Stendhal: A Biography

Robert Altner, Carol Gosman

За особеностите на екземпляра

Състояние:: Много добро
Забележка:: Почти отлично състояние - без следи от употреба.
Език:: Английски
Наличност:: 1 бр.

За изданието

Издателство:: George Allen and Unwin Ltd
Град на издаване:: London
Година:: 1980 г.
Език:: Английски
Страници:: 285
Корици:: Твърди
Категория:: Мемоари, биографии, писма
Тегло (гр.):: 642
Ширина (мм):: 160
Височина (мм):: 240
Дебелина (мм):: 27
ISBN:: 0049280422

Few great novelists of the nineteenth century have continued to speak more freshly to the personal and political passions of later ages, particularly our own, than Stendhal. Julien Sorel and Fabrizio del Dongo, the young adventurers who are the heroes of Le Rouge et le Noir and La Chartreuse de Parme, have been embraced as companions of the soul by generations of readers. Stendhal, the author writes, 'is such a complicated, elusive and compelling figure, the connections between his life and his work are so multifarious and at times ambiguous, that what was required, I came to feel, was a biography in which the narrative and interpretative strands would be constantly intertwined.' The result is an engrossing and stylish critical biography which reveals how it was that a rather unprepossessing and far from successful French minor official, born and raised in the provinces, and whose sense of society was shaped by the upheavals of pre- and post-Napoleonic Europe, should have become one of the most brilliant and imaginative of guides to the promises and pitfalls of sexual and worldly ambitions. Tracing the connections between the almost comic succession of failures in Stendhal's life and the enduring triumphs of his art, Robert Alter illuminates the process through which the writer's public and private experience fed into his great literary works. 'I have sought to give some concrete sense of how the major fiction emerged from the experience of the author, without, however, assuming that this implies a search for 'models' of the fictional characters in Stendhal's life, orthatthe work could be reductively explained by the life. Seeing the shifting correspondence between life and work meant for me not only attending to themes, values and psychological patterns in the fiction but also some close analysis of how in details of style and technique Stendhal managed to create a form of the novel so distinctively his own.' 'No writer of his time seems more engagingly alive today,' Robert. Alter concludes. His book is written, as onecritic, Victor Brombert of Princeton University, has put it, 'with love and wit - in the true spirit of Stendhal'. Among existing works, both in French and English, none provides a more authoritative reading of Stendhal's works together with so enlightening and vivid a portrait of the man himself. * Robert Alter is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley. He is well known as a critic and an historian of the novel, and his most recent published books have been Partial Magic and Defenses of the Imagination while he is preparing at present a study of the narrative art of the Bible. He is a contributing editor of Commentary and TriQuarterly, and a contributor too to The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times Book Review and other periodicals. His wife, Carol Cosman, has edited two anthologies of women's verse and is at work on a translation of Sartre's study of Flaubert, The Family Idiot.

Ключови думи: книги на английски език, английски книги, Стендал, биография