"The Red and the Black" is a reflective novel about the rise of poor, intellectually gifted people to High Society. Set in 19th century France it portrays the era after the exile of Napoleon to St. Helena. the influential, sharp epigrams in striking prose, leave reader almost as intrigued by the author's talent as the surprising twists that occur in the arduous love life.

Traces the life of the nineteenth century French novelist, attempts to portray his complex personality, and analyzes his major works.

Victor Brombert is a lion in the study of French literature, and in this classic of literary criticism, he turns his clear and perspicacious gaze on the works of one of its greatest authors—Stendhal. Best remembered for his novels The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma, Stendhal is a writer of extraordinary insight into psychology and the many shades of individual and political liberty. Brombert has spent a lifetime reading and teaching Stendhal and here, by focusing on the seemingly contradictory themes of inner freedom and outer constraint within Stendhal’s writings, he offers a revealing analysis of both his work and his life. For Brombert, Stendhal’s work is deeply personal; elsewhere, he has written about the myriad connections between Stendhal’s ironic inquiries into identity and his own boyhood in France on the brink of World War II. Proceeding via careful and nuanced readings of passages from Stendhal’s fiction and autobiography, Brombert pays particular attention to style, tone, and meaning. Paradoxically, Stendhal’s heroes often feel most free when in prison, and in a statement of stunning relevance for our contemporary world, Brombert contends that Stendhal is far clearer than any writer before him on the “crisis and contradictions of modern humanism that . . . render political freedom illusory.” Featuring a new introduction in which Brombert explores his earliest encounters with Stendhal—the beginnings of his “affair” during a year spent as a Fulbright scholar in Rome—Stendhal remains a spirited, elegant, and resonant account.

Love can be surprising. Love can be heartbreaking. Love can be an art. But love is the singular emotion that all humans rely on most . . . and crave endlessly, no matter what the cost. United by this theme of love, the nine titles in the Penguin Great Loves collection include tales of blissful and all- encompassing, doomed and tragic, erotic and absurd, seductive and adulterous, innocent and murderous love. A deeply moving addition to the Penguin Great Ideas and Great Journeys series, each gorgeously packaged book will challenge all expectations of love while celebrating the beauty of its existence. All books in this series: Cures for Love Doomed Love The Eaten Heart First Love Forbidden Fruit The Kreutzer Sonata A Mere Interlude Of Mistresses, Tigresses and Other Conquests The Seducer's Diary

Stendhal's Life of Rossini is a captivating biography of the famous Italian composer Gioachino Rossini. Through extensive research and firsthand accounts, Stendhal paints a vivid picture of Rossini's life, career, and artistic output. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in music history or classical music. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

On the evening of 22 March 1842, Henri Marie Beyle collapsed on a Parisian pavement and died a few hours later. In death, as in his life, the writer we now know as Stendhal remained ignored and underestimated by his contemporaries. Why this should be is explored by the award-winning writer, Jonathan Keates, in this major biography. Taking us from Stendhal's childhood in Grenoble through his varied careers to his death at fifty-nine, Keates examines the author's personal life, his many friendships and his work. 'Exact and illuminating ... Keates, like his subject, loves Italy and music and he loves Stendhal wisely and not too well. He is clear-eyed in appraising his faults.' Sunday Times Jonathan Keates manages to transmit both his own enthusiasm for his subject, and Stendhal's own enthusiasm for varied experience.' Independent 'Keates proves to be an alarmingly erudite guide.' Sunday Telegraph 'Keates has captured the historical sweep of his career and has a sure feel for the social milieux in which Stendhal lived ... A biography of admirable pace and geniality.' Evening Standard

"Stendhal's most independent heroines are usually disliked or marginalized by critics. However, when gender-neutral criteria are applied, Mina de Vanghel, Vanina Vanini, Mathilde de La Mole, and Lamiel can all be shown to enact extraordinary experiments in freedom. These experiments are all the more remarkable in view of the gender of their agents, the historical situation of the author (1783-1842), and the conventions of the literary movement that his fiction helped to found: realism. Simone de Beauvoir's 1949 study of Stendhal's heroines gives preference to the reserved females over his Amazons. But existentialism, as a philosophy of freedom, also enables a reading of the self-determining heroines that acknowledges the superiority of their choices: their resistance and counter-plots, their paradoxical authenticity, their rejection of seriousness, and their assumption of responsibility for the routes they plot."

This book deals with the important and hitherto neglected relationship between the works of Stendhal and Plutarch's Parallel Lives. Stendhal's readings of Plutarch are shown to inform his literary representations of Revolution and Empire, Restoration and Orleanism, as well as his theorizations of Romanticism. In particular, the Plutarchan concept of Parallel Lives is used to analyse one of the major themes of Stendhal's writing: the self-construction of individual identity, whether (auto)biographical or fictional, by means of the emulation (as distinct from the imitation) of heroic exemplars. As a consequence, the balance between irony and idealism often identified by critics in Stendhal's work is shown rather to be an imbalance, weighted in favour of an idealism derived from Plutarchan conceptions of heroism, particularly as they are represented in the Lives of Julius Caesar and Marcus Brutus.

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