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What is the correct approach when translating a literary work that dates back two hundred years? Should the translator try to bring the writer closer to the reader, i. e. simplify the text, omitting difficult-to-understand historical realities? Or should they, on the contrary, try to bring the reader closer to the writer by preserving historical realities and trying to explain them in footnotes as much as possible? Each of these options has its followers, and each has a right to exist. Moreover, sometimes both these points of view coexist in one translator’s personality: the linguist in them wants to make the text understandable without explanation, while the historian insists on preserving proper names and realities that are unclear to the modern reader. This paper attempts to resolve this conflict using the examples of old and new translations of two works by Balzac. The first one is “The Physiology of Marriage” (1829), first translated (with omissions) by V.L. Rantsov in 1900, and then by V.A. Milchina (her translation was published for the first time in 1995, and then, with corrections, in 2017). The second work, which Balzac conceived as a continuation of the one mentioned, is “The Minor Troubles of Married Life” (1846). It was first translated by E.G. Beketova in 1899, and then by V.A. Milchina in the same edition in 2017. The translations of Rantsov and Beketova were made according to the rules of their time, when the omission, for example, of proper names, which for some reason were difficult for the translator (the owner of the shadow theater Seraphin or the dancer Fanny Elsler), was considered a completely legal thing and not in the least reprehensible. Indeed, without these names, the text becomes smoother and easier to understand. This temptation is not unknown to modern translators either, but the author of this paper is convinced that it must be fought, especially when translating Balzac. However, this rule also has exceptions, and these are mentioned in the paper.

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The paper is an attempt at showing how the mentions and quotations of contemporary geographic dis-courses inserted in the Balzacian texts and paratexts are there to outline the features of a new novelistic æsthetic. We will start from the following observation: the Balzacian novel and its encyclopedic ambi-tion are contemporaneous with the first attempts of some geographers to found a unified science from a diversified set of knowledges and practices. Therefore, modern geography may appear as an adversary of Balzac’s own ambition of totalization and we will show that geographic discourse, rather than being a model for him as other scientific discourses are, is distorted in his novels, deprived of its epistemological value and reduced to a science without knowledge.

“Embodied Meaning. Materiality, Representation and Money in La Peau de Chagrin, À rebours and Le Jardin des supplices” This article presents readings of three French novels from the nineteenth century, namely Balzac's La Peau de chagrin, Huysmans' À rebours and Octave Mirbeau's Le Jardin des supplices. It examines issues of representation and meaning in relation to debt narratives and the use of bodies as a motif in relation to debt, and it argues that, in these novels, literary language and monetary representation displays parallel developments, exemplified through the shift from realist aesthetics to decadent literary style. The article ends by connecting a shifting representative function and related issues of meaning, to modern tendencies in literature, and the function of the human body in these narratives.

The paper is an attempt at showing how the mentions and quotations of contemporary geographic discourses inserted in the Balzacian texts and paratexts are there to outline the features of a new novelistic œsthetic. We will start from the following observation: the Balzacian novel and its encyclopedic ambition are contemporaneous with the first attempts of some geographers to found a unified science from a diversified set of knowledges and practices. Therefore, modern geography may appear as an adversary of Balzac's own ambition of totalization and we will show that geographic discourse, rather than being a model for him as other scientific discourses are, is distorted in his novels, deprived of its epistemological value and reduced to a science without knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The scholarly literature on realism has largely discussed the factors that have led to realism's development and, concurrently, have played a role in the rise of the novel. Yet one of them has received little theoretical and historical framing: namely, the dialectical relationship that realism, especially