" Salvator Rosa (1615–1673) was a colorful and controversial Italian painter, talented musician, a notable comic actor, a prolific correspondent, and a successful satirist and poet. His paintings, especially his rugged landscapes and their evocation of the sublime, appealed to Romantic writers, and his work was highly influential on several generations of European writers. James S. Patty analyzes Rosa’s tremendous influence on French writers, chiefly those of the nineteenth century, such as Stendhal, Honoré de Balzac, Victor Hugo, George Sand, and Théophile Gautier. Arranged in chronological order, with numerous quotations from French fiction, poetry, drama, art criticism, art history, literary history, and reference works, Salvator Rosa in French Literature forms a narrative account of the reception of Rosa’s life and work in the world of French letters. James S. Patty, professor emeritus of French at Vanderbilt University, is the author of Dürer in French Letters . He lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

Child of materialism and positivism, Courbet was without a doubt one of the most complex painters of the nineteenth century. Symbolising the rejection of traditions, Courbet did not hesitate to confront the public with the truth by liberating painting of conventional rules. He became from then on the leader of pictorial realism.

This book - the first full-length study of the blason poétique examines the evolution of this French genre in the course of the sixteenth century, but also traces its earliest heraldic origins and indicates its subsequent development into the seventeenth century. The blason is treated in general but attention is concentrated particularly upon the anatomical blasons and contreblasons written by Clément Marot and his contemporaries in the 1530s and 1540s with a revaluation of their chronology in the light of hitherto «lost» editions, and an examination of the poems themselves and their debt both to the native French tradition and to Italian influences. Parallels are traced with contemporary illustrated verse, and the study attempts to demonstrate how - far from being an ephemeral eccentricity - the genre fits into the overall pattern of sixteenth-century French verse.

Festivals and the French Revolution--the subject conjures up visions of goddesses of Liberty, strange celebrations of Reason, and the oddly pretentious cult of the Supreme Being. Every history of the period includes some mention of festivals; Ozouf shows us that they were much more than bizarre marginalia to the revolutionary process.

Highly readable narrative of a writing phenomenon. The world's most translated best-selling writer.

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.

In the eighteenth century Paris underwent a remarkable transformation in Western attitudes about life and death. The Architecture of Death traces this change through six pivotal decades, and analyzes the intellectual and social concerns that led to the establishment of a new kind of urban institution - the municipal cemetery. Drawing heavily on new materials and archival sources, supported by nearly 270 plans, photographs, and drawings, the book is not only a definitive work on the design of cemeteries but is also the cultural history of an age.