Prince of Europe

Prince of Europe
Author: Philip Mansel
Publisher: Orion Publishing Company
Total Pages: 414
Release: 2005
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780753818558

The Habsburg courtier Charles-Joseph Prince de Ligne seduced and symbolized eighteenth-century Europe. Speaking French, the international language of the day, he travelled between Paris and St Petersburg, charming everyone he met. He stayed with Madame du Barry, dined with Frederick the Great and travelled to the Crimea with Catherine the Great. But Ligne was more than a frivolous charmer. He participated in and recorded some of the most important events and movements of his day: the Enlightenment; the struggle for mastery in Germany; the decline of the Ottoman Empire; the birth of German nationalism; and the wars to liberate Europe from Napoleon. He had surprisingly radical views, believing for example in property rights for women, legal rights for Jews and the redistribution of wealth. He was also a highly respected writer and his books on gardens, his letters from the Crimea and his epigrams are considered minor classics of French literature.

Esther Happy

Esther Happy
Author: Honoré de Balzac
Publisher: Good Press
Total Pages: 143
Release: 2021-04-10
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

"Esther Happy" is one of the four parts of the serial novel, "The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans (also known as, "A Harlot High and Low,") a novel by French novelist Honoré de Balzac. Lucien de Rubempré and Carlos Herrera (Vautrin) have made a pact, in which Lucien will arrive at success in Paris if he agrees to follow Vautrin's instructions blindly. Esther van Gobseck throws a wrench into Vautrin's best-laid plans, however, because Lucien falls in love with her and she with him. One night, however, the incredibly rich banker Baron de Nucingen spots Esther and falls deeply in love with her. When Vautrin realizes that Nucingen's obsession is with Esther, he decides to use her power as a tool to help advance Lucien by extrapolating the maximum amount of money from the Baron as possible. Something that will result in a series of tragic results...

Bonaventura Vulcanius, Works and Networks

Bonaventura Vulcanius, Works and Networks
Author: Hélène Cazes
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 505
Release: 2010-11-19
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9004192093

This volume gathers studies and documentation on Bonaventura Vulcanius, a versatile philologist and writer who in 1581 settled in Leiden as a Professor of Greek and Latin. It includes many unpublished texts pertaining to this mysterious figure Dutch Humanism.

Resonant Recoveries

Resonant Recoveries
Author: Jillian C. Rogers
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2021
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0190658290

"French Music and Trauma Between the World Wars illustrates that coping with trauma was a central concern for French musicians active after World War I. The losses and violent warfare of World War I shaped how interwar French musicians-from those fighting in the trenches and working in military hospitals to more well-known musicians-engaged with music. Situated at the intersections of musicology, history, sound and performance studies, and psychology and trauma studies, Resonant Recoveries argues that modernists' compositions and musical activities were sonorous locations for managing and performing trauma. Through analysis of archival materials, French medical, philosophical, and literary texts, and the music produced between the wars, this book illuminates how music emerged during World War I as an embodied technology of consolation. Resonant Recoveries demonstrates that music making came to be understood by French interwar musicians as a consolatory practice that enhanced their abilities to remember lost loved ones, gave them opportunities to perform their grief publicly and privately, allowed them to create healing bonds of friendship, and soothed them with sonic vibrations and the rhythmically regular bodily movements required in order to perform many French neoclassical compositions. In revealing the importance music making held for interwar French musicians, this book refigures French modernist music as a therapeutic medium for creators, performers, and audiences, while also underlining the importance of addressing trauma, mourning, and people's emotional lives in music scholarship"--

International Exchange in the Early Modern Book World

International Exchange in the Early Modern Book World
Author: Matthew McLean
Publisher: Library of the Written Word
Total Pages: 383
Release: 2016
Genre: History
ISBN: 9789004316447

International Exchange in the Early Modern Book World presents new research on the movement and exchange of books between countries, languages and confessions. It explores commercial networks and business strategies, and the translation and circulation of literature, music and drama.

Epic and Empire

Epic and Empire
Author: David Quint
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 444
Release: 2021-01-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0691222959

Alexander the Great, according to Plutarch, carried on his campaigns a copy of the Iliad, kept alongside a dagger; on a more pronounced ideological level, ancient Romans looked to the Aeneid as an argument for imperialism. In this major reinterpretation of epic poetry beginning with Virgil, David Quint explores the political context and meanings of key works in Western literature. He divides the history of the genre into two political traditions: the Virgilian epics of conquest and empire that take the victors' side (the Aeneid itself, Camoes's Lusíadas, Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata) and the countervailing epic of the defeated and of republican liberty (Lucan's Pharsalia, Ercilla's Araucana, and d'Aubigné's Les tragiques). These traditions produce opposing ideas of historical narrative: a linear, teleological narrative that belongs to the imperial conquerors, and an episodic and open-ended narrative identified with "romance," the story told of and by the defeated. Quint situates Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained within these rival traditions. He extends his political analysis to the scholarly revival of medieval epic in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and to Sergei Eisenstein's epic film, Alexander Nevsky. Attending both to the topical contexts of individual poems and to the larger historical development of the epic genre, Epic and Empire provides new models for exploring the relationship between ideology and literary form.