late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century realism, established with the novelistic genres that predated its rise and in which it traditionally found expression. I examine this, with the conviction that there is a need for a new investigation of the connection between the orders of literary aesthetics and literary forms to consolidate the conceptual foundations of historical studies of realism, and to highlight its dynamic and conflicted character. For the purposes of this study, in the first section of the paper I engage critically with Russian Formalist Yuri Tynianov's ideas about literary facts and the concept of "series" in order to argue that we should look at realism and novelistic genres as two separate but dialectically related literary series. In the second and third sections of the essay, I test this view on the grounds of historical morphology with reference to the dialectical encounter between the bildungsroman, a novelistic genre, and the realist aesthetic within a period that proved crucial for both of their histories: the forty years between the appearance of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1795–1796) and Honoré de Balzac's Père Goriot (1834–1835). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of British and French society over the long nineteenth century can be framed as two contrasting histories of bureaucratization. In France, a "rational" body of organizational rules and procedures coalesced quickly around the state, taking their paradigmatic form during the First Republic and Empire (1792-1814) but stagnating thereafter. In Britain, these structures developed piecemeal, and over a longer time, gaining relative coherence by the midcentury. In both cases, however, office work became a major social, ideological, and cultural phenomenon, one that warranted literary portrayal despite its apparent unconduciveness to conventional narrative forms. In this article I illustrate the shifting character of "office novels" within these contexts, and I accordingly operate from both a comparative and a longitudinal perspective: comparing novels from France and Britain produced during the midcentury period (pivotal in the history of bureaucracy and of the novel) that focus on office life. I argue that the changing role of the office career between William Makepeace Thackeray's abortive office Bildungsroman The History of Samuel Titmarsh (1841) and Anthony Trollope's The Three Clerks (1858) reflects the reform, saturation, and ideological legitimation of bureaucratic forms in Britain over this period. Meanwhile, the transition from Honor'e de Balzac's highly reflexive satirical novel Les Employ'es (1844) to E' mile Gaboriau's office-hopping Picaresque Les Gens de Bureau (1862) reflects an increasing jadedness in France about the ability of these structures to change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The thread that runs through this article is made of silk, a fabric with a fascinating history of origins in China and a long record of projects aimed at organizing and mechanizing its production in Europe. The silk motif recurs throughout 19th century literature. As an object of realist description it gives the writer the opportunity to explore its sensuous material appeal and, also, to create around it a web of additional references and associations. For Honoré de Balzac and Bolesław Prus silk carries connotations of elegance, social status and social aspirations. In the fiction of Eliza Orzeszkowa it is one of the regularly recurring elements of descriptions of outward appearance of characters. It can interpreted as a mechanical repetition or, perhaps, the foregrounding of the stereotype meaning of silk intended as an invitation to the moral judgment of characters furnished with that mark. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a focus on 'Moi, Eugénie Grandet', one of the last exhibitions Louise Bourgeois worked on before her death in 2010, this article explores the artist's writings, both public and private, and her interactions with writers, to assess the potentially literary nature of her written and visual works. Arguing that Bourgeois's dialogues with Honoré de Balzac's novel Eugénie Grandet is a contemporary and feminist response to a longstanding tradition of pictorial appropriations of Balzac's work—from Paul Cézanne's 'Frenhofer, c'est moi!' to Pablo Picasso's illustrations for the centenary edition of Balzac's The Unknown Masterpiece—this article brings to light a literary intertext to Bourgeois's visual works and contends that it is a crucial aspect of her œuvre. Reckoning with a growing critical interest in the artist's archives and a rising number of edited volumes devoted to her writings, this article considers existing claims that identify Bourgeois as a writer and a poet. Aligning with Roland Barthes's definition