Dangerous Truths and Criminal Passions

1992-07-01 Literary Criticism

Author : Thomas DiPiero
Release : 1992-07-01
Genre : Literary Criticism
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 804/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Dangerous Truths and Criminal Passions by : Thomas DiPiero

Download or read book Dangerous Truths and Criminal Passions written by Thomas DiPiero. This book was released on 1992-07-01. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book challenges several traditional assumptions about the development of the French novel, notably that the novel is a bourgeois art form that rose and flourished along with the rise of the bourgeoisie; and that the novels of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were inevitable stepping stones on the road to the apotheosis of realism realized in the novels of Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola. Instead, the author argues that the early French novel articulated the French aristocracy's claims to natural ascendancy against an encroaching middle class. But like any other literary form, the novel produces and is a product of ideology, and it reveals the contradictions lying beneath the surface of an apparently seamless social structure. After the death of Louis XIV and the resulting social and political redefinition of the aristocracy, the ideological rifts in the novel's form enabled it to shift its class affiliations with the changing times. French cultural life was increasingly tinged with values determined by new configurations in the control and transmission of property, including new constraints on women's sexual behavior. Fiction that claimed for itself a rightful place in the real world began to appear. As it had during the seventeenth century, fiction continued to negotiate complex social contradictions and label as malevolent any person or group that seemed to threaten social order, notably the immoderate woman who flouted traditional conceptions of virtue and threatened to read the social fabric. This new account of the rise of the French novel is enriched throughout by close readings of both well-known and obscure novels, including d'Urfe;'s L'Astre;e, Gomberville's Polexandre, Furetière's Le Roman bourgeois, Pre;vost's Manon Lescaut, Diderot's La Religieuse, and Sade's Justine.

Theory of the Novel

2017-01-02 Literary Criticism

Author : Guido Mazzoni
Release : 2017-01-02
Genre : Literary Criticism
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 034/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Theory of the Novel by : Guido Mazzoni

Download or read book Theory of the Novel written by Guido Mazzoni. This book was released on 2017-01-02. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The novel is the most important form of Western art. It aims to represent the totality of life; it is the flagship that literature sends out against the systematic thought of science and philosophy. Indebted to Lukács and Bakhtin, to Auerbach and Ian Watt, Guido Mazzoni’s Theory of the Novel breaks new ground, building a historical understanding of how the novel became the modern book of life: one of the best representations of our experience of the world. The genre arose during a long metamorphosis of narrative forms that took place between 1550 and 1800. By the nineteenth century it had come to encompass a corpus of texts distinguished by their freedom from traditional formal boundaries and by the particularity of their narratives. Mazzoni explains that modern novels consist of stories told in any way whatsoever, by narrators who exist—like us—as contingent beings within time and space. They therefore present an interpretation, not a copy, of the world. Novels grant new importance to the stories of ordinary men and women and allow readers to step into other lives and other versions of truth. As Theory of the Novel makes clear, this art form narrates an epoch and a society in which individual experiences do not converge but proliferate, in which the common world has fragmented into a plurality of small, local worlds, each absolute in its particularity.

Beyond Greece and Rome

2020-04-23 Literary Criticism

Author : Jane Grogan
Release : 2020-04-23
Genre : Literary Criticism
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 110/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Beyond Greece and Rome by : Jane Grogan

Download or read book Beyond Greece and Rome written by Jane Grogan. This book was released on 2020-04-23. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though the subject of classical reception in early modern Europe is a familiar one, modern scholarship has tended to assume the dominance of Greece and Rome in engagements with the classical world during that period. The essays in this volume aim to challenge this prevailing view by arguing for the significance and familiarity of the ancient near east to early modern Europe, establishing the diversity and expansiveness of the classical world known to authors like Shakespeare and Montaigne in what we now call the 'global Renaissance'. However, global Renaissance studies has tended to look away from classical reception, exacerbating the blind spot around the significance of the ancient near east for early modern Europe. Yet this wider classical world supported new modes of humanist thought and unprecedented cross-cultural encounters, as well as informing new forms of writing, such as travel writing and antiquarian treatises; in many cases, and befitting its Herodotean origins, the ancient near east raises questions of travel, empire, religious diversity, cultural relativism, and the history of European culture itself in ways that prompted detailed, engaging, and functional responses by early modern readers and writers. Bringing together a range of approaches from across the fields of classical studies, history, and comparative literature, this volume seeks both to emphasize the transnational, interdisciplinary, and interrogative nature of classical reception, and to make a compelling case for the continued relevance of the texts, concepts, and materials of the ancient near east, specifically, to early modern culture and scholarship.

