The Hidden Reader: Stendhal, Balzac, Hugo, Baudelaire, Flaubert - Hardcover

Brombert, Victor

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674390121 ISBN 13: 9780674390126

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 1988

Synopsis

Victor Brombert is an unrivaled interpreter of French literature; and the writers he considers in this latest book are ones with whom he has a long acqualntance. These essays--eleven of them appearing in English for the first time and some totally new--give us an acute analysis of the major figures of the nineteenth century and a splendid lesson in criticism.

Brombert shows how a text works--its structure and narrative devices, and the symbolic function of characters, episodes, words--and he highlights the distinctive postures and styles of each writer. He gives us a sense of the hidden inner text as well as the techniques writers have devised to lead their readers to the discovery of what is hidden. With wonderful subtlety he unravels the reader's participatory response, whether it be Hugo reading Shakespeare, Sartre reading Hugo, Stendhal reading Rousseau, T. S. Eliot misreading Baudelaire, or Baudelaire, Balzac, and Flaubert reading their own sensibilities. This book is a sterling example of the finest kind of literary criticism--wise, intelligent, responsive, sympathetic--that reveals central aspects of the creative process and returns the reader joyfully to the texts themselves.

About this title

About the Author:

Victor Brombert is the Henry Putnam University Professor of Romance and Comparative Literature and Director of the Christian Gauss Seminars in Criticism at Princeton University.

From Library Journal:

Brombert's major concern is how authors "read" each other and their own sensibilities; he is further interested in "literary mediation and the gap between text and event." Investigating the complexities of these issues, he offers interpretations of key 19th-century authors, focusing on their central themes and stances. The final essay, on T. S. Eliot's misreading of Baudelaire and condemnation of the romantic "heresy," calls for a critical reevaluation of romanticism, a project already begun here. This is knowledgeable, elegant, even mandarin criticism; for academic libraries. Richard Kuczkowski, Dominican Coll., Blauvelt, N.Y.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0674390121
• ISBN 13: 9780674390126
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256