The Countess von Rudolstadt

The Countess von Rudolstadt
Author: George Sand
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 461
Release: 2018-01-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0812295528

The first translation of The Countess von Rudolstadt in more than a century brings to contemporary readers one of George Sand's most ambitious and engaging novels, hailed by many scholars of French literature as her masterpiece. Consuelo, or the Countess von Rudolstadt, born the penniless daughter of a Spanish gypsy, is transformed into an opera star by the great maestro Porpora. Her peregrinations throughout Europe (especially Vienna, Berlin, and the Bohemian forest), become a quest undertaken on a number of levels: as a singer, as a woman, and as an unwilling subject of alienation and oppression. Sand's heroine moves through a mid-eighteenth-century Europe where absolute rulers mingle with Enlightenment philosophers and gender-bending members of secret societies plot moral and political revolution. As the old order breaks down, she undergoes a series of grueling initiations into radically redefined notions of marriage and social organization. In a novel by equal measures philosophical and lurid, nothing is what it seems. Written some fifty years after the French Revolution, the book taps into many of the political and religious currents that contributed to that social upheaval—and aims to channel their potential for future change. Fed by Sand's rich imagination and bold aspirations for social reform, The Countess von Rudolstadt is a sinuous novel of initiation, continuing the coming of age tale of the titular heroine of Sand's earlier Consuelo and drawing on such diverse models as Ann Radcliffe's Gothic tales and Goethe's Wilhelm Meister.

George Sand

George Sand
Author: Martine Reid
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2018-04-27
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0271082720

The romantic and rebellious novelist George Sand, born in 1804 as Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, remains one of France’s most infamous and beloved literary figures. Thanks to a peerless translation by Gretchen van Slyke, Martine Reid’s acclaimed biography of Sand is now available in English. Drawing on recent French and English biographies of Sand as well as her novels, plays, autobiographical texts, and correspondence, Reid creates the most complete portrait possible of a writer who was both celebrated and vilified. Reid contextualizes Sand within the literature of the nineteenth century, unfolds the meaning and importance of her chosen pen name, and pays careful attention to Sand’s political, artistic, and scientific expressions and interests. The result is a candid, even-handed, and illuminating representation of a remarkable woman in remarkable times. With its clear, flowing language and impeccable scholarship, this Ernest Montusès Award–winning biography of the author of La Petite Fadette and A Winter in Majorca will be of great interest to those specializing in Sand and nineteenth-century literature—and to readers everywhere.

Consuelo

Consuelo
Author: George Sand
Publisher:
Total Pages: 332
Release: 1847
Genre: Venice (Italy)
ISBN:

Tracing Women's Romanticism

Tracing Women's Romanticism
Author: Kari E. Lokke
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 191
Release: 2004-09-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1134300611

Awarded the 2005 Jean-Pierre Barricelli Book Prize by the International Conference on Romanticism This book explores a cosmopolitan tradition of nineteenth-century novels written in response to Germaine de Staël's originary novel of the artist as heroine, corinne. The first book to delineate the contours of an international women's Romanticism, it argues that the künstlerromane of Mary Shelley, Bettine von Arnim, and George Sand offer feminist understandings of history and transcendence that constitute a critique of Romanticism from within. The book examines meditative, mystical and utopian visions of religious and artistic transcendence in the novels of women Romanticists as vehicles for the representation of a gendered subjectivity that seeks detachment and distance from the interests and strictures of the existing patriarchal social and cultural order. For these writers, the author argues, self-transcendence means an abandonment or dissolution of the individual self through political and spiritual efforts that culminate in a revelation of the divinity of a collective selfhood that comes into being through historical process.

Women and Death 3

Women and Death 3
Author: Clare Bielby
Publisher: Camden House
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2010
Genre: History
ISBN: 1571134395

Studies representations of women and death by women to see whether and how they differ from patriarchal versions.