Kent Puckett
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- January 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195332759
- eISBN:
- 9780199868131
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195332759.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
While everyone knows that the nineteenth-century novel is obsessed with gaffes, lapses, and blunders, who could have predicted that these would have so important a structural role to play in the ...
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While everyone knows that the nineteenth-century novel is obsessed with gaffes, lapses, and blunders, who could have predicted that these would have so important a structural role to play in the novel and its rise? Who knew that the novel in fact relies on its characters’ mistakes for its structural coherence, for its authority, for its form? Drawing simultaneously on the terms of narrative theory, sociology, and psychoanalysis, this book examines the necessary relation between social and literary form in the nineteenth-century novel as it is expressed at the site of the represented social mistake (eating peas with your knife, wearing the wrong thing, talking out of turn, etc.). Through close and careful readings of novels by Flaubert, Eliot, James, and others, this book shows that the novel achieves its coherence at the level of character, plot, and narration not in spite but because of the social mistake.Less
While everyone knows that the nineteenth-century novel is obsessed with gaffes, lapses, and blunders, who could have predicted that these would have so important a structural role to play in the novel and its rise? Who knew that the novel in fact relies on its characters’ mistakes for its structural coherence, for its authority, for its form? Drawing simultaneously on the terms of narrative theory, sociology, and psychoanalysis, this book examines the necessary relation between social and literary form in the nineteenth-century novel as it is expressed at the site of the represented social mistake (eating peas with your knife, wearing the wrong thing, talking out of turn, etc.). Through close and careful readings of novels by Flaubert, Eliot, James, and others, this book shows that the novel achieves its coherence at the level of character, plot, and narration not in spite but because of the social mistake.
Kent Puckett
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- January 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195332759
- eISBN:
- 9780199868131
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195332759.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter begins by looking at the social mistake in relation both to the novel and to the rather sudden appearance of the etiquette book in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. While ...
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This chapter begins by looking at the social mistake in relation both to the novel and to the rather sudden appearance of the etiquette book in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. While there had long been other works on manners—courtesy manuals, conduct books, etc.—the etiquette book differed from what came before because it made its case for of good form without offering the reader a stable ethical ideal. In the absence of shared social or cultural ends, the mistake emerges as an object that is at once reliable and disturbing. Then, in the context readings of eating peas with your knife in Thackeray and pointing at people in Balzac, the chapter develops a psychoanalytically inflected theory of the social mistake both in general and in relation to the particular form of the nineteenth-century novel.Less
This chapter begins by looking at the social mistake in relation both to the novel and to the rather sudden appearance of the etiquette book in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. While there had long been other works on manners—courtesy manuals, conduct books, etc.—the etiquette book differed from what came before because it made its case for of good form without offering the reader a stable ethical ideal. In the absence of shared social or cultural ends, the mistake emerges as an object that is at once reliable and disturbing. Then, in the context readings of eating peas with your knife in Thackeray and pointing at people in Balzac, the chapter develops a psychoanalytically inflected theory of the social mistake both in general and in relation to the particular form of the nineteenth-century novel.
Ann Jefferson
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691160658
- eISBN:
- 9781400852598
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691160658.003.0012
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter studies Balzac's Louis Lambert (1832), in which the character of Lambert is a (possibly) mentally ill genius who retreats into a world to which only his erstwhile fiancée has access. ...
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This chapter studies Balzac's Louis Lambert (1832), in which the character of Lambert is a (possibly) mentally ill genius who retreats into a world to which only his erstwhile fiancée has access. Through his writings Balzac attempts to examine and portray a certain topic on the matter of geniuses: the essential role played by women in their survival. Louis Lambert ends with the destruction of the main character, a male genius who nonetheless exemplifies all Balzac's own ideas about genius, and is also its most complete and elaborate theorist. Once again, fiction's interest in its failure may reveal more about genius than success. And that failure is also accompanied—still with considerable ambiguity—by the female presence that Balzac argued also deserved recognition as the essential helpmeet of genius.Less
This chapter studies Balzac's Louis Lambert (1832), in which the character of Lambert is a (possibly) mentally ill genius who retreats into a world to which only his erstwhile fiancée has access. Through his writings Balzac attempts to examine and portray a certain topic on the matter of geniuses: the essential role played by women in their survival. Louis Lambert ends with the destruction of the main character, a male genius who nonetheless exemplifies all Balzac's own ideas about genius, and is also its most complete and elaborate theorist. Once again, fiction's interest in its failure may reveal more about genius than success. And that failure is also accompanied—still with considerable ambiguity—by the female presence that Balzac argued also deserved recognition as the essential helpmeet of genius.
