French Literature Reviews - 2026

The Invention of Balzac
Comparative and World Literature

New publication by PUV:

Susi PIETRI
The Invention of Balzac
European Readings
Series "European Creations"
October 2004

This volume brings together for the first time major texts on Balzac written by modern European authors at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries: Henry James, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Rainer Maria Rilke, Robert Louis Stevenson, August Strindberg, Italo Svevo, Algernon C. Swinburne, Anton Chekhov, Oscar Wilde, and William Butler Yeats.
While engaging with theoretical issues and central questions of novelistic aesthetics, these "authorial texts" open up new critical perspectives on The Human Comedy, reveal an unprecedented and unfamiliar Balzac, and explore the possibilities of one writer reading another.
Serving as remote dialogues where returns to Balzac are mirrored and doubled, these portraits of Balzac are simultaneously self-portraits of writers in search of their own oeuvres.

This volume brings together major texts on Balzac written by modern European authors at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, including Henry James, Rainer Maria Rilke, Oscar Wilde, and Anton Chekhov. Engaging with theoretical issues and central questions of novelistic aesthetics, these texts open up critical perspectives on The Human Comedy and reveal an unfamiliar Balzac, while also serving as portraits that are simultaneously self-portraits of writers exploring their own oeuvres.

Readers interested in nineteenth-century literary reception, comparative literature, and the history of modern authorial commentary may find this volume relevant to their studies of how canonical texts are continuously reinvented across linguistic and cultural boundaries.