Cover: The Hidden Reader: Stendhal, Balzac, Hugo, Baudelaire, Flaubert, from Harvard University PressCover: The Hidden Reader in E-DITION

The Hidden Reader

Stendhal, Balzac, Hugo, Baudelaire, Flaubert

Product Details

E-DITION

$65.00 • £54.95 • €60.00

ISBN 9780674731561

Publication Date: 05/30/1988

226 pages

World

Available from De Gruyter »

Media Requests:

Related Subjects

Harvard University Press has partnered with De Gruyter to make available for sale worldwide virtually all in-copyright HUP books that had become unavailable since their original publication. The 2,800 titles in the “e-ditions” program can be purchased individually as PDF eBooks or as hardcover reprint (“print-on-demand”) editions via the “Available from De Gruyter” link above. They are also available to institutions in ten separate subject-area packages that reflect the entire spectrum of the Press’s catalog. More about the E-ditions Program »

Victor Brombert is an unrivaled interpreter of French literature; and the writers he considers in this latest book are ones with whom he has a long acqualntance. These essays—eleven of them appearing in English for the first time and some totally new—give us an acute analysis of the major figures of the nineteenth century and a splendid lesson in criticism.

Brombert shows how a text works—its structure and narrative devices, and the symbolic function of characters, episodes, words—and he highlights the distinctive postures and styles of each writer. He gives us a sense of the hidden inner text as well as the techniques writers have devised to lead their readers to the discovery of what is hidden. With wonderful subtlety he unravels the reader’s participatory response, whether it be Hugo reading Shakespeare, Sartre reading Hugo, Stendhal reading Rousseau, T. S. Eliot misreading Baudelaire, or Baudelaire, Balzac, and Flaubert reading their own sensibilities. This book is a sterling example of the finest kind of literary criticism—wise, intelligent, responsive, sympathetic—that reveals central aspects of the creative process and returns the reader joyfully to the texts themselves.

Recent News

Black lives matter. Black voices matter. A statement from HUP »

From Our Blog

Jacket: Iron and Blood: A Military History of the German-Speaking Peoples since 1500, by Peter Wilson, from Harvard University Press

A Lesson in German Military History with Peter Wilson

In his landmark book Iron and Blood: A Military History of the German-Speaking Peoples since 1500, acclaimed historian Peter H. Wilson offers a masterful reappraisal of German militarism and warfighting over the last five centuries, leading to the rise of Prussia and the world wars. Below, Wilson answers our questions about this complex history,