sylvia schafer
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804756839
- eISBN:
- 9780804768344
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804756839.003.0004
- Subject:
- Law, Environmental and Energy Law
This chapter takes up the historicity of “law and catastrophe” by exploring the problem that political events, represented and narrated as human-made catastrophes, have posed for the liberal legal ...
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This chapter takes up the historicity of “law and catastrophe” by exploring the problem that political events, represented and narrated as human-made catastrophes, have posed for the liberal legal imagination during the turbulent first half of the nineteenth century in France. It considers those political catastrophes that appeared to contemporary observers to result in an unbearable disintegration or dislocation of the legally meaningful civil individual: the catastrophes of revolutionary uprising and their long aftermaths. The analysis focuses on two strongly charged discussions of how liberal constructions of law might mitigate political catastrophe and its long-lasting effects. Both date from the period between 1789 and 1850. The first, Honoré de Balzac's Colonel Chabert, looks at the problem of civil existence after the revolutionary and Napoleonic breaks with France's monarchical past. The second, a set of juristic writings on the significance of state-provided legal aid around the revolution of 1848, addresses the catastrophic consequences of a poverty that excluded individuals from seeking rectifications through civil action and, once radicalized, threatened to drive them to the barricades.Less
This chapter takes up the historicity of “law and catastrophe” by exploring the problem that political events, represented and narrated as human-made catastrophes, have posed for the liberal legal imagination during the turbulent first half of the nineteenth century in France. It considers those political catastrophes that appeared to contemporary observers to result in an unbearable disintegration or dislocation of the legally meaningful civil individual: the catastrophes of revolutionary uprising and their long aftermaths. The analysis focuses on two strongly charged discussions of how liberal constructions of law might mitigate political catastrophe and its long-lasting effects. Both date from the period between 1789 and 1850. The first, Honoré de Balzac's Colonel Chabert, looks at the problem of civil existence after the revolutionary and Napoleonic breaks with France's monarchical past. The second, a set of juristic writings on the significance of state-provided legal aid around the revolution of 1848, addresses the catastrophic consequences of a poverty that excluded individuals from seeking rectifications through civil action and, once radicalized, threatened to drive them to the barricades.
Tony James
- Published in print:
- 1995
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198151883
- eISBN:
- 9780191672873
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198151883.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature, European Literature
The word ‘extase’ is linked with ‘phenomena of sleep’ for two other writers who use this phrase: Charles Nodier and Honore de Balzac. In 1831, Nodier published an article entitled ‘De quelques ...
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The word ‘extase’ is linked with ‘phenomena of sleep’ for two other writers who use this phrase: Charles Nodier and Honore de Balzac. In 1831, Nodier published an article entitled ‘De quelques phénomènes du sommeil’; the following year, in Balzac's novel Louis Lambert, the same phrase occurs in connection with an apparently precognitive dream. Though very different from each other, both writers attribute an importance to the link between dreams and madness and creativity. This chapter first explores Nodier's article and then examines briefly two of his fictional works, Smarra and La Fee aux miettes, which explore dreams and madness. Beginning with Louis Lambert, the chapter then shows how Balzac linked madness with what he saw as a relation of substitution, or incompatibility, between artistic creativity and sexuality. Finally, the chapter shows how the idea of sleep being connected with magnetism formed part of the plot in Ursule Mirouët.Less
The word ‘extase’ is linked with ‘phenomena of sleep’ for two other writers who use this phrase: Charles Nodier and Honore de Balzac. In 1831, Nodier published an article entitled ‘De quelques phénomènes du sommeil’; the following year, in Balzac's novel Louis Lambert, the same phrase occurs in connection with an apparently precognitive dream. Though very different from each other, both writers attribute an importance to the link between dreams and madness and creativity. This chapter first explores Nodier's article and then examines briefly two of his fictional works, Smarra and La Fee aux miettes, which explore dreams and madness. Beginning with Louis Lambert, the chapter then shows how Balzac linked madness with what he saw as a relation of substitution, or incompatibility, between artistic creativity and sexuality. Finally, the chapter shows how the idea of sleep being connected with magnetism formed part of the plot in Ursule Mirouët.
