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.

Balzac's Lives
Balzac's Lives

Author: Peter Brooks

Publisher: New York Review of Books

Published: 2020-10-06

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 1681374501

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Enter the mind of French literary giant Honoré de Balzac through a study of nine of his greatest characters and the novels they inhabit. Balzac's Lives illuminates the writer's life, era, and work in a completely original way. Balzac, more than anyone, invented the nineteenth-century novel, and Oscar Wilde went so far as to say that Balzac had invented the nineteenth century. But it was above all through the wonderful, unforgettable, extravagant characters that Balzac dreamed up and made flesh—entrepreneurs, bankers, inventors, industrialists, poets, artists, bohemians of both sexes, journalists, aristocrats, politicians, prostitutes—that he brought to life the dynamic forces of an era that ushered in our own. Peter Brooks’s Balzac’s Lives is a vivid and searching portrait of a great novelist as revealed through the fictional lives he imagined.

The Red Room
The Red Room

Author: H. G. Wells

Publisher: Read Books Ltd

Published: 2016-09-14

Total Pages: 17

ISBN-13: 1473345464

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"The Red Room" is a short story written by H. G. Wells. First published in the 1896 edition of "The Idler" magazine, it is a quintessentially Gothic tale about a man who spends a night in a supposedly haunted room in Lorraine Castle in an attempt to disprove the legends surrounding it. This thrilling tale constitutes a must-read for fans of Gothic literature and Wells' seminal work, and it would make for a fantastic addition to any collection. Herbert George Wells (1866 - 1946) was a prolific English writer who wrote in a variety of genres, including the novel, politics, history, and social commentary. "The Father of Science Fiction" was also a staunch socialist, and his later works are increasingly political and didactic. Today, he is perhaps best remembered for his contributions to the science fiction genre thanks to such novels as "The Time Machine" (1895), "The Invisible Man" (1897), and "The War of the Worlds" (1898). Many vintage books such as this are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive. We are republishing this book now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with a specially commissioned new biography of the author.