Author: Honoré de BalzacPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 846
Book Description
The magic skin, The quest of the absolute, and other stories
Author: Honoré de BalzacWaxworks
Author: Michelle E. BloomPublisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816639311
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 368
Book Description
London, 1921. The world's greatest wax sculptor watches in horror as flames consume his museum and melt his uncannily lifelike creations. Twelve years later, he opens a wax museum in New York. Crippled, disfigured, and driven mad by the fire, he resorts to body snatching and murder to populate his displays, preserving the bodies in wax. "In a thousand years you will be as lovely as you are now, " he assures one victim. In The Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), director Michael Curtiz perfectly captures the macabre essence of realistic wax figures that have excited the darker aspects of the public's imagination ever since Madame Tussaud established her famous museum in London in 1802. Artists, too, have been fascinated by wax sculptures, seeing in them--and in the unique properties of wax itself--an eerie metaphoric power with which to address sexual anxiety, fears of mortality, and other morbid subjects. In Waxworks, Michelle E. Bloom explores the motif of the wax figure in European and American literature and art. In particular, she connects the myth of Pygmalion to the obsession with wax statues of women in the nineteenth-century fetishization of prostitutes and female corpses and as depicted in such "wax fictions" as Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop (1841). Filmmakers, too, have sought inspiration from wax museums, and Bloom analyzes works from the silent era to such waxwork-themed Hollywood horror films as Mad Love (1935) and House of Wax (1953). Bringing her discussion to the present, Bloom examines the work of contemporary artists who use the medium of wax in ways never imagined by Madame Tussaud. As extravagant new wax museums open in Las Vegas, Times Square, and Paris, Waxworksoffers a provocative cultural history of this enduring--and disturbing--art form.
Catherine Lescault
Author: Walter IdlewildPublisher:
ISBN: 9780998622606
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 312
Book Description
"In the delirious and vitalizing novel Catherine Lescault, alternative incarnations of Honoré de Balzac's classic characters from The Unknown Masterpiece enact romances of lunacy and obsession to dramatize their search for the reality of artistic creation. The novelists Frenhofer and Porbus, the painter and muse Gillette, the troubadour Nicolas, and the sculptor Houdon all strive to discover the secret of imbuing art with life, despite the voices of academic critics and students, peers and rivals, relatives and loved ones, and their own withering internal frailties. Some disciples may achieve the dream of allowing the ideal courtesan subject, Catherine Lescault herself, to breathe and live and love, while other artists' fixations lead into monomaniacal madness with unspeakably tragic consequences. Which interpretation will ultimately triumph: sculpture, paint, music, dance, acts on the stage, or words on the page?"--Back cover.
The Quest of the Absolute
Author: Honoré de BalzacPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : France
Languages : en
Pages : 412
Book Description
The Unknown Masterpiece
Author: Honoré de BalzacComédie Humaine
Author: Honoré de BalzacThe Works of Balzac
Author: Honoré de BalzacThe Comédie Humaine
Author: Honor ̌de BalzacThe quest of the absolute. The unknown masterpiece. Christ in Flanders. Melmoth reconciled. The red house
Author: Honoré de BalzacRomantic Rapports
Author: Larry H. PeerPublisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1571139400
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 192
Book Description
New essays offering fresh glimpses of Romanticism as interdisciplinary and cross-linguistic, illuminating the discursive features and the pan-European nature of the movement.