Jonathan Strauss
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780823233793
- eISBN:
- 9780823241262
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823233793.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
This chapter reveals ways in which artists and novelists aestheticized material death and the abject desires associated with it. They drew on the materiality of their works to examine the relations ...
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This chapter reveals ways in which artists and novelists aestheticized material death and the abject desires associated with it. They drew on the materiality of their works to examine the relations between life and death. The painter and lithographer Odilon Redon used his conversance with anatomy, biology, and evolution to develop a pictorial universe in which death could be viewed from the viewpoint of the dead. Balzac went further by looking at the relations between putrefaction and the fictional status of literary characters. Flaubert tapped a metaphorics of dead bodies to imagine the complex relations between historical and novelistic narratives. In each of these cases, the medicalized knowledge of death offered a means for expressing and thinking through the materiality of artworks while offering insights into the imaginary and libidinal aspects of medical thought. As such, they represent a significant commentary on contemporary scientific theories.Less
This chapter reveals ways in which artists and novelists aestheticized material death and the abject desires associated with it. They drew on the materiality of their works to examine the relations between life and death. The painter and lithographer Odilon Redon used his conversance with anatomy, biology, and evolution to develop a pictorial universe in which death could be viewed from the viewpoint of the dead. Balzac went further by looking at the relations between putrefaction and the fictional status of literary characters. Flaubert tapped a metaphorics of dead bodies to imagine the complex relations between historical and novelistic narratives. In each of these cases, the medicalized knowledge of death offered a means for expressing and thinking through the materiality of artworks while offering insights into the imaginary and libidinal aspects of medical thought. As such, they represent a significant commentary on contemporary scientific theories.
Elizabeth Amann
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780226187259
- eISBN:
- 9780226187396
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226187396.003.0007
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History
The first part of the epilogue identifies a series of traits shared by the five figures examined in the study. The second part explores how aspects of the revolutionary vision of dandyism reappear in ...
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The first part of the epilogue identifies a series of traits shared by the five figures examined in the study. The second part explores how aspects of the revolutionary vision of dandyism reappear in nineteenth-century attempts to theorize the figure: specifically, Honoré de Balzac’s Traité de la vie élégante, Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus and Charles Baudelaire’s “Le peintre de la vie moderne.”Less
The first part of the epilogue identifies a series of traits shared by the five figures examined in the study. The second part explores how aspects of the revolutionary vision of dandyism reappear in nineteenth-century attempts to theorize the figure: specifically, Honoré de Balzac’s Traité de la vie élégante, Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus and Charles Baudelaire’s “Le peintre de la vie moderne.”
Eric Hayot
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- May 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195377965
- eISBN:
- 9780199869435
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195377965.003.0001
- Subject:
- History, Cultural History, Asian History
Beginning with an overview of the Western sympathetic revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries, this chapter lays out a series of instances in which China makes its appearance inside moral ...
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Beginning with an overview of the Western sympathetic revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries, this chapter lays out a series of instances in which China makes its appearance inside moral philosophy, focusing mostly on works by Adam Smith and Honoré de Balzac. It introduces the book's two major theoretical keywords, the “ecliptic” and the “example-effect,” and considers them in relation to the history of moral philosophy and the “Asian values debate” on human rights.Less
Beginning with an overview of the Western sympathetic revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries, this chapter lays out a series of instances in which China makes its appearance inside moral philosophy, focusing mostly on works by Adam Smith and Honoré de Balzac. It introduces the book's two major theoretical keywords, the “ecliptic” and the “example-effect,” and considers them in relation to the history of moral philosophy and the “Asian values debate” on human rights.
