" J'ai trouvé une idée merveilleuse. je serai un homme de génie ", s'exclame Balzac au moment où il écrit Le Père Goriot. Il venait d'imaginer La Comédie humaine, ce cycle romanesque dans lequel les mêmes personnages réapparaissent d'un roman à l'autre. Il venait de créer un monde, le monde balzacien. Les plus beaux romans, dit André Maurois, sont des romans d'apprentissage. Les illusions de la jeunesse s'y heurtent au monde féroce et pourtant plein de délices.

L'amour devient c...

Le présent ouvrage s'inscrit dans une politique de conservation patrimoniale des ouvrages de la littérature Française mise en place avec la BNF.

HACHETTE LIVRE et la BNF proposent ainsi un catalogue de titres indisponibles, la BNF ayant numérisé ces oeuvres et HACHETTE LIVRE les imprimant à la demande.

Certains de ces ouvrages reflètent des courants de pensée caractéristiques de leur époque, mais qui seraient aujourd'hui jugés condamnables.

Ils n'en appartiennent pas moins à l'his...

Winston Smith works for the Ministry of Truth in London, chief city of Airstrip One. Big Brother stares out from every poster, the Thought Police uncover every act of betrayal. When Winston finds love with Julia, he discovers that life does not have to be dull and deadening, and awakens to new possibilities. Despite the police helicopters that hover and circle overhead, Winston and Julia begin to question the Party; they are drawn towards conspiracy. Yet Big Brother will not tolerate dissent ...

Paul Auster's enthralling adventure story from the author of contemporary classic The New York Trilogy: 'a literary voice for the ages' (Guardian) It was the summer that men first walked on the moon. I was very young back then, but did not believe there would ever be a future. I wanted to live dangerously, to push myself as far as I could go, and then see what happened when I got there.'So begins the mesmerising narrative of Marco Stanley Fogg - orphan, child of the 1960s, a quester by nature.

Moon Palace is his story - a novel that spans three generations, from the early years of this century to the first lunar landings, and moves from the canyons of Manhattan to the cruelly beautiful landscape of the American West. Filled with suspense, unlikely coincidences, wrenching tragedies and marvellous flights of lyricism and erudition, the novel carries the reader effortlessly along with Marco's search - for love, for his unknown father, and for the key to the elusive riddle of his origins and his fate. 'Clever: very...

Kazuo Ishiguro imagines the lives of a group of students growing up in a darkly skewed version of contemporary England. Narrated by Kathy, now thirty-one, Never Let Me Go dramatises her attempts to come to terms with her childhood at the seemingly idyllic Hailsham School and with the fate that has always awaited her and her closest friends in the wider world. A story of love, friendship and memory, Never Let Me Go is charged throughout with a sense of the fragility of life.

Written by one of the world's leading literary theorists, this book provides a wide-ranging, accessible and humorous introduction to the English novel from Daniel Defoe to the present day. It covers the works of major authors, including Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Laurence Sterne, Walter Scott, Jane Austen, the Brontes, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce.

Rien n'est plus étranger au personnage de Julien Sorel que la sérénité des vainqueurs. Alors que Napoléon, son modèle, est à jamais défait, Sorel est condamné à grandir dans une famille mesquine, à vivre dans une province trop étroite. Le fracas des fusils a laissé place au bruit lancinant de la scierie familiale : soldat privé de bataille, il ne lui reste que le coeur des femmes à faire saigner. Premier de ses amours, dernière de ses victimes : Mme de Rênal, jeune femme mél...

Si tous les écrivains ne sont pas des passionnés du dictionnaire ni des ouvrages de rhétorique, ils suivent tous des procédés et des règles qui sont hérités de modèles et d'usages propres à chaque genre. Leurs ouvrages sont construits selon un certain nombre de formes générales comme la chronologie, les personnages d'un récit qu'ils adaptent à leur manière. Le but de cet ouvrage est de décrire ces formes car leur connaissance conditionne une compréhension en profondeur des te...

Aspects of the English-Speaking World offers students of English and EFL teachers essential information about the five largest countries in the Aglosphere: The United Kingdom, Ireland, The United Status, Canada and Australia.

Each chapter introduces the student to a new country, giving them essential information about that country's people, politics, history, language, and the topices that are most important in that country today.

Aspects of the English-Speaking World also focuses on the use ...

The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman - the Pulitzer prize-winning Holocaust survivor story'The most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust' Wall Street Journal'The first masterpiece in comic book history' The New YorkerThe Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus tells the story of Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Europe, and his son, a cartoonist coming to terms with his father's story. Maus approaches the unspeakable through the diminutive. Its form, the cartoon ...