This canon of French literature, Honore de Balzac (1799-1850) is also a major European figure in the development of realism. His work is dominated by an inter-related sequence of novels and short stories, La Comedie Humanine, which charts the idiosyncrasies of French society from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the 1840's. Among the most famous of these are Le Pierre Goriot and La Cousine Bette. Iin this study, Dr Tilby concentrates on the main approaches in practice and discusses some of the earliest responses to Balzac's work. His introduction and headnotes set Balzac's work in context. This book will be of interest to students of French language and literature and also to those studying French in combined studies or humanities courses.

Examining how the rise of book illustration affected the historic hegemony of the word, Keri Yousif explores the complex literary and artistic relationship between the novelist Honoré de Balzac and the illustrator J. J. Grandville during the French July Monarchy (1830-1848). Both collaborators and rivals, these towering figures struggled for dominance in the Parisian book trade at the height of the Romantic revolution and its immediate aftermath. Both men were social portraitists who collaborated on the influential encyclopedic portrayal of nineteenth-century society, Les Français peints par eux-mêmes. However, their collaboration soon turned competitive with Grandville's publication of Scènes de la vie privée et publique des animaux, a visual parody of Balzac's Scènes de la vie privée. Yousif investigates Balzac's and Grandville's individual and joint artistic productions in terms of the larger economic and aesthetic struggles within the nineteenth-century arena of cultural production, showing how writers were forced to position themselves both in terms of the established literary hierarchy and in relation to the rapidly advancing image. As Yousif shows, the industrialization of the illustrated book spawned a triadic relationship between publisher, writer, and illustrator that transformed the book from a product of individual genius to a cooperative and commercial affair. Her study represents a significant contribution to our understanding of literature, art, and their interactions in a new marketplace for publication during the fraught transition from Romanticism to Realism.

Leading specialists shed new light on key narrative and thematic features of the writings of Honoré de Balzac.

This volume adopts a varied approach to the study of the 'material world' in the French literature, thought and visual arts of the 19th century. Contributors look not only at the Romantic and Realist transcendence of the Neo-classical heritage of abstraction and idealism, but also adopt modern critical perspectives to analyse central themes such as urbanisation, fetishism and the representation of the female body.

Presents critical essays on the works of French author Honore de Balzac.

Graham Robb has produced a masterpiece literary biography in which Balzac bursts into life on every page. The living manifestation of the colourful and varied world he described, yet at the same time its most astonishing exception, Balzac is the perfect subject for biography. Robb skilfully interweaves the life with the work to paint an indelible and brilliantly compelling portrait of one of the great tragicomic heroes of the nineteenth century, a man whose influence both in and outside his native France has been and is still immense.