Here is the blurb from the dust jacket:
In the last few decades, a great quantity of forgotten personal writing-diaries, memoirs, and letters written by George Sand, Anatole France, and Marcel Proust, among others-has resurfaced in France. In this marvelously original book, Dan Hofstadter shows how these rediscovered documents bear on the erotic lives of their writers, and how the fine French tradition of conducting love affairs developed as an art form. As his subtle analysis makes amply clear, the love letters exchanged in a series of highly charged liaisons also suggested the themes, even the wording, of celebrated future novels.
Bypassing old-fashioned biographical modes and applying the scrupulous techniques of the best modern American nonfiction, Hofstadter focuses on crucial months in the lives of these great figures of nineteenth-century Paris. Enlisting the evidence of hastily written notes, telegrams, and confessions, as well as famous letters and novels, he weaves a narrative bursting with surprise and revelation. The romantic trajectory runs from Benjamin Constant and Mme de Stael to the beautiful Mme Recamier and her lover Chateaubriand; from George Sand and Alfred de Musset to Mme de Caillavet and Anatole France; and it concludes with a touching portrait, based partly on still -unpublished sources, of the girl who became the model for Proust's Gilberte.
Disenchanted yet compassionate, with an affectionate eye for the comical and absurd, The Love Affair as a Work of Art shows us just how much we all have been affected by the erotic, romantic, and literary powers of these long -past heroes and heroines.
Below is the blurb from the back cover:
The Love Affair as a Work of Art is itself a work of art of a high and rare order. Not an exercise in belles-lettres or an essay in historical biography, it is both simultaneously, adding up to an integer all its own. The gleaming theme of the book is the role of memory in the essential rela tionships of people who give themselves up wholly to profound experiences of feeling. We imagine we knew the people who embellish this theme-which shines like sunlight through the interstices of incident-but as we read we realize we are only now making their acquaintance. That even goes for Proust! This is a miracle of incorruptible empathy and literary sovereignty. A great, a serious, and an enchanting creation. -JAMES LORD
There is no one else-no one-in the entire United States who can write like this. The verve, the elegance, the wit, the worldliness of The Love Affair as a Work of Art has no equal. Hofstadter wears his learning lightly-and the readers of this book will find themselves in the continuous presence of illuminating delights. We ought to be thankful for having such an American writer in our midst. And the French ought to be thankful for such an American, who knows and writes about them and their literary past so well. -JOHN LUKACS
| Price | $4.00 |
|---|---|
| Shipping & Handling | $3.00 |
| Total | $7.00 |
