Author: Honore De BalzacPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 452
Book Description
Cousin Bette
Author: Honore De BalzacCousin Betty
Author: Honoré de BalzacCousin Bette
Author: Honoré de BalzacPublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199553947
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 529
Book Description
Cousin Bette (1846), long considered Balzac's last great novel, is a key work in his Comedie humaine. Grounded in a meticulous documentation of contemporary France, this tale is set in the prosperous Paris of Louis-Phillipe and details a jealous woman's campaign of persecution against her own family. This new translation has an introduction by David Bellos which sets this work in its social, historical, and literary context.
Cousin Betty
Author: Honoré de BalzacComédie Humaine
Author: Honoré de BalzacCousin Bette
Author: Honoré de BalzacPublisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0140441603
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 479
Book Description
The story of the Hulot family. Risen to eminence under Napoleon 1, their aristocratic values leave them bewildered and vulnerable in the money-ridden burgeois Paris of the 1840s. It is also the story of Bette herself, the poor relation whose patient malice finally leads to their demise.
Cousin Betty
Author: Honoré de BalzacA Passion in the Desert
Author: Honore de BalzacPublisher: The Floating Press
ISBN: 1776539214
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 21
Book Description
During Napoleon's campaign in Egypt, one French soldier becomes separated from his regiment and finds himself wandering lost in the desert. Just when he has given up all hope, he makes an unlikely friend. This highly allegorical short story gives readers an opportunity to ponder the nature of love and human relationships.
The Cosmopolitans
Author: Sarah SchulmanPublisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
ISBN: 1558619054
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 385
Book Description
A “captivating, perceptive, and empathic novel of New York” told with “panache and mischievous ebullience” (Booklist, starred review). In this retelling of Balzac’s Parisian classic Cousin Bette, Sarah Shulman spins her revenge story in Mad Men–era New York City. Bette, a lonely spinster, has worked as a secretary at an ad agency for thirty years. Her only real friend is her apartment neighbor Earl, a black, gay actor with a miserable job in a meatpacking plant. Shamed and disowned by their families, both find refuge in New York and in their friendship. Everything changes when Hortense, Bette’s wealthy niece from Ohio, moves to the city to pursue her own acting career. Her arrival reminds Bette of her scandalous past and the estranged Midwestern family she left behind. When Hortense’s calculating ambitions cause a rift between Bette and Earl, Bette uses her connections in the television ad world to destroy those who have wronged her. Textured with the grit and gloss of midcentury Manhattan in the days before the Civil Rights and Feminist Movements, The Cosmopolitans “balance[s] the hopes of an entire era on the backs of a fragile relationship. . . . Jarring and beautiful, this is a modern classic” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).
The Misfit of the Family
Author: Michael LuceyPublisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822385163
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 341
Book Description
In more than ninety novels and novellas, Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) created a universe teeming with over two thousand characters. The Misfit of the Family reveals how Balzac, in imagining the dense, vividly rendered social world of his novels, used his writing as a powerful means to understand and analyze—as well as represent—a range of forms of sexuality. Moving away from the many psychoanalytic approaches to the novelist's work, Michael Lucey contends that in order to grasp the full complexity with which sexuality was understood by Balzac, it is necessary to appreciate how he conceived of its relation to family, history, economics, law, and all the many structures within which sexualities take form. The Misfit of the Family is a compelling argument that Balzac must be taken seriously as a major inventor and purveyor of new tools for analyzing connections between the sexual and the social. Lucey’s account of the novelist’s deployment of "sexual misfits" to impel a wide range of his most canonical works—Cousin Pons, Cousin Bette, Eugenie Grandet, Lost Illusions, The Girl with the Golden Eyes—demonstrates how even the flexible umbrella term "queer" barely covers the enormous diversity of erotic and social behaviors of his characters. Lucey draws on the thinking of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu and engages the work of critics of nineteenth-century French fiction, including Naomi Schor, D. A. Miller, Franco Moretti, and others. His reflections on Proust as Balzac’s most cannily attentive reader suggest how the lines of social and erotic force he locates in Balzac’s work continued to manifest themselves in twentieth-century writing and society.