The Love Affair as a Work of Art

by Dan Hofstadter

Book Overview

This series of entwined biographical sketches recounts how, in the Romantic Era, love affairs, often illicit, were transformed into novels, memoirs, and published correspondences. We make the intimate... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374192316
• ISBN13: 9780374192310
• Release Date: January 1996
• Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
• Length: 314 Pages
• Weight: 1.03 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.6" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

charming

This is an unusual book: it has no pretense of scholarly contribution, yet is delightfully literary in a refreshingly casual way. Hofstadter delves insightfully and amusingly into the dynamics of love affairs between literary figures in 19th century France. He explores, sometimes speculatively but never reductively, how these figures' characters and backgrounds played into the ways that their entanglements unfolded, and feels for the links between love, understanding, letter writing, literary inspiration and creativity, and the social world of the time. Altogether charming ...