Pere Goriot: A Norton Critical Edition / Edition 1

by Honore de Balzac

Overview

The text is that of Burton Raffell’s acclaimed 1994 translation.

The text is accompanied by an introduction, textual annotations by the editor, and a map of Paris.

"Responses: Contemporaries and Other Novelists" illustrates Balzac’s immense influence on other writers, among them Charles Baudelaire, Hippolyte Taine, Émile Zola, and Marcel Proust.

"Twentieth-Century Criticism" presents a superb selection of critical writing about the novel.

The critics include Ernst Robert Curtius, Albert Béguin, Erich Auerback, Georges Poulet, Michel Butor, Louis Chevalier, Pierre Barbéris, Peter Brooks, Sandy Petrey, Nicole Mozet, and Janet L. Beizer.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393971668
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	12/17/1997
Series:	Norton Critical Editions Series
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	978,034
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Honore de Balzac (1799-1850) was born in Tours. By the time of his death, he had written over one hundred novels, novellas, and plays, all the while working as a journalist. Colonel Chabert is one of the "Scenes from Private Life," which is a part of Balzac's well-known life-long project, La Comedie Humaine.

Peter Brooks has written extensively about the nineteenth-century novel, French and English. His books include The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess; Reading for the Plot, Body Work, Psychoanalysis and Storytelling and The Emperor's Body: A Novel. After many years on the faculty at Yale University, he currently teaches at Princeton University.

Burton Raffel is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette Emeritus. He is the translator of many works, including Gargantua and Pantagruel (awarded the French-American Foundation Translation Prize), Père Goriot, Beowulf, and the five romances of Chrétien de Troyes.

Table of Contents

1	Private Lodgings	7
2	Afternoon Calls	59
3	Entry into Society	95
4	Trompe-la-Mort	151
5	The Two Daughters	215
6	Death of a Father	251
	Afterword	277
	Selected Bibliography	285

What People are Saying About This

John Lyons

This is a terrific rendering of a perennial favorite. Raffel gives us all the lively, dramatic, and colorful Balzac style—I didn't think this could be done in English. It doesn't read at all like a translation—I was caught up completely with the feeling of direct contact with the Parisian life—but Raffel remains faithful to the finest detail.
—(John Lyons, University of Virginia)

Editorial Reviews

Balzac's 1834 King Lear-esque novel here gets a little fresh air breathed into it by Burton Raffel, who won the 1991 French-American Translation Prize.

Library Journal