Description
Book SynopsisSchwarz's study is chock full of judicious evaluation of characters, narrative devices, ethical commentary, and helpful information about historical and political contexts including the role of Napoleon, the rise of capitalism, trains, class divisions, transformation of rural life, and the struggle to define human values in a period characterized by debates between and among rationalism, spiritualism, and determinism. One experiences the pleasure of watching a master critic as he re-reads, savors, and passes on his hard-won wisdom about how we as humans read and why. Daniel Morris,Professor of English, Purdue University Written by one of literature's most esteemed scholars and critics,Reading the European Novel to 1900is an engaging and in-depth examination of major works of the European novel from Cervantes'Don Quixote toZola'sGerminal. In Daniel R. Schwarz's inimitable style, which balances formal and historical criticism in precise, readable prose, this book offers close readings
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
1 Introduction: The Odyssey of Reading Novels 1
2 Miguel de Cervantes’Don Quixote (1605, 1615): Inventing the Novel 25
3 Reading Stendhal’s The Red and the Black (1830) and The Charterhouse of Parma (1839): Character and Caricature 55
1 “Perhaps”:The Red and the Black as Psychological Novel and Political Anatomy 56
2 The Charterhouse of Parma: Narrative as Energy, Reading as Play 69
4 Predatory BehaviorinBalzac’sP`ere Goriot (1835): Paris as a Trope for Moral Cannibalism 89
5 Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857) and Sentimental Education (1869): The Aesthetic Novel 107
1 Madame Bovary: Literary Form Examining Provincial Manners and Desire 107
2 Briefly Discussing the Puzzles of Sentimental Education 124
6 ReadingDostoevsky’sNotes from Underground (1864) and Crime and Punishment (1866) 133
1 Notes from Underground: The Piano Plays Back 133
2 Crime and Punishment: Raskolnikov’s Descent and Rebirth 146
7 Hyperbole and Incongruity in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880): Excess and Turmoil as Modes of Being 171
8 Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869): The Novel as Historical Epic 203
9 Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1877): Exploring Passions and Values in Nineteenth-Century Russia 231
10 Emile Zola’s Germinal (1885): The Aesthetics, Thematics, and Ideology of the Novel of Purpose 253
Selected Bibliography (IncludingWorks Cited) 273
Index 279