John T. Hamilton
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780823251384
- eISBN:
- 9780823253029
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823251384.003.0008
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Political Philosophy
As his letters attest, Balzac was deeply concerned about incorporating musical composition, performance and reception into his broad novelistic project. The task, as he explicitly describes it, is ...
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As his letters attest, Balzac was deeply concerned about incorporating musical composition, performance and reception into his broad novelistic project. The task, as he explicitly describes it, is not “to talk about music” (parler de musique) but rather “to talk music” (parler musique), that is, to depict musical experience without employing it merely as a literary metaphor. In a reading of his novella Massimilla Doni, which features an extended analysis of Rossini's oratorio Mosè in Egitto, the present article discusses the various aspects of music's place in literature, which in turn offers some reflection on the tensions between music and verbal language, between the sound of the opera house and the silence of the page.Less
As his letters attest, Balzac was deeply concerned about incorporating musical composition, performance and reception into his broad novelistic project. The task, as he explicitly describes it, is not “to talk about music” (parler de musique) but rather “to talk music” (parler musique), that is, to depict musical experience without employing it merely as a literary metaphor. In a reading of his novella Massimilla Doni, which features an extended analysis of Rossini's oratorio Mosè in Egitto, the present article discusses the various aspects of music's place in literature, which in turn offers some reflection on the tensions between music and verbal language, between the sound of the opera house and the silence of the page.
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- March 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226886015
- eISBN:
- 9780226886039
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226886039.003.0002
- Subject:
- Philosophy, General
This chapter discusses conceptions of “midpoint of life” through the lives and works of Dante, Petrarch, Friedrich Hölderlin, Goethe, Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland, Vittorio Alfieri, Friedrich Shiller, ...
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This chapter discusses conceptions of “midpoint of life” through the lives and works of Dante, Petrarch, Friedrich Hölderlin, Goethe, Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland, Vittorio Alfieri, Friedrich Shiller, Honoré de Balzac, Oscar Wilde, Thomas Chatterton, John Keats, Gottfried Benn, Thomas Mann, and Ingeborg Bachmann.Less
This chapter discusses conceptions of “midpoint of life” through the lives and works of Dante, Petrarch, Friedrich Hölderlin, Goethe, Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland, Vittorio Alfieri, Friedrich Shiller, Honoré de Balzac, Oscar Wilde, Thomas Chatterton, John Keats, Gottfried Benn, Thomas Mann, and Ingeborg Bachmann.
Julia V. Douthwaite
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226160580
- eISBN:
- 9780226160634
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226160634.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature
The French Revolution brings to mind violent mobs, the guillotine, and Madame Defarge, but it was also a publishing revolution: more than 1,200 novels were published between 1789 and 1804, when ...
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The French Revolution brings to mind violent mobs, the guillotine, and Madame Defarge, but it was also a publishing revolution: more than 1,200 novels were published between 1789 and 1804, when Napoleon declared the Revolution at an end. This book explores how the works within this enormous corpus announced the new shapes of literature to come and reveals that vestiges of these stories can be found in novels by the likes of Mary Shelley, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, and L. Frank Baum. Deploying political history, archival research, and textual analysis, it focuses on five major events between 1789 and 1794—first in newspapers, then in fiction—and shows how the symbolic stories generated by Louis XVI, Robespierre, the market women who stormed Versailles, and others were transformed into new tales with ongoing appeal. The author uncovers a 1790 story of an automaton-builder named Frank énsteÏn, links Baum to the suffrage campaign going back to 1789, and discovers a royalist anthem’s power to undo Balzac’s Pére Goriot.Less
The French Revolution brings to mind violent mobs, the guillotine, and Madame Defarge, but it was also a publishing revolution: more than 1,200 novels were published between 1789 and 1804, when Napoleon declared the Revolution at an end. This book explores how the works within this enormous corpus announced the new shapes of literature to come and reveals that vestiges of these stories can be found in novels by the likes of Mary Shelley, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, and L. Frank Baum. Deploying political history, archival research, and textual analysis, it focuses on five major events between 1789 and 1794—first in newspapers, then in fiction—and shows how the symbolic stories generated by Louis XVI, Robespierre, the market women who stormed Versailles, and others were transformed into new tales with ongoing appeal. The author uncovers a 1790 story of an automaton-builder named Frank énsteÏn, links Baum to the suffrage campaign going back to 1789, and discovers a royalist anthem’s power to undo Balzac’s Pére Goriot.
