Work
Honoré de Balzac
Overview
Honoré de Balzac ( BAL-zak, also US: BAWL-; French: [ɔnɔʁe d(ə) balzak]; born Honoré Balzac; 20 May 1799 – 18 August 1850) was a French novelist and playwright. The novel sequence La Comédie humaine, described as a panorama of post-Napoleonic French life, is generally viewed as his magnum opus.
Due to his keen observation of detail and unfiltered representation of society, Balzac is regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature. He is renowned for his multi-faceted characters; even his lesser characters are complex, morally ambiguous and fully human. Inanimate objects are imbued with character as well; the city of Paris, a backdrop for much of his writing, takes on many human qualities. His writing influenced many famous writers, including the novelists Émile Zola, Charles Dickens, Marcel Proust, Gustave Flaubert, Henry James and Fyodor Dostoevsky, and filmmakers François Truffaut and Jacques Rivette. Many of Balzac's works have been made into films and his work has served as a framework for other writers. James called him "really the father of us all."
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Philosophers who discussed Honoré de Balzac
- Mircea Eliade
- Jean-Paul Sartre
- Lucian
- Emil Cioran
- György Lukács
- François Rabelais
- Louis de Bonald
- Michel Serres
Related ideas
- French Revolution
- Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Gustave Flaubert
- Emile, or On Education
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- Jesuits
- Roland Barthes
- Victor Cousin
- Leon Trotsky
- Auguste Rodin
- Gustave Courbet
- Marcel Proust
- Realism (arts)
- Oscar Wilde
- Walter Benjamin
- Camille Paglia
- Romanticism
- Structuralism
- Masterpiece
- Lexico
- Oak
- Victor Hugo
- Émile Zola
- Oxford University Press
Place in the tradition
Part of Romanticism.