On Stendhal: "The study of human nature, 'the observation of the human heart and its passions, ' was his constant preoccupation. But where could he study the passions better than in himself? Though he lived exuberantly, submitting himself to experience... he went on incessantly writing down everything that happened to him just as it happened. he even led to perform some remarkable experiments upon himself.He laid claim to having been a soldier, a man of fortune, a great lover, a society wit, a diplomat, a traveler, and even, sometimes, a revolutionary conspirator. "Fifty years after his death he becomes one of the demigods of the world's letters, taking his place in the ranks of the great social writers who appeared toward the end of the last century. his manner of life itself has fascinated whole regiments of literary scholars in France, Italy and Germany in the last forty years." -Matthew Josephson, From the Introduction (1946) "Like Josephson's Victor Hugo, it is the best and most comprehensive English study of its subject, a careful collection of material, skillfully assembled and organized...When Freud read Stendhal's memoirs of his childhood and adolescence he called them 'a manifestation of psychological genius.' Stendhal, he saw, had been a Freudian some 70 years before Freud himself."-TIME Magazine (1946)

During a period when the field of literary studies turned away from texts to "theory," Novel Configurations: A Study of French Fiction has become an underground classic. Although it proposes a theory, that theory is inductive and solidly based in real works of fiction. While looking again at significant masterpieces that range from the early nineteenth-to the late twentieth-centuries, from the creations of traditional french writers to that of an Argentine who spent most of his productive life in France. Allan H. Pasco has perceptively indicted new but valid close readings that have revolutionized our view of these works. He suggests that La Chartreuse de Parme is rigorously organized, that Balzac was a narrational minimalists, that Huysmans developed novelistic strategies that would be played out in the Nouvea Roman, that Proust intended good readers to come away from A la recherche du temps perdu with very different but complementary interpretations, that Robbe-Grillet's La Jalousie turns on a plot that seems strange only because it takes place in the mind of the narrator. From these philololgically sophisticated interpretations, Pasco lucidly, elegantly, and wittily points to categories that include all fiction. Concentrating on patterns and description, on the one hand, and external and internal organization, on the other, Novel configurations proposes a new classification that can be easily taught to novices though it will help even professional readers understand the most complex fictional innovations.

An engaging, highly accessible and informative introduction to French literature from the Middle Ages to the present.

"Stendhal's most independent heroines are usually disliked or marginalized by critics. However, when gender-neutral criteria are applied, Mina de Vanghel, Vanina Vanini, Mathilde de La Mole, and Lamiel can all be shown to enact extraordinary experiments in freedom. These experiments are all the more remarkable in view of the gender of their agents, the historical situation of the author (1783-1842), and the conventions of the literary movement that his fiction helped to found: realism. Simone de Beauvoir's 1949 study of Stendhal's heroines gives preference to the reserved females over his Amazons. But existentialism, as a philosophy of freedom, also enables a reading of the self-determining heroines that acknowledges the superiority of their choices: their resistance and counter-plots, their paradoxical authenticity, their rejection of seriousness, and their assumption of responsibility for the routes they plot."