of the literary text as a 'new cloth woven with old quotations' and the figure of active reader developed in Barthes's own dialogues with Balzac, this article contends that Bourgeois's literariness is found in simultaneous writing, reading and visual practices and in the ambivalence—between dependency and resistance—towards the words they rely on. Ultimately, this exploration of Bourgeois's words participates in a wider debate on the status of artists' writings, first articulated in Linda Goddard's 2012 special issue of this journal, where they are defined through their 'heightened awareness of the inescapable tensions and crossovers between practice and discourse' and the way they 'bear the trace of this consciousness'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a focus on 'Moi, Eugénie Grandet', one of the last exhibitions Louise Bourgeois worked on before her death in 2010, this article explores the artist's writings, both public and private, and her interactions with writers, to assess the potentially literary nature of her written and visual works. Arguing that Bourgeois's dialogues with Honoré de Balzac's novel Eugénie Grandet is a contemporary and feminist response to a longstanding tradition of pictorial appropriations of Balzac's work—from Paul Cézanne's 'Frenhofer, c'est moi!' to Pablo Picasso's illustrations for the centenary edition of Balzac's The Unknown Masterpiece—this article brings to light a literary intertext to Bourgeois's visual works and contends that it is a crucial aspect of her œuvre. Reckoning with a growing critical interest in the artist's archives and a rising number of edited volumes devoted to her writings, this article considers existing claims that identify Bourgeois as a writer and a poet. Aligning with Roland Barthes's definition of the literary text as a 'new cloth woven with old quotations' and the figure of active reader developed in Barthes's own dialogues with Balzac, this article contends that Bourgeois's literariness is found in simultaneous writing, reading and visual practices and in the ambivalence—between dependency and resistance—towards the words they rely on. Ultimately, this exploration of Bourgeois's words participates in a wider debate on the status of artists' writings, first articulated in Linda Goddard's 2012 special issue of this journal, where they are defined through their 'heightened awareness of the inescapable tensions and crossovers between practice and discourse' and the way they 'bear the trace of this consciousness'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aux quatre coins de "La Comédie humaine" d’Honoré de Balzac résonnent de nombreux objets qui répercutent jusqu’aux oreilles du lecteur contemporain les bruits et les sons de la France de Louis-Philippe. Ces sons, transportés par le discours romanesque, inscrivent dans la trame narrative des récits où ils surgissent des nœuds et des enjeux thématiques que la diégèse qui, pourtant, les porte n’aborde pas frontalement. Il en va ainsi, par exemple, des robes et des éperons. Les premières frémissent en se mouvant, en s’accrochant aux balustrades, en frôlant les parquets ou les marches de l’escalier : leurs « froufrous » géolocalisent et policent le féminin qui toujours doit s’annoncer pour advenir dans l’arène sociale. L’éperon, au contraire, impose ses cliquetis sur la place publique, dans le salon, voire, jusque dans la nef de l’église, montrant que les hommes et les femmes, chez Balzac, ne sont pas soumis aux mêmes impératifs sonores.

Bette Abla (La Cousine Bette), ‘Yoksul Akrabalar’ (Les Parents Pauvres) başlığı altında Cousin Pons ile birlikte yayımlanmış bir romandır. 1846 yılında Le Constitutionnel dergisinde tefrika romanı olarak yayımlanan bu yapıtta dizginsiz tutkuların neden olduğu yıkımlar gözler önüne serilmektedir. Bette Abla’da, hemen hemen tüm kahramanların olumlu ya da olumsuz tutkulu insanlar olması oldukça dikkate değerdir. Adeline Hulot’nun kocasına aşırı tutkusu, Crevel’in paraya aşırı bağlılığı, Hector Hulot’nun kadınlara karşı dizginsiz tutkusu, Lisbeth Fischer’in görülmemiş intikam tutkusu ve Valérie Marneffe’in lüks ve para tutkusu romanı adeta bir tutkular defilesine dönüştürmüştür. Başkahramanlardan biri olan Lisbeth Fischer’in akrabası olan Adeline Hulot’dan öç alma ana konusu etrafında dönen roman, adeta saplantı haline gelen tutkulara sahip kahramanların amaçlarına ulaşmak için hangi yollara başvurduklarını bütün çıplaklığıyla ortaya koymaktadır. Lisbeth Fischer öç alma tutkusuyla ve Baron Hulot genç kadın tutkusuyla adeta yanıp tutuşmaktadır. Bu iki kahraman, zincirlerini kırmış tutkularının esiri olup hem kendi hem de etrafındakilerin yaşamlarında yıkımlara neden olmuşlardır. Tematik odaklı bu çalışmada, Honoré de Balzac’ın Bette Abla adlı eserinde dizginsiz tutkuları nasıl ortaya koyduğunu göstermek amaçlanmıştır.

