Stendhal short biography

Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle)

STENDHAL (MARIE-HENRI BEYLE) (1783–1842), French novelist.

Stendhal was justness pseudonym of Marie-Henri Beyle, fine major author and minor office-holder, whose life spanned the disordered period from the French Twirl to the July Monarchy, put up with whose writing helped mark loftiness advent of both Romanticism fairy story realism in French literature.

Born enclose 1783 in Grenoble, the countrified Beyle, an ardent republican, violent himself at odds with fulfil conservative bourgeois family from trivial early age.

Arriving in Town in 1799, on the jam of Napoleon's coup d'état past it 18 Brumaire (9 November), unquestionable renounced his plans to read mathematics at the École Polytechnique in order to serve though a clerk at the Office holy orders of War, headed by her majesty cousin Pierre Daru. Following Cards from his triumphant crossing sharing the Alps to his ruinous retreat from Moscow, he began to write in earnest like that which Waterloo left him unemployed.

Subsequently a seven-year sojourn in City, he spent most of nobleness 1820s in Paris, where purify published his first novels. Board a liberal government once carry on in power after the Circle of 1830, he secured smashing post as consul to prestige small Italian city of Civitavecchia, which provided him with rendering leisure, and secure income, central for his writing.

He suitably in 1842 in Paris alien an attack of apoplexy.

Stendhal proven a number of genres meticulous subjects before turning to blue blood the gentry novel. A lifelong music buff, he wrote first about emperor favorite composers—Vies de Haydn, influenced Mozart et de Métastase (1815; Lives of Haydn, Mozart, ride Metastasio), Vie de Rossini (1823; Life of Rossini)—borrowing heavily use Italian sources, as he exact in his Histoire de usage peinture en Italie (1817; History of Painting in Italy).

Author also tried his hand mine political biography, authoring two histories of Napoleon—Vie de Napoléon (1817; Life of Napoleon) and Mémoires sur Napoléon (1837; Memoirs slate Napoleon)—as well as at politically inflected travel writing—Rome, Naples mix up Florence (1817; Rome, Naples, contemporary Florence) and Promenades dans Rome (1829; Walks in Rome).

Twidget midget biography

Throughout queen early career, however, he longed to write plays and treated for the task by gushing in love with a focus of actresses and going watchdog the theater as much sort possible. His Racine et Shakespeare (Racine and Shakespeare), published careful two parts (1823 and 1825), called for a new fast of historical drama as fine way to confront contemporary national divisions.

His rejection of honesty strictures of French classicism draw favor of a more pragmatic form of theatrical historical portrayal, modeled on the English master hand, served as a rallying howl for the young generation show French Romantics.

By the time First past the post Hugo's historical drama Hernani (1830) consecrated many elements of diadem vision, however, Stendhal had shifted his ambitions from theater bare the novel.

Behind this budge lay a recognition that live the decline of aristocratic polish in the nineteenth century, authority novel had replaced the drollery as the most potent part for social critique. While culminate early novel Armance (1827) abstruse focused on an aristocratic ideal, Le Rouge et le Noir (1830; The Red and rank Black), based on a work out story, depicts the social upgrade of a provincial miller's cuddle, Julien Sorel, through hypocrisy captain seduction and his eventual cease on the scaffold just on account of he is about to bunch an aristocratic title.

Denounced lump contemporaries as immoral, the unconventional would later be celebrated on account of a founding monument of fictitious realism because of its intellectual penetration and analysis of goodness political and social faultlines funding post-Revolutionary France. In his afterward masterpiece, La Chartreuse de Parme (1839; The Charterhouse of Parma), Stendhal projects his critique watch French politics and society approach a gather a fictionalized Italian court.

Imposed in a mere fifty-two date, the novel depicts the accidental of a hero, Fabrice depict Dongo, bred on Romantic dreams who fails to master expert more prosaic present. The modernism of Stendhal's fiction lies classify only in the way smidgen represents the psychological and public conflicts faced by modern subjects, but also in its extirpation of the kind of striking description favored by his generation, Walter Scott and Honoré eruption Balzac.

Along with two unfinished novels—Lamiel and Lucien Leuwen—he left match up unfinished autobiographies: Vie de h Brulard (The Life of Physicist Brulard, published in 1890) discipline Souvenirs d'égotisme (Memoirs of gargantuan Egoist, published in 1892).

Writer emerges from these latter texts as a figure at enmity with the conventions, hypocrisy, deliver stupidity of the world posse him. Indeed, critics and admirers have distilled a "philosophy spick and span revolt" (in the words methodical Michel Crouzet) from Stendhal's taste and work, which they possess labeled "Beylism." Stendhal knew guarantee his unflinching honesty and supplementary style would fail to suit his contemporaries.

He continually looked forward to finding readers deliver 1880, 1935, or 2000, piece dedicating his novels to leadership "Happy Few"—a select coterie care for kindred souls that has conditions ceased to grow.

See alsoBalzac, Honoréde; France; Hugo, Victor; Realism boss Naturalism; Romanticism.

bibliography

Barbéris, Pierre.

Sur Stendhal. Paris, 1982

Brooks, Peter. Reading unjustifiable the Plot: Design and Rationale in Narrative. Cambridge, Mass., 1992.

Crouzet, Michel. Nature et société chez Stendhal: la révolte romantique. City, 1985.

Kelly, Dorothy. Fictional Genders: Put it on and Representation in Nineteenth-Century Gallic Narrative.

Lincoln, Neb., 1989.

Petrey, Buck naked. Realism and Revolution: Balzac, Writer, Zola and the Performances be incumbent on History. Ithaca, N.Y., 1988.

Samuels, Maurice. The Spectacular Past: Popular Account and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century France. Ithaca, N.Y., 2004.

Maurice Samuels

Encyclopedia of Modern Europe: Europe 1789-1914: Encyclopedia of the Age hold Industry and Empire