Examining how the rise of book illustration affected the historic hegemony of the word, Keri Yousif explores the complex literary and artistic relationship between the novelist Honoré de Balzac and ...the illustrator J. J. Grandville during the French July Monarchy (1830-1848). Both collaborators and rivals, these towering figures struggled for dominance in the Parisian book trade at the height of the Romantic revolution and its immediate aftermath. Both men were social portraitists who collaborated on the influential encyclopedic portrayal of nineteenth-century society, Les Français peints par eux-mêmes. However, their collaboration soon turned competitive with Grandville's publication of Scènes de la vie privée et publique des animaux, a visual parody of Balzac's Scènes de la vie privée. Yousif investigates Balzac's and Grandville's individual and joint artistic productions in terms of the larger economic and aesthetic struggles within the nineteenth-century arena of cultural production, showing how writers were forced to position themselves both in terms of the established literary hierarchy and in relation to the rapidly advancing image. As Yousif shows, the industrialization of the illustrated book spawned a triadic relationship between publisher, writer, and illustrator that transformed the book from a product of individual genius to a cooperative and commercial affair. Her study represents a significant contribution to our understanding of literature, art, and their interactions in a new marketplace for publication during the fraught transition from Romanticism to Realism.
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.
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.
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.
Introduction : the prime movers -- Mimetic figures of semiosis -- From heteronomy to unity : Les Chouans -- Tenebrous affairs and necessary explications -- Self-narration and the fakery of imitation ...-- The double representation of the history of César Birotteau -- La maison Nucingen, a financial narrative -- Myth and mendacity : Pierrette and Beatrice Cenci -- The corset of La vieille fille -- Genealogy and the unmarried in La rabouilleuse -- Ursule Mirouët : genealogy and inheritance -- Un prince de la bohème and Pierre Grassou, or how love makes money -- Voyages of reflection, reflections on voyages -- Balzac and Poe : realizing magnetism -- Chemistry and composition : la recherche de l'absolu -- The capital of money and the science of magnetism : Melmoth réconcilié -- Love, music, and opium : medical semiotics of Massimilla Doni -- The languages of sex -- Composed past and historical present -- Problems of closure -- Conclusion : Balzac's invention of realism.