The aim of this paper is to describe the figure of the Italian uncompromising physician and poet Giovanni Rajberti (1805–1861), who was a strenuous opponent of non-scientific medical practices in Italy, including Animal Magnetism, Homeopathy and Hydropathy. In particular, he demonstrated the inconsistency of mesmerist practices in an exemplary yet less-known episode that involved the famous French writer Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850). Although his ideas hindered his career, Rajberti continued to criticize alternative practices, sustaining the value of true medicine and science against charlatans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the figure of an undulating line, or "squiggle," printed initially in Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy and copied by two nineteenth-century writers: first, by the German E. T. A. Hoffmann, in a little-known fragment, and, second, more famously, by the French Honoré de Balzac as the epigraph to his novel La peau de chagrin. These three squiggles form a triangulated relationship of imitation across two centuries, three countries, and three languages. Through attention to William Hogarth's line of beauty and Johann Caspar Lavater's physiognomic contour lines, the article considers the history of the undulating line as a figure for reading. It suggests that, for Sterne,Hoffmann, and Balzac, the inclusion of a pictured line withintextmay be seen as a "reverse ekphrastic"maneuver, one that aims to reflect the movement of narrative in visual form. In this way, the "squiggle" is foregrounded as a new and concrete motif forcomparative criticism onHoffmann and Balzac, identifying a shared interest in Sterne, as well as inthe relationship and entanglement of text and image. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Honoré de Balzac's La Peau de chagrin is a window into a pivotal moment in the international circulation of the idea of Weltliteratur. Published just four years after Goethe coined the term, Balzac's novel both instantiated and theorized the concept. To make this case, I first trace the novel's transtextual dialogue with Goethe's theater and theory. Then, drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Gisèle Sapiro, I specify which tenets of Goethe's model hold and which shift in that transfer. Heightened Eurocentricism speaks to a distinction between the French and German literary fields, mediated by the newspaper Le Globe. Increased skepticism toward the regime is mediated by Balzac himself, revealing a peculiar class of agents of Weltliteratur : conscious beneficiaries who remained, paradoxically, unwilling participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout his career as a literary critic, Alfred Kazin wrote often and with sympathy and insight about Theodore Dreiser, one of the most powerful, panoramic, and compassionate novelists in American literary history. Kazin was an intense reader and writer, committed in his books, essays, and reviews to connecting with and describing the personality of each author he examined. His interpretive work on Dreiser illuminates what it means to be a literary critic and teacher. When we read Kazin in the midst of twenty-first century theory, ideology, and professionalism, we realize all the more clearly the goal in his literary criticism that he aimed for, achieved, and represented—and that now is missing from literary education and experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marriage, Reason and Sentiment in Honoré de Balzac and Cao Xueqin. The Case of Letters of Two Brides and Dream of the Red Chamber. In both Balzac’s (1799–1850) Letters of Two Brides (1845) and Cao’s (1715– 1763) Dream of the Red Chamber (1742–1764), we have two very determined young girls, ready for marriage, who dream of a more passionate life. Lacking family support, they are alone and adopt opposite behavior patterns. The first (Louise de Chaulieu / Lin Daiyu) stays the same and wants a marriage of love, while the second (Renée de Maucombe / Xue Baochai) resigns herself to a marriage of convenience arranged by her family. Their two destinies diverge: one experiences great love but dies prematurely; the other experiences family happiness but is a prisoner in a life of conventions. However, behind these oppositions, their differences appear superficial and seems to come only from the social and political context. The two destinies are ultimately closely related, until they almost merge. Not only does the stubbornness of the two heroines in the realization of their dream lead them to a similar situation, both authors have also come up with a very similar technique when exposing the same surprising result. In Balzac, the two heroines become “Siamese twins” thanks to the system of correspondence. In Cao’s case, it is thanks to a particular narrative technique that constantly relates both heroeines to each other. Finally, via their common reflections on the influence of “bad novels” on young girls, Balzac and Cao deliver us “a novel about novels”. The novel is a language vessel, and at the same time a metalanguage that reflects on the linguistic structure of the work.

