Honore de Balzac

Andrew Oliver

Balzac's classic philosophical novel about a young man (Raphaël) torn between two women, one whom he loves but who does not reciprocate his affections (Foedora, the "woman without a heart") and one who loves him but for whom initially he has only fraternal feelings (Pauline). The sentimental drama is associated with a philosophical one in allegorical form: how does a man live his life ... with intensity but in an existence of short duration, or without desires in a long life? The drama is expressed through the talisman, a wild ass's skin, given to the hero by an old antique dealer. The skin has magical powers: it enables the owner to satisfy any desire, but it shrinks each time it is used. The owner's life is mirrored by the shrinking skin. This edition reproduces the text of the first edition of the novel (1831) and is the only available edition of this version. The book comes with a cd-rom on which the reader will find a critical apparatus prepared by Andrew Oliver, a well-known Balzac scholar.

Roman Philosophique

La Peau de Chagrin

This volume affords a visual documentation of the most varied political career in American history and exemplifies the work of the principal American portraitists from the days of Copley and Stuart to the dawn of the Daguerrean era. Included in the 159 illustrations are all the known life portraits, busts, and silhouettes of John Quincy and Louisa Catherine Adams, along with important replicas, copies, engravings, and representative likenesses of their siblings. The book is organized into seven chapters which generally coincide with the major divisions of John Quincy Adams' political career. Within each chapter are discussed the artists, their relationships with the Adams's, and the provenance of each of their works. A chronology of John Quincy Adams' life for each period accompanies the chapter to which it pertains. Information about the size of each likeness, the inscriptions if any, the date executed, and present ownership where known is summarized in the List of Illustrations. The Adams's, as they watched themselves age over the years in the marble, ink, or oil of the artists who portrayed them, recorded much by way of commentary on the artistic talent and process at hand. The author makes use of the diaries and correspondence preserved in the Adams Papers, thus combining a learned appreciation with an intimate glimpse of Adams's as they saw themselves.

Portraits of John Quincy Adams and His Wife

Augustin-Amant-Constant-Fidèle Edouart

Auguste Edouart's Silhouettes of Eminent Americans, 1839-1844

intertextualité de la lecture dans L'Immoraliste de Gide

Michel, Job, Pierre, Paul

Nadia Odouard

Raymond Radiguet, Le Bal du comte d'Orgel

Rachel Falconer

What happens when we re-read a familiar book? Does the second encounter turn us into experts, more knowing and confident in our relation to the text? Or conversely, does it expose the gaps and limits of each reading experience? Does re-reading affirm our own sense of identity, reconnecting us to earlier memories, or does it shock and destabilize, revealing discontinuities between past and present selves? Is re-reading uncanny, a discovery of the familiar in the unfamiliar, or the reverse? Do certain literary devices and tropes – symbols, allegories, for example, depend on re-reading to be activated? Are there some texts that can only be re-read? Re-reading is rarely discussed in depth yet it forms the core of most conversations about literature, for we rarely become passionate or critical about books we have only read once. It is also re-reading that consolidates a core of texts into what we recognise to be a canon of literature, and it is re-reading, again, that breaks open the canon and reshapes it. We re-read alone, but we also re-read communally, in the shared space of the theatre, or in the translation of a text from one culture to another, or one medium to another. Re-reading is a necessary part of the professional reader’s life yet there is often, in the history of the individual scholar, some formative relationship with a text read obsessively in childhood. This bilingual volume of essays brings together an international group of eminent scholars in order to reflect on this process of re-reading, in honour of Graham Falconer, Professor of 19th century French literature, and long-term re-reader. The essays vary from personal reflections on formative childhood reading, and self-reflexive scholarly re-readings, to analysis of the theme of re-reading in texts, and presentation of new theories of re-reading. Gustave Flaubert, Honoré de Balzac, Stendhal, Eugène Fromentin, Guy de Maupassant, Marcel Proust, Samuel Beckett, Dostoevsky, Mikhail Bakhtin, W. B. Yeats, William Blake, Roland Petit, H. G. Wells and Anthony Hope are amongst the authors re-visited in these reflections on the practice of re-reading.

Essays in honour of Graham Falconer

Re-reading / La relecture

John Quincy Adams

Massachusetts Historical Society

This volume affords a visual documentation of John and Abigail Adams' political career and exemplifies the work of the principal American portraitists.

Portraits of John and Abigail Adams

The Treaty of Ghent signed in 1814, ending the War of 1812, allowed Americans once again to travel abroad. Medical students went to Paris, artists to Rome, academics to Gottingen, and tourists to all European capitals. More intrepid Americans ventured to Athens, to Constantinople, and even to Egypt. Beginning with two eighteenth-century travellers, this book then turns to the 25-year period after 1815 that saw young men from East Coast cities, among them graduates of Harvard, Yale, and Columbia, travelling to the lands of the Bible and of the Greek and Latin authors they had first known as teenagers. Drawing on unpublished letters and diaries together with previously neglected newspaper accounts, as well as a handful of published accounts, this book offers a new look at the early American experience in Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean world. More than thirty illustrations complement the stories told by the travellers themselves.

Andrew Oliver

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