The monarchs of seventeenth-century Europe put a surprisingly high priority on the abolition of dueling, seeing its eradication as an important step from barbarism toward a rational state monopoly on justice. But it was one thing to ban dueling and another to stop it. Duelists continued to kill each other with swords or pistols in significant numbers deep into the nineteenth century. In 1883 Maupassant called dueling “the last of our unreasonable customs.” As a dramatic and forbidden ritual from another age, the duel retained a powerful hold on the public mind and, in particular, the literary imagination.
Many of the greatest names in Western literature wrote about or even fought in duels, among them Corneille, Molière, Richardson, Rousseau, Pushkin, Dickens, Hugo, Dumas, Twain, Conrad, Chekhov, and Mann. As John Leigh explains, the duel was a gift as a plot device. But writers also sought to discover in duels something more fundamental about human conflict and how we face our fears of humiliation, pain, and death. The duel was, for some, a social cause, a scourge to be mocked or lamented; yet even its critics could be seduced by its risk and glamour. Some conservatives defended dueling by arguing that the man of noble bearing who cared less about living than living with honor was everything that the contemporary bourgeois was not. The literary history of the duel, as Touché makes clear, illuminates the tensions that attended the birth of the modern world.
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"It is the extraordinary prevalence of duels in literature that John Leigh explores in a study that ranges from the early 17th century to the early 20th century, and that moves confidently across the continent of European literature... Leigh has a remarkable range of reading to hand and is easy with the different proprieties of various European languages. He wears his learning lightly with a nonchalance, one might think, that matches many of the duelists we encounter in his book. -- New Statesman
Touché is keen, clever, thorough, crisply humorous and impressive in its sources... the short section discussing Merimée s Le vase étrusque - an elegant, ironical and neat story of fatuous idealism and callous worldliness holds the attention and makes one wish to read the original. So, too, does Leigh s treatment of duelling in those central European masterpieces -- The Spectator
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Descrizione libro Hardback. Condizione: New. New copy - Usually dispatched within 4 working days. Many of the West's best writers fought in duels or wrote about them, seduced by glamour or risk or recklessness. A gift as a plot device, the duel also offered a way to discover how we face fears of humiliation, pain, and death. John Leigh's literary history of the duel illuminates these and other tensions attending the birth of the modern world. Codice articolo B9780674504387
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Descrizione libro Condizione: New. Many of the West's best writers fought in duels or wrote about them, seduced by glamour or risk or recklessness. A gift as a plot device, the duel also offered a way to discover how we face fears of humiliation, pain, and death. John Leigh's literary history of the duel illuminates these and other tensions attending the birth of the modern world. Num Pages: 342 pages, illustrations. BIC Classification: DSBD; JHBT. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 245 x 163 x 32. Weight in Grams: 648. . 2015. Hardcover. . . . . Codice articolo V9780674504387
Descrizione libro Condizione: New. Codice articolo 22088357-n