Wow! eBook
Opera in the Novel from Balzac to Proust
Author(s): Cormac Newark (Author)
- Publisher: Cambridge University Press
- Publication Date: May 9, 2011
- Edition: 1st
- Language: English
- Print length: 298 pages
- ISBN-10: 0521118905
- ISBN-13: 9780521118903
Book Description
The turning point of Madame Bovary, which Flaubert memorably set at the opera, is only the most famous example of a surprisingly long tradition, one common to a range of French literary styles and sub-genres. In the first book-length study of that tradition to appear in English, Cormac Newark examines representations of operatic performance from Balzac’s La Comédie humaine to Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, by way of (among others) Dumas père’s Le Comte de Monte-Cristo and Leroux’s Le Fantôme de l’Opéra. Attentive to textual and musical detail alike in the works, the study also delves deep into their reception contexts. The result is a compelling cultural-historical account: of changing ways of making sense of operatic experience from the 1820s to the 1920s, and of a perennial writerly fascination with the recording of that experience.
