This book deals with the important and hitherto neglected relationship between the works of Stendhal and Plutarch's Parallel Lives. Stendhal's readings of Plutarch are shown to inform his literary representations of Revolution and Empire, Restoration and Orleanism, as well as his theorizations of Romanticism. In particular, the Plutarchan concept of Parallel Lives is used to analyse one of the major themes of Stendhal's writing: the self-construction of individual identity, whether (auto)biographical or fictional, by means of the emulation (as distinct from the imitation) of heroic exemplars. As a consequence, the balance between irony and idealism often identified by critics in Stendhal's work is shown rather to be an imbalance, weighted in favour of an idealism derived from Plutarchan conceptions of heroism, particularly as they are represented in the Lives of Julius Caesar and Marcus Brutus.

"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."

This is a book about the life and work of a singular writer, an author well-known for his biographies and travel writing but most famous for his novels The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma. As a child, Stendhal witnessed the unfolding of the French Revolution; as a young man, he served Napoleon first as a soldier and then as an administrator; and as a middle-aged man, he made it his task not to pursue his career, but instead to take as much paid leave as possible in order to be free and to be happy—and to write. Stendhal’s works often take the form of conversations with his readers—the “Happy Few” as he called them—about the things that matter most. He once claimed that he spent the majority of his life “carefully considering five or six main ideas.” This book makes clear what those main ideas were, why they mattered to Stendhal, and why they continue to matter to all of us.

TThe Oxford Handbook to European Romanticism brings together leading scholars in the field to examine the intellectual, literary, philosophical, and political elements of European Romanticism. The book focuses on the cultural history of the period extending from the French Revolution to the uprisings of 1848. It begins with a series of chapters examining key texts written by major writers in languages including: French; German; Italian; Spanish; Russian; Hungarian; Greek; and Polish amongst others. A second section then explores the naturally inter-disciplinary quality of Romanticism, exemplified by the different discourses with which writers of the time set up an internal, comparative dynamic. These chapters highlight the sense a discourse gives of being written knowledgeably against other pretenders to completeness or comprehensiveness of self-understanding of the time. Discourses typically advance their own claims to resume European culture, collaborating with and at the same time trying to assimilate each other in the process. The main examples featured here are: history; geography; drama; theology; language; philosophy; political theory; the sciences; and the media. Each chapter offers an original and individual interpretation of an inherently comparative world of individual writers and the discursive idioms to which they are historically subject. Together the forty-one chapters provide a comprehensive and provocative overview of European Romanticism.

Marrying life-writing with classical reception, this book examines ancient biography and its impact on subsequent ages. Close readings of ancient texts are framed by an assessment of their influence on the age of the French Revolution and Napoleon, and on the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, of responses to ancient biography of modern critics, and of its visible legacy in art and film. Crucially it asks what modern biographers can learn from their ancient predecessors. Are the challenges involved in life-writing still the same? Have working methods changed, and in what ways? What in the context of biographical writing is truth, and how are its interests best served? How is it possible, now as then, honestly to convey a life?

The Greek biographer and philosopher Plutarch of Chaeronea (c. 45-125 AD) makes a fascinating case-study for reception studies not least because of his uniquely extensive and diverse afterlife. Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Plutarch offers the first comprehensive analysis of Plutarch’s rich reception history from the Roman Imperial period through Late Antiquity and Byzantium to the Renaissance, Enlightenment and the modern era. The thirty-seven chapters that make up this volume, written by a remarkable line-up of experts, explore the appreciation, contestation and creative appropriation of Plutarch himself, his thought and work in the history of literature across various cultures and intellectual traditions in Europe, America, North Africa, and the Middle East.

If the eighteenth century was the age of reason and enlightenment, the nineteenth century was undeniably the age of movement. This tumultuous period in French history bore witness to the rise and fall of countless political movements, from revolutions and “coups d’état”, to popular protests and the first workers’ strikes. It was an age of economic movements as France embraced the new world of finance and banking, and underwent its own industrial revolution. Social mobility increased as a dynamic commercial bourgeoisie began to challenge the system of aristocratic privilege that neither the 1789 Revolution nor the Napoleonic Empire had dismantled entirely. The era was one of artistic ferment, as Romanticism gave way to Realism, Naturalism, Impressionism, and Symbolism. Intellectual and philosophical movements, from Liberalism to Saint-Simonianism, sought both to reconcile the country with its past and construct the framework for a progressive, more harmonious future. Through seventeen thematic essays, Aller(s)-Retour(s) seeks to understand nineteenth-century France as a society in perpetual motion. Recognising the instability that is key to the very concept of movement, this volume explores how the intellectual shifts and cross-currents of the nineteenth century responded to, and impacted upon, each other. Finally, it asks why questions of motion and movement dominated this period, as every sphere of French life confronted its own extremes of progress and renewal, stagnancy and regression.