This study explores the process by which Balzac made use of the unique structure of his fictional world to create subtlety and complexity both within and between the individual works of "La Comedie humaine." Internal narrations--scenes of story-telling--offer a particularly rich field of study as characters tell each other stories about other characters. Because of the system of recurring characters, Balzac's narrative framing creates layers of meaning, thus raising questions that resonate throughout the whole textual edifice. "Weaving Balzac's Web" shows how story-telling scenes can serve as windows into the depths of Balzac's masterpiece and reveal the carefully construction complexities and ambiguities that lie enmeshed in its vast narrative web.

Exploring the experiments in individual and national self-consciousness conducted during the Romantic period, this essential comparative study of European literature, philosophy and politics makes original and often surprising connections and contrasts to reveal how personal and social identities were re-orientated and disorientated from the French Revolution onwards. Reviving a contested moment in the history of aesthetic theory, this study shows how the growing awareness of irresolution in Kant's third Kritik allowed Romantic writers to put the aesthetic to radical uses not envisaged by its parent philosophy. It also recounts how they would go on to force philosophy to revise received notions of authority, empowering women and subordinated ethnic groups to re-orientate existing hierarchies. The sheer range and variety of writers covered is testament both to the breadth of writing that Kant's philosophy so rashly legitimated and to the wider importance of philosophy to the understanding of Romantic literature.

The consequences of high-end inequality seep into almost every aspect of human life: it is not just a question for economists. In this highly accessible new work, Professor Shaviro takes an interdisciplinary approach to explore how great works of literature have provided some of the most incisive accounts of inequality and its social and cultural ramifications over the last two centuries. Through perceptive close readings of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Edith Wharton, among others, he not only demonstrates how these accounts are still relevant today, but how they can illuminate our understanding of our current situation and broaden our own perspective beyond the merely economic.

A portrait of the self-destructive French novelist follows Balzac's early literary disappointments, impractical money-making schemes, love affairs, correspondences, and achievements.

Owing to his keen observation of detail and unfiltered representation of society, Balzac is regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature. Balzac sought to present his characters as real people, neither fully good nor fully evil, but completely human. His labyrinthine city provided a literary model used later by English novelist Charles Dickens and Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky. The novel sequence La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of post-Napoleonic French life, is generally viewed as his magnum opus.. An original illustration.