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.

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.

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.

The Charterhouse of Parma (1839) is a compelling novel of passion and daring, of prisons and heroic escape, of political chicanery and sublime personal courage. Set at the beginning of the nineteenth century, amidst the golden landscapes of northern Italy, it traces the joyous but ill-starred amorous exploits of a handsome young aristocrat called Fabrice del Dongo, and of his incomparable aunt Gina, her suitor Prime Minister Mosca, and Clelia, a heroine of ethereal beauty and earthly passion. These characters are rendered unforgettable by Stendhal's remarkable gift for psychological insight. `Never before have the hearts of princes, ministers, courtiers, and women been depicted like this,' wrote Honore de Balzac. `Stendhal's tableau has the dimensions of a fresco but the precision of the Dutch masters.' The great achievement of The Charterhouse of Parma is to conjure up the excitement and romance of youth while never losing sight of the harsh realities which beset the pursuit of happiness, nor the humour and patient irony with which these must be viewed. This new translation captures Stendhal's narrative verve, while the Introduction explores the novel's reception and the reasons for its enduring popularity and power. 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.

In this vigorous and fast-moving novel of post-Napoleonic France, Julien Sorel's plans to reach the higher echelons of society through the priesthood are defelected by his realization that the attainment of happiness is of greater consequence than the pursuit of ambition. Subtitled `A Chronicle of 1830', Stendhal's depiction of a nation of smug hypocrites scandalized contemporary readers, who recognized themselves or their peers and felt uncomfortable with the energy, imagination, and sincerity of a hero so patently inspired by their lately deposed Emperor. Julien's restless energy is fully captured in this specially commissioned translation of one of the world's great novels. 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.

Unfolding Mallarme proposes new meanings in Mallarme's poetry and seeks to promote the development of his poetic art as a successful search for linguistic and textual mastery. This development is systematically traced from Mallarme's earliest verse through to `Un coup de Des', the radically innovative poem which was about to be published in a fine-art edition at the time of his untimely death in 1898. In a series of close readings, Roger Pearson examines Mallarme's poetic output up to and including the central `Sonnet en yx', which is discussed both in its earliest version and within the context of `Plusieurs sonnets'. These readings are followed by analyses of other major sonnets, of `Prose (pour des Esseintes)', and of `Un coup de Des' itself. The `profound calculation' on which Mallarme claimed to have based this seemingly random text is here unfolded in all its structural and semantic complexity.

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.'

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.

'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.

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.

What is the public value of poetry? How do poets envisage their own role and function within society? How do we? Do poets seek to shape public opinion and behaviour? Should they? Or do they offer alternatives-perhaps sacred alternatives-to political and religious ideologies? Are they what Shelley in 1821 called 'the unacknowledged legislators of the World'? And what might that mean? During the decades immediately preceding the Revolution of 1789 the status of contemporary poetry in France was at its lowest ebb. At the same time the perceived power of the writer to influence public events reached a high-water mark with Voltaire's triumphant return to Paris in 1778. In the course of the next century French poetry enjoyed an extraordinary renaissance and flowering, perhaps its greatest. But what of the poet's public influence? In 1881 the people of Paris processed for six hours past the home of Victor Hugo on the occasion of his 79th birthday, and in 1885 an estimated two million people witnessed his state funeral. But who or what were they acknowledging? Poetry or republicanism? Or perhaps their own power? For with each Revolution that passed-1789, 1830, 1848-French poets themselves felt increasingly marginalised. This study addresses the first part of this story and focuses on the role and function of the poet during the so-called Romantic Period. Beginning with an account of the literary climate in pre-revolutionary France it then maps the changes in that climate wrought by the events of the 1789 Revolution. It describes the new politico-literary agendas set by Chateaubriand and others on the monarchist Right, and by Stael and others on the liberal Left. Against this background it then analyses in detail the poetic output and public exploits of the three major French poets of the period: Lamartine, Hugo, and Vigny. The Romantic figure of the poet as prophet and magus is habitually dismissed as a cliche. But by focusing on the role of the poet as lawgiver this book reveals the rich and complex terms in which the public function of poetry was debated in post-revolutionary France - and how amidst the centenary celebrations of 1889, as Romanticism gave way to Symbolism, the poet as lawgiver continued to play a central part in that debate.

This book offers the first comprehensive close reading in any language of the complete works of Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867). Taking full account of his critical writings on literature and the fine arts, it provides fresh readings of Les Fleurs du Mal and Le Spleen de Paris. It situates these works within the context of nineteenth-century French literature and culture and reassesses Baudelaire's reputation as the 'father' of modern poetry. Whereas he is traditionally considered to have rejected the public role of the writer as moralist, educator, and political leader and to have dedicated himself instead to the exclusive pursuit of beauty in art, this book contends not only that he rejected Art for Art's sake but that he saw in 'beauty'-defined not as an inherent quality but as an effect of harmony and rich conjecture-an alternative ethos with which to resist the tyrannies of ideology and conformism. Contrarian in his thinking and provocatively innovative in his poetic practice, Baudelaire fell foul of the law when six poems in Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) were banned for obscenity. In the second edition (1861), substantially recast and enlarged, the poet as alternative lawgiver made plainer still his resistance to the orthodoxies of his day. In a series of major critical articles he proclaimed the 'government of the imagination', while from 1855 until his death he developed an alternative literary form, the prose poem-a thing of beauty and an invitation to imagine the world afresh, to make our own rules.

During much of his life Voltaire's plays and verse made him the toast of society, but his barbed wit and commitment to reason also got him into trouble. Jailed twice and eventually banished by the King, he was an outspoken critic of religious intolerance and persecution. His personal life was as colourful as his intellectual one. Voltaire never married, but had long-term affairs with two women: Emilie, who died after giving birth to the child of another lover, and his niece, Marie-Louise, with whom he spent his last twenty-five years. With its tales of illegitimacy, prison, stardom, exile, love affairs and tireless battles against critics, Church and King, Roger Pearson's brilliant biography brings Voltaire vividly to life.