This essay links Julia Ward Howe's infamous "lost" text, The Hermphrodite (first published in 2004), with Honor'e de Balzac's Sarrasine (1830), arguing that Howe rewrites Balzac's figure of the "tragic hermaphrodite" with the intention of protesting nineteenth-century American assumptions regarding innate sexual difference. The Hermaphrodite tells the story of Laurence, a deeply contemplative, intelligent person whose sexual identity is disputed, but Howe never employs the term "hermaphrodite" outright. This situation encourages readers to judge Laurence's hermaphroditism by his behavior and actions in the novel, not his biology, and this is furthermore consistent with the way the term "hermaphrodite" was used and understood by mid-nineteenthcentury Americans. As such, this essay examines the claims that Howe makes about the social machinery of gender in The Hermaphrodite, arguing that while Laurence has much in common with Balzac's Sarrasine, Howe uses her protagonist as a means of revising outdated arguments about biological "truth." Howe's Laurence revisits and updates nineteenth-century considerations of the aesthetic androgyne in the service of a modern, political agenda concerning sexual demarcation and difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The visual imaginary world of Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) was exemplarily suited to his preferred genre, that is, a newly emerging realist prose. Within his own lifetime Balzac’s popular novels were frequently adapted for the stage, and it follows that his highly visual style has also inspired film adaptations since the earliest advent of cinema. Generations of filmmakers have faced the dilemma of how to reflect the descriptive realism of Balzac’s dense writing within the unique language of cinema. One of the more challenging and abstract features of Balzac’s writing is the central importance of memory in many of his texts, among themLe Colonel Chabert(1834) andLa Duchesse de Langeais(1836). In the wake of the antirealist movement in film (following its perceived association with mid-twentieth-century fascism), several recent film adaptations of Balzac have avoided the tendency to produce traditional, highly visual and illustrative interpretations of nineteenth-century realist prose by making original use of the presence or absence of diegetic sound in their films. In so doing, they grant a new realist importance to film audio and engage the viewer in the realist experience of a created and shared memory. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The issue of 'desire' is one that is of deep interest to both Balzac and Cao Xueqin. The purpose of the article is to show that the focus and development of these two authors on the issue of desire present astonishing similarities and a common aim to show that there is no final solution. Instead, there is a similar approach that impacts the entire life of their heroes and can be considered as the cursed part of the human condition. Recognition of desire as the chimera that it is and renouncing the pursuit of its satisfaction could be one solution. Yet is not desire what constitutes being human? Renouncing it could turn out to be as chimerical as the original problem, the hope for its fulfillment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Honoré de Balzac’s 1836 novellaL'Interdictionis the story of a wife's attempt to have her husband declared legally incompetent by reason of insanity, and of an idealisticjuge d'instruction's investigation of her request. In a procedurally detailed recounting of the investigation, Balzac reflects on the law's role alongside other discourses of authority in defining and adjudicating normal and abnormal behaviour. The eventual discovery that the husband is sane and that the wife's motives in claiming the contrary are grossly self-interested leads the narrator to familiar Balzacian conclusions about the marginalization of virtue – its depiction, indeed, as a form of madness – in a corrupt modern society. Yet the text's constant evocation of questions of plausibility, verisimilitude and realism draws these legal considerations into a self-reflexive dispute about narrative aesthetics, a mise-en-abyme of contemporaneous debates between the literary approach known as ‘idealism’, and Balzac's own nascent conception of the novelist's art, which would one day be known as ‘realism’. Despite its superficial moralizing, the text leads inexorably to the conclusion that idealism – the judge's, the husband's, Balzac's contemporary novelists' – is, simply, impossible, and must always yield to the demands of reality. The novella thus reveals how literature not only engages with legal issues and arguments, but appropriates them for the purposes of intra-literary aesthetic debates about how best to represent the world. Indeed,L'Interdictiongives a sense of how legal and representational disputes can in fact be two aspects of the same fundamental quarrel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Il 1836 è l’anno in cui in Francia la serialità incontra la letteratura: dall’idea di Émile de Girardin di fare delle opere letterarie il punto di forza della ʻpresse à bon marchéʼ nasce il roman-feuilleton. Generalmente, si riconosce la paternità del nuovo genere a Honoré de Balzac, il primo scrittore a dare il suo contributo alla stampa politica con La Vieille fille. Negli ultimi vent’anni però nello spazio della critica francese è nata una ʻquerelleʼ sul primato di Balzac, e si è arrivati a dubitare che La Vieille fille appartenga al genere del roman-feuilleton. Scopo dell’articolo è quello di analizzare gli studi che hanno avanzato questa contestazione, descrivere ciò che ha portato alla formulazione di quest’ipotesi e capire se il dibattito sul primato del feuilleton possa trovare o meno una risposta. Un percorso che tocca il genere stesso del roman-feuilleton.

O objetivo deste artigo é apresentar alguns elementos de relação entre as esferas jornalística e literária presentes na produção de Honoré de Balzac. Reconhecidamente, havia, no século XIX, uma via de mão dupla entre esses domínios e seus contornos eram difusos; o que sugere indícios de intertextualidade nas escritas literária e não literária balzaquianas.