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9781846314872
- eISBN:
- 9781846317156
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/UPO9781846317156.009
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
Aside from department stores, some groups of small shopkeepers offered an alternative to unattractive little shops in France. These shopkeepers assembled in arcades and provided a more congenial ...
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Aside from department stores, some groups of small shopkeepers offered an alternative to unattractive little shops in France. These shopkeepers assembled in arcades and provided a more congenial environment to attract customers, becoming an important forerunner of the department store as well as the modern shopping mall. Napoléon I's liberalisation of the laws governing commerce led to the appearance of new stores in the early years of the nineteenth century, offering other forms of shopping before the department stores became the target of resentment by small shops. These innovations bear witness to sales and marketing strategies that Honoré de Balzac highlights in his 1844 novella Gaudissart II. Balzac also gives centre stage to the sale of a piece of merchandise, which he considers a key drama in human interactions, and demonstrates the techniques in customer relations in action.Less
Aside from department stores, some groups of small shopkeepers offered an alternative to unattractive little shops in France. These shopkeepers assembled in arcades and provided a more congenial environment to attract customers, becoming an important forerunner of the department store as well as the modern shopping mall. Napoléon I's liberalisation of the laws governing commerce led to the appearance of new stores in the early years of the nineteenth century, offering other forms of shopping before the department stores became the target of resentment by small shops. These innovations bear witness to sales and marketing strategies that Honoré de Balzac highlights in his 1844 novella Gaudissart II. Balzac also gives centre stage to the sale of a piece of merchandise, which he considers a key drama in human interactions, and demonstrates the techniques in customer relations in action.
Thomas Dodman
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780226492803
- eISBN:
- 9780226493138
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226493138.003.0006
- Subject:
- History, History of Ideas
In the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars nostalgia progressively ceased to be a precise medical term and instead grew into a more capacious cultural category—a concept open to competing meanings. A ...
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In the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars nostalgia progressively ceased to be a precise medical term and instead grew into a more capacious cultural category—a concept open to competing meanings. A victim of its own success, the diagnosis was adopted across the medical profession—and found equally in irritated esophagi or pronounced cranial lumps—ultimately losing much of its coherence. By mid-century, the term had also crept into vernacular language, through the writings of Balzac and playwrights drawn to this mysterious condition. Unlike other meteoric nineteenth-century mental disorders, though, nostalgia did not simply disappear when doctors began to lose interest in it. Instead, it was successfully reframed as a romantic disease akin to tuberculosis—that is a malady coupled up with a pleasurable aesthetics of suffering—and as an instinctual attachment to home all the more valuable in a society still jittery from post-revolutionary aftershocks. In moderate doses, nostalgia thus became a wholesome feeling, a perfectly natural sign of patriotic devotion. Only in the army and navy did it continue to spell disaster, as young conscripts in regimental barracks across Europe came to find out, and as French medical officers sent overseas knew only too well.Less
In the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars nostalgia progressively ceased to be a precise medical term and instead grew into a more capacious cultural category—a concept open to competing meanings. A victim of its own success, the diagnosis was adopted across the medical profession—and found equally in irritated esophagi or pronounced cranial lumps—ultimately losing much of its coherence. By mid-century, the term had also crept into vernacular language, through the writings of Balzac and playwrights drawn to this mysterious condition. Unlike other meteoric nineteenth-century mental disorders, though, nostalgia did not simply disappear when doctors began to lose interest in it. Instead, it was successfully reframed as a romantic disease akin to tuberculosis—that is a malady coupled up with a pleasurable aesthetics of suffering—and as an instinctual attachment to home all the more valuable in a society still jittery from post-revolutionary aftershocks. In moderate doses, nostalgia thus became a wholesome feeling, a perfectly natural sign of patriotic devotion. Only in the army and navy did it continue to spell disaster, as young conscripts in regimental barracks across Europe came to find out, and as French medical officers sent overseas knew only too well.