Involuntary Confessions of the Flesh in Early Modern France

2016-09-14 Literary Criticism

Author : Nora Martin Peterson
Release : 2016-09-14
Genre : Literary Criticism
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 35X/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Involuntary Confessions of the Flesh in Early Modern France by : Nora Martin Peterson

Download or read book Involuntary Confessions of the Flesh in Early Modern France written by Nora Martin Peterson. This book was released on 2016-09-14. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Involuntary Confessions of the Flesh in Early Modern France was inspired by the observation that small slips of the flesh (involuntary confessions of the flesh) are omnipresent in early modern texts of many kinds. These slips (which bear similarities to what we would today call the Freudian slip) disrupt and destabilize readings of body, self, and text—three categories whose mutual boundaries this book seeks to soften—but also, in their very messiness, participate in defining them. Involuntary Confessions capitalizes on the uncertainty of such volatile moments, arguing that it is instability itself that provides the tools to navigate and understand the complexity of the early modern world. Rather than locate the body within any one discourse (Foucauldian, psychoanalytic), this book argues that slips of the flesh create a liminal space not exactly outside of discourse, but not necessarily subject to it, either. Involuntary confessions of the flesh reveal the perpetual and urgent challenge of early modern thinkers to textually confront and define the often tenuous relationship between the body and the self. By eluding and frustrating attempts to contain it, the early modern body reveals that truth is as much about surfaces as it is about interior depth, and that the self is fruitfully perpetuated by the conflict that proceeds from seemingly irreconcilable narratives. Interdisciplinary in its scope, Involuntary Confessions of the Flesh in Early Modern France pairs major French literary works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (by Marguerite de Navarre, Montaigne, Madame de Lafayette) with cultural documents (confession manuals, legal documents about the application of torture, and courtly handbooks). It is the first study of its kind to bring these discourses into thematic (rather than linear or chronological) dialog. In so doing, it emphasizes the shared struggle of many different early modern conversations to come to terms with the body’s volatility. Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Body and Story

2006-12 History

Author : Richard Terdiman
Release : 2006-12
Genre : History
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 433/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Body and Story by : Richard Terdiman

Download or read book Body and Story written by Richard Terdiman. This book was released on 2006-12. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Body and Story, Richard Terdiman explores the tension between what might seem to be two fundamentally different ways of understanding the world: as physical reality and as representation in language. In demonstrating the complicated relationship between these two modes of being, he also presents a new bold approach to the problem of conflicts between irreconcilable but equally compelling theoretical ideas. Enlightenment rationalism is most often understood as maintaining that words can meaningfully refer to and grasp things in the material world, while Postmodernism famously argues that nothing exists outside of language. Terdiman challenges this clean distinction, finding the early seeds of Postmodern doubt in the Enlightenment, and demonstrating the stubborn resistance of material reality—particularly that of the body—to language even today. Building on readings of works by 18th-century encyclopedist Denis Diderot and contemporary philosopher-icon Jacques Derrida, Terdiman argues that despite their genuine and profound opposition, a constant negotiation or mutual interrogation has always been taking place between these two world-views, even as the balance at times shifts to one side or the other. In analyzing these shifts he proposes a new model for understanding how seemingly unabridgeable theories legitimately coexist in our intellectual conception of the world, and he suggests a new ethics for managing this coexistence.

Popular eBooks

Dangerous Truths and Criminal Passions

Theory of the Novel

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Involuntary Confessions of the Flesh in Early Modern France

Body and Story

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