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Both critic and writer, Stendhal has now become established as one
of realism's founding fathers. Dr Pearson's book maps out, for the
first time, the critical reception of Stendhal's two most widely
read novels, The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma
since their publication in 1830 and 1839 respectively. In part one
he provides generous samples of the most important
nineteenth-century responses to the novels, almost all of them
translated into English for the first time. Part two presents a
full range of the most authoritative and influential readings since
1945, which illustrate a wide variety of critical approaches.
Both critic and writer, Stendhal has now become established as one
of realism's founding fathers. Dr Pearson's book maps out, for the
first time, the critical reception of Stendhal's two most widely
read novels, The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma
since their publication in 1830 and 1839 respectively. In part one
he provides generous samples of the most important
nineteenth-century responses to the novels, almost all of them
translated into English for the first time. Part two presents a
full range of the most authoritative and influential readings since
1945, which illustrate a wide variety of critical approaches.
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La Bete humaine (Paperback)
Emile Zola; Translated by Roger Pearson
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R287
R236
Discovery Miles 2 360
Save R51 (18%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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Did possessing and killing amount to the same thing deep within the
dark recesses of the human beast? La Bete humaine (1890), is one of
Zola's most violent and explicit works. On one level a tale of
murder, passion and possession, it is also a compassionate study of
individuals derailed by atavistic forces beyond their control. Zola
considered this his `most finely worked' novel, and in it he
powerfully evokes life at the end of the Second Empire in France,
where society seemed to be hurtling into the future like the new
locomotives and railways it was building. While expressing the hope
that human nature evolves through education and gradually frees
itself of the burden of inherited evil, he is constantly reminding
us that under the veneer of technological progress there remains,
always, the beast within. This new translation captures Zola's
fast-paced yet deliberately dispassionate style, while the
introduction and detailed notes place the novel in its social,
historical, and literary context. 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.
Considered by Andre Gide to be one of the ten greatest novels in
the French language, Emile Zola's Germinal is a brutal depiction of
the poverty of a mining community in northern France Etienne
Lantier, an unemployed railway worker, is a clever but uneducated
young man with a dangerous temper. Compelled to take a back-breakin
job at Le Voreux mine when he cannot get other work, he discovers
that his fellow miners are ill, hungry and in debt, unable to feed
and clothe their families. When conditions in the mining community
deteriorate even further, Lantier finds himself leading a strike
that could mean starvation or salvation for all. The thirteenth
novel in Zola's great Rougon-Macquart sequence, Germinal expresses
outrage at the exploitation of the many by the few, but also shows
humanity's capacity for compassion and hope. Translated with an
introduction by Roger Pearson in Penguin Classics If you enjoyed
Germinal, you might like Zola's Therese Raquin, also available in
Penguin Classics.
'If this is the best of all possible worlds, then what must the
others be like?' Young Candide is tossed on a hilarious tide of
misfortune, experiencing the full horror and injustice of this
'best of all possible worlds' - the Old and the New - before
finally accepting that his old philosophy tutor Dr Pangloss has got
it all wrong. There are no grounds for his daft theory of Optimism.
Yet life goes on. We must cultivate our garden, for there is
certainly room for improvement. Candide is the most famous of
Voltaire's 'philosophical tales', in which he combined witty
improbabilities with the sanest of good sense. First published in
1759, it was an instant bestseller and has come to be regarded as
one of the key texts of the Enlightenment. What Candide does for
chivalric romance, the other tales in this selection - Micromegas,
Zadig, The Ingenu, and The White Bull - do for science fiction, the
Oriental tale, the sentimental novel, and the Old Testament. This
new edition also includes a verse tale based on Chaucer's The Wife
of Bath's Tale, in which we discover that most elusive of secrets:
What Pleases the Ladies. 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.
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The Masterpiece (Paperback)
Emile Zola; Translated by Thomas Walton; Edited by Roger Pearson
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R315
R258
Discovery Miles 2 580
Save R57 (18%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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The Masterpiece is the tragic story of Claude Lantier, an ambitious
and talented young artist from the provinces who has come to
conquer Paris and is conquered by the flaws in his own genius.
While his boyhood friend Pierre Sandoz becomes a successful
novelist, Claude's originality is mocked at the Salon and turns
gradually into a doomed obsession with one great canvas. Life - in
the form of his model and wife Christine and their deformed child
Jacques - is sacrificed on the altar of Art. The Masterpiece is the
most autobiographical of the twenty novels in Zola's
Rougon-Macquart series. Set in the 1860s and 1870s, it provides a
unique insight into his career as a writer and his relationship
with Cezanne, a friend since their schooldays in Aix-en-Provence.
