Corinne, Or, Italy

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Oxford University Press, 1998 - Fiction - 422 pages
Corinne, or Italy (1807) is both the story of a love affair and Madame de Stael's homage to the landscape, literature, and art of Italy. The Scottish peer Lord Nelvil is torn between his passion for the beautiful Italian poetess Corinne and respect for his dead father's wish that he should marry Lucile, a traditionally dutiful English girl. His choice leads to tragedy for Corinne and a seared conscience for himself. Madame de Stael weaves discreet French Revolutionary allusion and allegory into her novel. It stands at the birth of modern nationalism and is also one of the first works to put a woman's creativity centre stage. Sylvia Raphael's new translation preserves the natural character of the French original and is complemented by notes and an introduction which sets an extraordinary work of European Romanticism in its historical context.

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About the author (1998)

Germaine de Stael, the daughter of a Swiss banker, was "the first woman of middle-class origins to impress herself, through her own genius, on all the major public events of her time---events political, literary, in every sense revolutionary" (Ellen Moers). Mme de Stael presided over a Paris salon in which the greatest minds of the day met and conversed. Her cosmopolitan liberalism so offended Napoleon that he once forbade her to come within 40 miles of Paris. Mme de Stael's writing helped lay the cultural foundations of French romanticism. Her essay De l'Allegmagne (Of Germany) (1810) introduced German romantic poetry and philosophy to the French. Her novels depicted strong-willed heroines driven by passion and intellectual curiosity but constrained by social conventions.

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