The text is accompanied by an introduction, textual annotations by the editor, and a map of Paris.
"Responses: Contemporaries and Other Novelists" illustrates Balzac's immense influence on other writers, among them Charles Baudelaire, Hippolyte Taine, ?mile Zola, and Marcel Proust.
"Twentieth-Century Criticism" presents a superb selection of critical writing about the novel.
The critics include Ernst Robert Curtius, Albert...