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Balzac

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Balzac

Honoré de . 1799--1850, French novelist: author of a collection of novels under the general title La Comédie humaine, including Eugénie Grandet (1833), Le Père Goriot (1834), and La Cousine Bette (1846)
Collins Discovery Encyclopedia, 1st edition © HarperCollins Publishers 2005
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References in periodicals archive
For the protagonist of Barres's first novel, Sous l'oeil des Barbares (1888), the contagion of Balzacian types is so widespread that to think and feel like Rastignac has become distastefully commonplace, even "vulgar":
Now, one of these favorite arrangements, the one perhaps that most powerfully excites the Balzacian imagination, consists of opposing a single character ...
Moreover, exploiting the Balzacian technique of personnages reparaissants, Tremblay has used individual characters in several plays and has extended the technique to his novels as well, so that theatre and fiction taken together have assumed almost epic proportions.
Certainly, the corollary aspiration for omnipotence that distinguishes the Balzacian character can be said to constitute the protagonist's third and final challenge when she refuses at the cost of her own life to acquiesce before a patriarchal and quite literally fascistic psychosocial order whose aggression against the world is propelled by a rage-filled unwillingness to forego precisely the fantasy of absolute satiation the protagonist defeated at the beginning of her trial by ordeal.
Nobody seems to have suspected Grove's truly Balzacian writerly furor in pouring out book after book in just a few years' time.
9 Kim Christensen's article "Painter Said to Be Focus of FBI Probe" (Los Angeles Times, August 29, 2006) This news story, about an alleged FBI probe into Thomas Kinkade's contractual arrangements with galleries, can be seen as an interesting parable of Balzacian proportions for an art market run amok.
In conclusion, it will discuss Bette's role in the novel beyond her personal frustrations, and the phenomenon of deviations of desire among Balzacian characters.
He describes the experience of writing Bonfire as one of constantly, furtively looking over his shoulder, terrified that some other novelist (Truman Capote?) would beat him to the punch with a big, Balzacian book about 1980s New York.
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