Peppino Ortoleva
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- August 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780190900250
- eISBN:
- 9780190900298
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190900250.003.0009
- Subject:
- Political Science, Democratization
Fake news has been cyclically surfacing in the history of journalism and public opinion. In the vein of some classic authors, the chapter identifies ideas that are surprisingly useful in the present ...
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Fake news has been cyclically surfacing in the history of journalism and public opinion. In the vein of some classic authors, the chapter identifies ideas that are surprisingly useful in the present media environment. It interweaves three historical threads relevant to today’s fake news: (1) the growth of canards in 19th-century Paris, observed by both Honoré de Balzac and Gérard de Nerval as the habitual invention of news when facts were not sufficiently attractive for readers; (2) the diffusion of fausses nouvelles during the Great War, described by Marc Bloch and propelled by the tendency, in times of crisis, to search for oracles more than information proper; (3) the propensity, suggested by Richard Hofstadter, to spread conspiracy theories, notably in the development of McCarthyism.Less
Fake news has been cyclically surfacing in the history of journalism and public opinion. In the vein of some classic authors, the chapter identifies ideas that are surprisingly useful in the present media environment. It interweaves three historical threads relevant to today’s fake news: (1) the growth of canards in 19th-century Paris, observed by both Honoré de Balzac and Gérard de Nerval as the habitual invention of news when facts were not sufficiently attractive for readers; (2) the diffusion of fausses nouvelles during the Great War, described by Marc Bloch and propelled by the tendency, in times of crisis, to search for oracles more than information proper; (3) the propensity, suggested by Richard Hofstadter, to spread conspiracy theories, notably in the development of McCarthyism.
Richard Osborne
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195181296
- eISBN:
- 9780199851416
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195181296.003.0012
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western
The Théâtre Italien’s Édouard Robert spent the winter on a long-drawn-out scouting mission through Italy, beginning and ending in Bologna. He was looking for singers and operas, but he was also ...
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The Théâtre Italien’s Édouard Robert spent the winter on a long-drawn-out scouting mission through Italy, beginning and ending in Bologna. He was looking for singers and operas, but he was also acting as a courier between Gioachino Rossini in Bologna and Carlo Severini and Alejandro Maria Aguado in Paris, as plans were laid for the triumvirate to take over the administration of the theater. By the spring of 1832, Rossini had composed six of the 12 movements. Unable to face the task of completing the textually less-promising sections of the poem, he asked Giovanni Tadolini to complete them for him. Their Stabat mater was performed in Madrid on Good Friday 1833. It is not clear when Rossini and Olympe Pélissier first met. Whenever that was, the relationship itself appears to have taken root in 1832. A letter to Honoré de Balzac in January invited him to supper in the company of Rossini.Less
The Théâtre Italien’s Édouard Robert spent the winter on a long-drawn-out scouting mission through Italy, beginning and ending in Bologna. He was looking for singers and operas, but he was also acting as a courier between Gioachino Rossini in Bologna and Carlo Severini and Alejandro Maria Aguado in Paris, as plans were laid for the triumvirate to take over the administration of the theater. By the spring of 1832, Rossini had composed six of the 12 movements. Unable to face the task of completing the textually less-promising sections of the poem, he asked Giovanni Tadolini to complete them for him. Their Stabat mater was performed in Madrid on Good Friday 1833. It is not clear when Rossini and Olympe Pélissier first met. Whenever that was, the relationship itself appears to have taken root in 1832. A letter to Honoré de Balzac in January invited him to supper in the company of Rossini.
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9781846314872
- eISBN:
- 9781846317156
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/UPO9781846317156.006
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, France witnessed the decline of small shops due to their inability to compete with department stores. This tension between the two forms of commerce was ...
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In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, France witnessed the decline of small shops due to their inability to compete with department stores. This tension between the two forms of commerce was perhaps not inevitable. In his 1837 novel César Birotteau, Honoré de Balzac shows how two sectors of the retail trade, petit commerce and grands magasins, can coexist. Meanwhile, Emile Zola highlights the political and ideological conflicts between practitioners of old-style commerce and advocates the new in his 1883 novel Au bonheur des dames.Less
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, France witnessed the decline of small shops due to their inability to compete with department stores. This tension between the two forms of commerce was perhaps not inevitable. In his 1837 novel César Birotteau, Honoré de Balzac shows how two sectors of the retail trade, petit commerce and grands magasins, can coexist. Meanwhile, Emile Zola highlights the political and ideological conflicts between practitioners of old-style commerce and advocates the new in his 1883 novel Au bonheur des dames.
