrics of a uniquely prescient and generative modernity. Grounded in a scrupulous sounding of the complex ambiguities of the original poems, Manson's English translations draw on the resources of the most innovative poetries of our own time these may be the first translations really to trust the English language to bear the full weight of Mallarméan complexity. With THE POEMS IN VERSE, Mallarmé's voice is at last brought back, with all its incisive strangeness, into the conversation it started a hundred and fifty years ago, called contemporary poetry."

Opera In The Flesh
Opera In The Flesh

Author: Sam Abel

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-06-26

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13: 1000308154

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Verdi, Wagner, polymorphous perversion, Puccini, Brunnhilde, Pinkerton, and Parsifal all rub shoulders in this delightful, poetic, insightful, sexual book sprung by one man's physical response to the power and exaggeration we call opera. Sam Abel applies a light touch as he considers the topic of opera and the eroticized body: Why do audiences respond to opera in a visceral way? How does opera, like no other art form, physically move watchers? How and why does opera arouse feelings akin to sexual desire? Abel seeks the answers to these questions by examining homoerotic desire, the phenomenon of the castrati, operatic cross-dressing, and opera as presented through the media. In this deeply personal book, Abel writes, ‘These pages map my current struggles to pin down my passion for opera, my intense admiration for its aesthetic forms and beauties, but much more they express my astonishment at how opera makes me lose myself, how it consumes me.’ In so doing, Abel uncovers what until now, through dry musicology and gossipy history, has been left behind a wall of silence: the physical and erotic nature of opera. Although Abel can speak with certainty only about his own response to opera, he provides readers with a language and a resonance with which to understand their own experiences. Ultimately, Opera in the Flesh celebrates the power of opera to move audiences as no other book has done. It is indeed a treasure of scholarship, passion, and poetry for everyone with even a passing interest in this fascinating art form.