Honore de balzac biography yahoo search

Balzac meticulously reconstructed French urban working class and provincial life, yet he was uniquely unsentimental in his perspective. This is notable because Balzac wrote during the Romantic era, a period in which sentiment and gothic melodrama—particularly the novels of Walter Scott , Alexandre Dumas , and Victor Hugo , and the paintings of Eugene Delacroix —enjoyed immense popularity.

The works of Balzac and fellow French realists Gustave Flaubert and Stendhal , in contrast, were criticized as vulgar and cynical, although they are now considered by scholars as the most significant and influential works of nineteenth-century French literature.

Honore de balzac biography yahoo search: One of the greatest European

Balzac believed that Romanticism, with its focus on individualism and sentimentality, failed to present a meaningful perspective on society. The goal of his Human Comedy, stated expressly in his preface, was to study the "social species" the way a scientist would examine the phenomena of the natural world. His early training as a journalist informs his prose with precision, conciseness of diction, and attention to the drama of everyday life.

In this respect, Balzac is distinctly modern before there was a term " modernism. Yet unlike modern novelists such as James Joyce , Balzac rendered human life not as an impersonal, directionless experience but governed within a recognizable moral framework, where ignoble acts or virtuous deeds bore moral consequences. Although not a moralist in any sense, Balzac, as well as the great Russian realistic novelists of the later nineteenth century, used the realistic form to more authentically, less didactically, present life, with its social protocols and hypocrisies, as the source material of art.

Balzac's influence among subsequent novelists as an observer of society and human psychology would be difficult to overestimate. His father was a regional administrator during the French Revolution. He soon drifted towards journalism , contributing to political and artistic reviews set up by a new generation of intellectuals who viewed the cultural debris of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire , and the complacency of the restored monarchy with a mixture of cynicism, idealism and regret.