Ourika
Ourika

Author: Claire de Duras

Publisher: Modern Language Association

Published: 2014-01-01

Total Pages: 86

ISBN-13: 1603292292

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John Fowles presents a remarkable translation of a nineteenth-century work that provided the seed for his acclaimed novel The French Lieutenant's Woman and that will astonish and haunt modern readers. Based on a true story, Claire de Duras's Ourika relates the experiences of a Senegalese girl who is rescued from slavery and raised by an aristocratic French family during the time of the French Revolution. Brought up in a household of learning and privilege, she is unaware of her difference until she overhears a conversation that suddenly makes her conscious of her race--and of the prejudice it arouses. From this point on, Ourika lives her life not as a French woman but as a black woman who feels "cut off from the entire human race." As the Reign of Terror threatens her and her adoptive family, Ourika struggles with her unusual position as an educated African woman in eighteenth-century Europe. A best-seller in the 1820s, Ourika captured the attention of Duras's peers, including Stendhal, and became the subject of four contemporary plays. The work represents a number of firsts: the first novel set in Europe to have a black heroine; the first French literary work narrated by a black female protagonist; and, as Fowles points out in the foreword to his translation, "the first serious attempt by a white novelist to enter a black mind."

The Cambridge Companion to the French Novel
The Cambridge Companion to the French Novel

Author: Timothy Unwin

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1997-10-28

Total Pages: 432

ISBN-13: 1139825356

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This volume offers a unique and valuable insight into the novel in French over the past two centuries. In a series of essays, acknowledged experts discuss a variety of topics including nineteenth-century realism, women and fiction, popular fiction, experiment and innovation, war and the Holocaust, the Francophone novel, and postmodern fiction. They offer a challenging reassessment of major figures, while deliberately reading traditional views of literary history against the grain. Theoretical discussion is combined with close reading of texts and exploration of context, comparison with other genres and other literatures, and reference to novels from earlier periods. This companionable introduction includes a chronology and guide to further reading. From it emerges a strong sense of the vitality and energy of the modern French novel, and of the debates surrounding it.

Peripheries of Nineteenth-century French Studies
Peripheries of Nineteenth-century French Studies

Author: Timothy Bell Raser

Publisher: University of Delaware Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 9780874137651

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The French nineteenth century came to its full fruition only recently, herald and instigator as it was of some of the most important developments of the twentieth century. This volume offers a wide-ranging selection of scholarly approaches to the works of the French nineteenth century, articles that show how pertinent the texts of that moment are to an understanding of our own modernity.

3 books to know Social Novel
3 books to know Social Novel

Author: Benjamin Disraeli

Publisher: Tacet Books

Published: 2020-05-04

Total Pages: 2801

ISBN-13: 3968589009

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Welcome to the3 Books To Knowseries, our idea is to help readers learn about fascinating topics through three essential and relevant books. These carefully selected works can be fiction, non-fiction, historical documents or even biographies. We will always select for you three great works to instigate your mind, this time the topic is:Social Novel: Sybil - Benjamin Disraeli Les Misérables - Victor Hugo Germinal - Émile Zola Social novel is a work of fiction in which a social problem is dramatized through its effect on the characters. Usually a social novel limits itself to exposure of a problem. A personal solution may be arrived at by the novel's characters, but the author does not insist that it can be applied universally or that it is the only one. Benjamin Disraeli's Sybil is one of the first social-problem novels. Sibyl deals with the social and economic disparity between the rich and the poor as a result of the Industrial Revolution. Les Misérables is the magnum opus of the French writer Victor Hugo. It narrates the French political and social situation in the Democratic Uprising. The book draws a critical parallel to the material development of society and the consequent exclusion of poor people. Germinal is Zola's masterpiece and one of the most significant novels in the French tradition. The story takes place in France during a strike caused by the reduction of wages. To compose Germinal, the author spent two months working as a miner in the extraction of coal. Zola describes the principle of the political and trade union organization of the working class, such as the existing divisions between Marxists and anarchists. This is one of many books in the series 3 Books To Know. If you liked this book, look for the other titles in the series, we are sure you will like some of the topics.