Article: Madness and Military History in Balzac's "Adieu".(Critical Essay)

The distinctiveness of Honore de Balzac's Comedie humaine has often been linked to its representation of contemporary society. For both Erich Auerbach and Georg Lukacs, for instance, Balzac inaugurates a new style of realism by portraying the present. Auerbach maintains that Balzac is one of the founders of "modern realism" for having "seized upon the representation of contemporary life as his own particular task" (468). And Lukacs writes that Balzac transcends the historical novel of Walter Scott by passing "from the portrayal of past history to the portrayal of the present as history" (83). While Balzac does abandon the overtly historical mode of his romans de jeunesse ...

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