The focus of this study in comparative criticism is close
analysis of Dostoevsky's first literary publication-his 1844
translation of the first edition of Balzac's Eugе́nie
Grandet (1834)-and the ...stylistic choices that he made as a
young writer while working on Balzac's novel. Through the prism of
close reading, the author analyzes Dostoevsky's literary debut in
the context of his future mature aesthetic style and poetics.
Comparing the original and the translation side by side, this book
focuses on the omissions, additions and substitutions that
Dostoevsky brought into the text. It demonstrates how young
Dostoevsky's free translation of Eugénie Grandet predicts
the creation of his own literary characters, themes, and other
aspects of his literary output that are now recognized as
Dostoevsky's signature style. It investigates the changes that
Dostoevsky made while working on Balzac's text and analyzes the
complex transplantation of Balzac's imagery, motifs, and character
portraiture from Eugénie Grandet into Dostoevsky's own
writing later on.
How does the imagination work? How can it lead to both reverie and scientific insight? In this book, Kieran M. Murphy sheds new light on these perennial questions by showing how they have been ...closely tied to the history of electromagnetism.
The discovery in 1820 of a mysterious relationship between electricity and magnetism led not only to technological inventions—such as the dynamo and telegraph, which ushered in the “electric age”—but also to a profound reconceptualization of nature and the role the imagination plays in it. From the literary experiments of Edgar Allan Poe, Honoré de Balzac, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, and André Breton to the creative leaps of Michael Faraday and Albert Einstein, Murphy illuminates how electromagnetism legitimized imaginative modes of reasoning based on a more acute sense of interconnection and a renewed interest in how metonymic relations could reveal the order of things.
Murphy organizes his study around real and imagined electromagnetic devices, ranging from Faraday’s world-changing induction experiment to new types of chains and automata, in order to demonstrate how they provided a material foundation for rethinking the nature of difference and relation in physical and metaphysical explorations of the world, human relationships, language, and binaries such as life and death. This overlooked exchange between science and literature brings a fresh perspective to the critical debates that shaped the nineteenth century.
Extensively researched and convincingly argued, this pathbreaking book addresses a significant lacuna in modern literary criticism and deepens our understanding of both the history of literature and the history of scientific thinking.
Although Balzac's work has been much studied, practically nothing has been written on his use of linguistic concepts. Applying a new approach, this perceptive book demonstrates that the theme and ...theory of language were central to Balzac's fiction. In considering how the novelist was influenced by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century speculation on language, Martin Kanes traces the development of Balzac's own linguistic ideas from his early to his later writings.
Originally published in 1976.
ThePrinceton Legacy Libraryuses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
The romances of Herman Melville, author of Moby-Dick and Billy Budd, Sailor, are usually examined from some setting almost exclusively American. European or other planetary contexts are subordinated ...to local considerations. But while this isolated approach plays well in an arena constructed on American exclusiveness, it does not express the reality of the literary processes swirling around Melville in the middle of the nineteenth century. A series of expanding literary and technological networks was active that made his writing part of a global complex. Honoré de Balzac, popular French writer and creator of realism in the novel, was also in the web of these same networks, both preceding and at the height of Melville’s creativity. Because they engaged in similar intentions, there developed an almost inevitable attraction that brought their works together. Until recently, however, Balzac has not been recognized as a significant influence on Melville during his most creative period. Over the last decade, scholars began to explore literary networks by new methodologies, and the criticism developed out of these strategies pertains usually to modernist, postcolonial, contemporary situations. Remarkably, however, the intertextuality of Melville with Balzac is quite exactly a casebook study in transcultural comparativism. Looking at Melville’s innovative environment reveals meaningful results where the networks take on significant roles equivalent to what have been traditionally classed as genetic contacts.
Sandy Petrey here looks at the emergence of nineteenth-century French realism in the light of the concept of speech acts as defined by J. L. Austin and as exemplified by the history of the French ...Revolution. Through analysis of the techniques of representation in works by Balzac, Stendhal, and Zola, Petrey suggests that the expression of a truth depends on the same collective forces necessary to change a regime. According to Petrey, political legitimacy in the Revolution, the Empire, and the Restoration was established by means of a series of demonstrations that what words say cannot be interpreted without reference to the community to which they speak. Petrey first discusses the creation of France's National Assembly in 1789 as a foundational example of how speech acts can bring about historical transformation. He then challenges the most powerful twentieth-century assault on realist aesthetics, Roland Barthes's S/Z , and also considers the views of such contemporary critics as Jacques Derrida, Barbara Johnson, and Stanley Fish. During the Revolution, Petrey says, statements of truth were not descriptions of what was, but rather exhortations to produce what was not. Nineteenth-century French fiction represents in literary form a similar collectively authorized linguistic performance; the real in realism comes from representing facts not as they are in themselves but as they are produced and rejected in society. In the course of illuminating readings of three central realist works—Balzac's Pere Goriot , Stendhal's The Red and the Black , and Zola's Germinal —Petrey takes the position that the dilemmas of representation, far from being one of realism's blind spots, figure among its major narrative subjects.
Every writer is a player in the marketplace for literature. Jonathan Paine locates the economics ingrained within the stories themselves, showing how the business of literature affects even ...storytelling devices such as genre, plot, and repetition. In this new model of criticism, the text is a record of its author’s sales pitch.
Empiricism and empire : La peau de chagrin -- Marginal realism in Le père Goriot -- Realism, romance, and La fille aux yeux d'or -- Economies of romance and history in Phineas Finn -- Mapping and ...unmapping Phineas Finn and Phineas redux -- Global London and the way we live now -- "Berlin wird Weltstadt" : nation, city, and world in Cécile -- The imaginative geography of Effi Briest -- Conclusion : the limits of "realism"
In Real Time David F. Bell explores the decisive impact the accelerated movement of people and information had on the fictions of four giants of French realism--Balzac, Stendhal, Dumas, and Zola. ..._x000B__x000B_Nineteenth-century technological advances radically altered the infrastructure of France, changing the ways ordinary citizens--and literary characters--viewed time, space, distance, and speed. The most influential of these advances included the improvement of the stagecoach, the growth of road and canal networks leading to the advent of the railway, and the increasing use of mail, and of the optical telegraph. Citing examples from a wide range of novels and stories, Bell demonstrates the numerous ways in which these trends of acceleration became not just literary devices and themes but also structuring principles of the novels themselves. _x000B__x000B_Beginning with both the provincial and the Parisian communications networks of Balzac, Bell proceeds to discuss the roles of horses and optical telegraphs in Stendhal and the importance of domination of communication channels to the characters of Dumas, whose Count of Monte-Cristo might be seen as the ultimate fictional master of this accelerated culture. Finally, Bell analyzes the cinematic vision created by the arrival of the railroad, as depicted by Zola in La Bete Humaine.
Balzac made a conscious effort inComedie Humaineto multiply the reappearance, from book to book, of some of his characters. This careful analysis of nearly six-hundred reappearing characters shows ...that some appear only briefly, in no significant role; others play important parts; and some become principals in later action.