David Roberts
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801450235
- eISBN:
- 9780801460975
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801450235.003.0004
- Subject:
- Art, Art History
This chapter explores the recreation of the union of art, religion, and politics in Athenian tragedy in music drama, just as the modern synthesis of the arts, in which the orchestra takes the place ...
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This chapter explores the recreation of the union of art, religion, and politics in Athenian tragedy in music drama, just as the modern synthesis of the arts, in which the orchestra takes the place of the Greek chorus, is intended to give life and body to the vision of social synthesis. It analyzes the works of Saint-Simon, Mazzini, Balzac, Berlioz, and Wagner. It argues that the centrality of Wagner to the history and the idea of the total work of art is twofold: his theory of the Gesamtkunstwerk forms the central directing inspiration of his music dramas; his manifestos Art and Revolution (1849) and The Artwork of the Future (1849) fuse in the heat of revolutionary fervor the various anticipations since the French Revolution of the artwork to come into a powerful vision of the regeneration of man, society, and art. Beyond that, however, Wagner’s aesthetic conception of politics complements Rousseau’s political conception of art.Less
This chapter explores the recreation of the union of art, religion, and politics in Athenian tragedy in music drama, just as the modern synthesis of the arts, in which the orchestra takes the place of the Greek chorus, is intended to give life and body to the vision of social synthesis. It analyzes the works of Saint-Simon, Mazzini, Balzac, Berlioz, and Wagner. It argues that the centrality of Wagner to the history and the idea of the total work of art is twofold: his theory of the Gesamtkunstwerk forms the central directing inspiration of his music dramas; his manifestos Art and Revolution (1849) and The Artwork of the Future (1849) fuse in the heat of revolutionary fervor the various anticipations since the French Revolution of the artwork to come into a powerful vision of the regeneration of man, society, and art. Beyond that, however, Wagner’s aesthetic conception of politics complements Rousseau’s political conception of art.
Arthur F. Kinney
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- March 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781617032561
- eISBN:
- 9781617032578
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781617032561.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter focuses on the publication history of William Faulkner’s third novel Flags in the Dust (which would be retitled Sartoris) and its rejection by the publishing house Horace Liveright. It ...
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This chapter focuses on the publication history of William Faulkner’s third novel Flags in the Dust (which would be retitled Sartoris) and its rejection by the publishing house Horace Liveright. It suggests that readers for Liveright judged the novel’s structure haphazard and fragmented because they initially could not comprehend Faulkner’s emerging aesthetic. By contrast, Jean-Paul Sartre of France was able to grasp the nature of Faulkner’s textual experiments early on, probably because the latter’s poetic reminds him of that of Honoré de Balzac. Both Balzac and Faulkner developed a distinct sense of place and a richly detailed prose style to create “tapestry-like fiction.” The chapter argues that Faulkner had actually carefully designed what initially seemed haphazard prose. It also discusses many similarities between Flags in the Dust and another Faulkner novel, The Sound and the Fury, highlighting their close intertextual links and parallels between their “deliberate and revolutionary poetics.”Less
This chapter focuses on the publication history of William Faulkner’s third novel Flags in the Dust (which would be retitled Sartoris) and its rejection by the publishing house Horace Liveright. It suggests that readers for Liveright judged the novel’s structure haphazard and fragmented because they initially could not comprehend Faulkner’s emerging aesthetic. By contrast, Jean-Paul Sartre of France was able to grasp the nature of Faulkner’s textual experiments early on, probably because the latter’s poetic reminds him of that of Honoré de Balzac. Both Balzac and Faulkner developed a distinct sense of place and a richly detailed prose style to create “tapestry-like fiction.” The chapter argues that Faulkner had actually carefully designed what initially seemed haphazard prose. It also discusses many similarities between Flags in the Dust and another Faulkner novel, The Sound and the Fury, highlighting their close intertextual links and parallels between their “deliberate and revolutionary poetics.”