It also presents a well-documented account of the turbulent Bohemia
world in which the Impressionists came to prominence despit the
conservatism of the Academy and the ridicule of the general public.
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.
every heart imagines itself the first to thrill to a myriad
sensations which once stirred the hearts of the earliest creatures
and which will again stir the hearts of the last men and women to
walk the earth'
What is a life? How shall a storyteller conceive a life? What if
art means pattern and life has none? How, then, can any story be
true to life? These are some of the questions which inform the
first of Maupassant's six novels, A Life (Une Vie) (1883) in which
he sought to parody and expose the folly of romantic illusion. An
unflinching presentation of a woman's life of failure and
disappointments, where fulfillment and happiness might have been
expected, A Life recounts Jeanne de Lamare's gradual lapse into a
state of disillusion.
With its intricate network of parallels and oppositions, IA Life
reflects the influence of Flaubert in its attention to form and its
coherent structure. It also expresses Maupassant's characteristic
naturalistic vision in which the satire of bourgeois manners, the
representation of the aristocracy in pathological decline, the
undermining of human individuality and ideals, and the study of
deterioration and disintegration, all play a role. But above all
Maupassant brings to his first novel the short story writer's
genius for a focused tension between stasis and change, and A Life
is one of his most compelling portraits of dispossession and
powerlessness.
About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has
made available the broadest spectrum 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, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date
bibliographies for further study, and much more.
Following his Unfolding Mallarme: The Development of a Poetic Art,
this book is the second in Roger Pearson's authoritative two-volume
study of the work of Stephanie Mallarme (1842-1898), and the first
comprehensive study of Mallarme's 'poetry of circumstance' in any
language. For Mallarme, in a world without God, the role of the
poet is to break the silence with language and to confer upon the
contingency of circumstance a therapeutic semblance of formal and
semantic pattern. Literature provides a 'translation of silence',
'intimate galas' in which the mysterious drama of the human
condition is performed for and by the reader on the stage of the
verse poem, the prose poem, and what Mallarme calls the 'poeme
critique'. In Part 1, Pearson examines the prose poems within the
context of Mallarme's writing about the theatre. In Part II, he
focuses on the 'circumstanzas' - the famous 'Tombeaux', 'Hommages',
'Eventails', and 'vers de circonstance' - in which Mallarme invests
the quotidian with the 'glorious lie' of poetry. In a series of
close readings Pearson demonstrates how complex poetic structures,
and especially the sonnet, may serve to guide the human search for
meaning and shape our anguish in a 'ceremony of the Book.'
Almost three hundred years after his birth in 1694, this is the
first comprehensive study of Voltaire's contes philosophiques - the
philosophical tales for which he is now best remembered and which
include the masterpiece Candide. The Fables of Reason situates each
of the twenty-six stories in its historical and intellectual
context and offers new readings and approaches in the light of
modern critical thinking. It rejects the traditional view that
Voltaire's contes were the private expression of his philosophical
perplexity, written merely in the margins of his historiography and
his campaigns against the Establishment. Arguing that narrative is
Voltaire's essential mode of thought, the book stresses the role of
the reader and shows how the contes are designed less to
communicate a set of truths than to encourage independence of mind.
Roger Pearson has written a witty, lucid and scholarly guide to the
`fables of reason' with which Voltaire undermined - and continues
to undermine - the religious, philosophical, and economic `fables',
by which other thinkers have tried to explain and direct human
experience.
This new study of Stendhal's novels takes its title from Stendhal's
dictum `Un roman est comme un archet, la caisse du violon qui rend
les sons, c'est l'ame du lecteur.' Its central theme is the
relationship between novelist and reader, as orchestrated in
Armance, Le Rouge et le Noir, Lucien Leuwen and La Chartreuse de
Parme. From the author's analyses of these novels it emerges that
Stendhal plays upon the reader's reactions and makes him or her
experience in the act of reading what his protagonists experience
in the act of living. Well written, and without obscure theoretical
terminology, Stendhal's Violin is aimed at both the first-degree
scholar and specialist reader. It contains full discussion of the
views of other critics, and presents individual, challenging new
interpretations of Stendhal's novels.
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