Rosemary Lloyd - Böcker

The Land of Lost Content explores the ways in which nineteenth-century French writers represented childhood and children in their work. Rosemary Lloyd considers poetry, fiction, autobiographies, and letters to trace the ways in which a range of writers gradually responded to changing concepts of the self. After a study of central problems and recurrent motifs encountered in autobiography, a chronological survey of fictional texts shows the development of a series of myths of childhood successively debunked by later writers, who in turn create their own myths. Further chapters explore such central themes as reading, nature, and school, and examine the evolution of a literature in which the child becomes the main protagonist, as well as addressing the question of whether the child figure is merely used as a reductive stereotype. This is the first study of childhood in nineteenth-century France to range from autobiography through major fiction to works for children, and to use as its primary focus the narratological difficulties of recreating childhood.

This is a comparative study of the work and thought of the German Romantic writer E. T. A. Hoffmann and the French poet Charles Baudelaire. Hoffmann was introduced into France in 1829 and Baudelaire could have read his work in the numerous translations that were published in the following decades. This 1979 book attempts to explain Baudelaire's fascination with Hoffmann's combination of humour and the fantastic, showing the extent to which the two men shared very similar views about art in particular and the world in general. Although earlier critics had referred to Baudelaire's interest in Hoffmann and the influence Hoffmann had over him, none had examined the question at such length, nor analysed in such detail the way in which each exploited the fantastic.

Charles Baudelaire's place among the great poets of the Western world is undisputed, and his influence on the development of poetry since his lifetime has been enormous. In this Companion, essays by outstanding scholars illuminate Baudelaire's writing both for the lay reader and for specialists. In addition to a survey of his life and a study of his social context, the volume includes essays on his verse and prose, analyzing the extraordinary power and effectiveness of his language and style, his exploration of intoxicants like wine and opium, and his art and literary criticism. The volume also discusses the difficulties, successes and failures of translating his poetry and his continuing power to move his readers. Featuring a guide to further reading and a chronology, this Companion provides students and scholars of Baudelaire and of nineteenth-century French and European literature with a comprehensive and stimulating overview of this extraordinary poet.

Charles Baudelaire's place among the great poets of the Western world is undisputed, and his influence on the development of poetry since his lifetime has been enormous. In this Companion, essays by outstanding scholars illuminate Baudelaire's writing both for the lay reader and for specialists. In addition to a survey of his life and a study of his social context, the volume includes essays on his verse and prose, analyzing the extraordinary power and effectiveness of his language and style, his exploration of intoxicants like wine and opium, and his art and literary criticism. The volume also discusses the difficulties, successes and failures of translating his poetry and his continuing power to move his readers. Featuring a guide to further reading and a chronology, this Companion provides students and scholars of Baudelaire and of nineteenth-century French and European literature with a comprehensive and stimulating overview of this extraordinary poet.

Although much has been written lately on the links between painting and writing, little or no attention has been paid to those moments in literature when the narrative stops to allow for the description of those objects we associate with still life. Rosemary Lloyd's book shows how fascinating this overlooked area is; how rich in suggestions of class, race, and gender; how much it indicates about human pleasures and about the experience of space and time. Lloyd focuses on the last two centuries, particularly at points marked by the irruption of images of contingency and rapid change into the fields of art: for example, the year of the Terror in French history; the decade in which Haussman's politically driven transformation of Paris led Baudelaire to write his great modernist poem "Le Cygne"; and "on or about December 1910," the date to which Virginia Woolf attributes a revolution in the definition of literary character. Lloyd's central concern lies with the ways in which the still life, written or painted, both evokes and attempts to deal with the sense of contingency. While she makes frequent reference to paintings, she focuses above all on written still lifes, particularly those moments when novels pause to address the subject matter of still life—a bowl of fruit, a hat rack, a desk cluttered with pens and papers—in ways that invite contemplation of other and broader cultural domains. She draws on literary and art works from Australia, England, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, and the United States.

Madame Bovary ranks among the world’s most famous and widely read novels, and has inspired numerous critical theories. First published in 1987, this study draws on both twentieth-century and traditional critical views to provide both students and scholars with a fresh analysis of the novel: its narrative techniques, social background, and underlying structures. By setting the novel in an historical context, and exploring the ways in which it offers a hinge between romanticism and realism, the book establishes a framework through which the reader can assess questions of narrative strategy, of symbolic patterning and most importantly, parody and pastiche. Throughout Madame Bovary, Rosemary Lloyd argues, a series of intertwining voices challenge assumptions about the nature of narrative and the relationship between reader and writer. This reissue will provoke and stimulate debate among students and lecturers in French and English literature, for whom Madame Bovary is a key text in the development of the novel.