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"Brooks, Peter, 1938- author"
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Flaubert in the ruins of Paris : the story of a friendship, a novel, and a terrible year
\"In 1869, Gustave Flaubert published what he considered to be his masterwork novel, A Sentimental Education, which told a deeply human and deeply pessimistic story of the 1848 revolutions. The book was a critical and commercial flop. Flaubert was devastated. Yet his year was only going to get worse. The summer of 1870 through the spring of 1871 would come to be known as the \"Terrible Year\" in France. France suffered a humiliating defeat in their war against Prussia, followed by the fall of Napoleon III and his Second Empire, the declaration of a republic, then the siege of Paris by the Prussian army, capitulation, and a dishonorable peace. This in turn provoked a revolt of the people of Paris, who formed a local government called the Commune, which was crushed in the bloodiest class warfare France has ever known. Paris by the end of May 1871--at the end of \"the Bloody Week,\" with the defeat and summary execution of the insurrectionists--was a scorched wasteland, set afire by the retreating Communards. As the dust settled, a struggle began among politicians and artists to define France's future. Yet no one could agree on what France should become; Parisians built the Sacré-Cœur as a monument to French reactionaries just as the newly formed secular republic was distancing itself from religion. For a time, France was inches away from returning to a monarchy led by the Comte de Chambord. As artists, Gustave Flaubert along with his friend George Sand were part of this larger movement to capture the new essence of France and predict the country's future course. Flaubert was convinced that the commune could never have happened if more people had read A Sentimental Education\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Enigmas of identity
\"We know that it matters crucially to be able to say who we are, why we are here, and where we are going,\" Peter Brooks writes in Enigmas of Identity. Many of us are also uncomfortably aware that we cannot provide a convincing account of our identity to others or even ourselves. Despite or because of that failure, we keep searching for identity, making it up, trying to authenticate it, and inventing excuses for our unpersuasive stories about it. This wide-ranging book draws on literature, law, and psychoanalysis to examine important aspects of the emergence of identity as a peculiarly modern preoccupation.
eBook
Realist Vision
Realist Visionexplores the claim to represent the world \"as it is.\" Peter Brooks takes a new look at the realist tradition and its intense interest in the visual. Discussing major English and French novels and paintings from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Brooks provides a lively and perceptive view of the realist project.Centering each chapter on a single novel or group of paintings, Brooks examines the \"invention\" of realism beginning with Balzac and Dickens, its apogee in the work of such as Flaubert, Eliot, and Zola, and its continuing force in James and modernists such as Woolf. He considers also the painting of Courbet, Manet, Caillebotte, Tissot, and Lucian Freud, and such recent phenomena as \"photorealism\" and \"reality TV.\"
eBook