David Simpson
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780226600192
- eISBN:
- 9780226600369
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226600369.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
The term terror in the French Revolution has taken on mythic stature, but the actual incidence of the word reflects a complicated and ambiguous history. Analyzed here, the “reign of terror” is an ...
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The term terror in the French Revolution has taken on mythic stature, but the actual incidence of the word reflects a complicated and ambiguous history. Analyzed here, the “reign of terror” is an invention of those who displaced the Jacobins in 1794 and popularized (and demonized) both terror and terrorism (the second for the first time) in the European languages. Edmund Burke, throughout the 1790s, proved very sparing in his references to terror, understanding that to accord the power of terror to the French state would be to endorse its power and prestige at the expense of British opposition. The European gothic novel, so popular in the 1790s, is also surprisingly astute, for all its sensationalism, in displacing the vocabulary of terror away from contemporary politics into a historically remote psychoaesthetic sphere. Subsequent historical novels (Balzac, Dumas, Hugo, Dickens) are yet more fastidious in avoiding the excesses of terror-talk as they seek to comprehend (rather than parody) the dynamics of the Revolution.The figure of the Medusa in A Tale of Two Cities draws upon a rich iconographic legacy, in which it figures sometimes as a victim and (more often) as an avenging feminine spirit dispensing a terrible justice upon oppressors.Less
The term terror in the French Revolution has taken on mythic stature, but the actual incidence of the word reflects a complicated and ambiguous history. Analyzed here, the “reign of terror” is an invention of those who displaced the Jacobins in 1794 and popularized (and demonized) both terror and terrorism (the second for the first time) in the European languages. Edmund Burke, throughout the 1790s, proved very sparing in his references to terror, understanding that to accord the power of terror to the French state would be to endorse its power and prestige at the expense of British opposition. The European gothic novel, so popular in the 1790s, is also surprisingly astute, for all its sensationalism, in displacing the vocabulary of terror away from contemporary politics into a historically remote psychoaesthetic sphere. Subsequent historical novels (Balzac, Dumas, Hugo, Dickens) are yet more fastidious in avoiding the excesses of terror-talk as they seek to comprehend (rather than parody) the dynamics of the Revolution.The figure of the Medusa in A Tale of Two Cities draws upon a rich iconographic legacy, in which it figures sometimes as a victim and (more often) as an avenging feminine spirit dispensing a terrible justice upon oppressors.
Theodore Ziolkowski
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- October 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780198746836
- eISBN:
- 9780191809187
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198746836.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature, Mythology and Folklore
The growing popularity of alchemy as a metaphor led to the adaptation of the alchemist in novels and plays by Hugo, Dumas, and Balzac, in all of which the alchemist’s noble ambition or lust for gold ...
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The growing popularity of alchemy as a metaphor led to the adaptation of the alchemist in novels and plays by Hugo, Dumas, and Balzac, in all of which the alchemist’s noble ambition or lust for gold reduces his initial genius to ignominy and ridicule. Similarly, in the Austrian Friedrich Halm’s drama The Adept the alchemist’s obsession with the great secret of nature is misconstrued by society and gradually transformed into a lust for power. Like their French and German contemporaries, Poe and Hawthorne introduced the figure of the alchemist into their stories to show how his initially noble obsession could be perverted and lead to the destruction of those around him and his own dismay. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Mary Anne Atwood, whose personal practice of alchemy produced her remarkable work A Suggestive Inquiry into the Hermetic Mystery.Less
The growing popularity of alchemy as a metaphor led to the adaptation of the alchemist in novels and plays by Hugo, Dumas, and Balzac, in all of which the alchemist’s noble ambition or lust for gold reduces his initial genius to ignominy and ridicule. Similarly, in the Austrian Friedrich Halm’s drama The Adept the alchemist’s obsession with the great secret of nature is misconstrued by society and gradually transformed into a lust for power. Like their French and German contemporaries, Poe and Hawthorne introduced the figure of the alchemist into their stories to show how his initially noble obsession could be perverted and lead to the destruction of those around him and his own dismay. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Mary Anne Atwood, whose personal practice of alchemy produced her remarkable work A Suggestive Inquiry into the Hermetic Mystery.
