Droll Stories - Softcover

De Balzac, Honore

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1634505115 ISBN 13: 9781634505116

Publisher: Skyhorse, 2015

Synopsis

From the great French novelist comes this long-unavailable collection of tales in the tradition of Boccaccio’s Decameron.

Balzac’s Contes Drolatiques, or Droll Stories, were originally published in three volumes in the 1830s. Set in medieval Europe, these stories were Balzac’s attempt to write in the great tradition of Rabelais and Boccaccio, to render the Middle Ages with a touch of raunchy humor, and to provide a delightful portrait of medieval France. Balzac took the old themes that had delighted his ancestors the tales of faithless wives and confiding husbands, of monks incredibly endowed for amorous athleticism, of lusty wenches and adventurous lads, and of great bouts of eating and drinking.

Droll Stories has always been an essential part of Balzac’s work when published in French, but it has been excluded from the definitive English editions. This book presents all three volumes of this classic and enduring work.

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About this title

From the Author:

Honoré de Balzac was born in 1799 in France. As a novelist and playwright, he is widely regarded as the founder of realism in European literature. His work had a profound effect on generations of writers who have followed him, from Proust to Dickens to Faulkner to Kerouac. He is best known for his La Comédie humaine, a multivolume collection of linked novels and stories. He died in 1850 in Paris at the age of fifty-one.

From the Back Cover:

Balzac's Contes Drolatiques, published in three installments in the 1830s, offers a lively and lusty portrait of sixteenth-century French life and manners. These thirty stories in the tradition of Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Rabelais were claimed by the author to have originated in manuscripts from the abbeys of Touraine. Abounding in episodes of good-humored licentiousness, the tales scandalized Balzac's contemporaries and continue to delight modern readers.
French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) was a founder of realism in European literature. An inspiration to Proust, Dickens, Faulkner, Dostoyevsky, and countless others, Balzac wrote works that were hailed for their multifaceted characters and exquisite attention to detail. This edition's excellent translation was the first to make Contes Drolatiques available to English-speaking readers.
Dover (2014) republication of a standard edition.
See every Dover book in print at
www.doverpublications.com

About this edition

• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1634505115
• ISBN 13: 9781634505116
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 572