Touche: The Duel in Literature - Hardcover

John Leigh

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674504380 ISBN 13: 9780674504387

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2015

Synopsis

The monarchs of seventeenth-century Europe put a surprisingly high priority on the abolition of dueling, seeing its eradication as an important step from barbarism toward a rational state monopoly on justice. But it was one thing to ban dueling and another to stop it. Duelists continued to kill each other with swords or pistols in significant numbers deep into the nineteenth century. In 1883 Maupassant called dueling the last of our unreasonable customs. As a dramatic and forbidden ritual from another age, the duel retained a powerful hold on the public mind and, in particular, the literary imagination. Many of the greatest names in Western literature wrote about or even fought in duels, among them Corneille, Moliere, Richardson, Rousseau, Pushkin, Dickens, Hugo, Dumas, Twain, Conrad, Chekhov, and Mann. As John Leigh explains, the duel was a gift as a plot device. But writers also sought to discover in duels something more fundamental about human conflict and how we face our fears of humiliation, pain, and death. The duel was, for some, a social cause, a scourge to be mocked or lamented; yet even its critics could be seduced by its risk and glamour. Some conservatives defended dueling by arguing that the man of noble bearing who cared less about living than living with honor was everything that the contemporary bourgeois was not. The literary history of the duel, as "Touche" makes clear, illuminates the tensions that attended the birth of the modern world."

About this title

Review:

"Touche" is remarkable. Through the insightful analysis of classic works in English, French, German, Russian, and Italian literature from the past three centuries, the book generates a vivid history of dueling. It is brilliantly written, filled with apt allusions to contemporary art and music a pleasure to read. --Theodore Ziolkowski, Princeton University"

Touché , an intriguing book by John Leigh, a specialist in 18th-century French literature at Cambridge University, provides some of the answers... Some of the most striking moments are when he invokes potential modern parallels to duels American Westerns, Olympic fencing. Mr Leigh may not be able to make duelling seem new. But his entertaining study will remind readers why this archaic form of male combat can still be compelling, and how it could live on. -- Economist

urbane and elegantly penned -- Literary Review

"It is the extraordinary prevalence of duels in literature that John Leigh explores in a study that ranges from the early 17th century to the early 20th century, and that moves confidently across the continent of European literature... Leigh has a remarkable range of reading to hand and is easy with the different proprieties of various European languages. He wears his learning lightly with a nonchalance, one might think, that matches many of the duelists we encounter in his book. -- New Statesman

Touché is keen, clever, thorough, crisply humorous and impressive in its sources... the short section discussing Merimée s Le vase étrusque - an elegant, ironical and neat story of fatuous idealism and callous worldliness holds the attention and makes one wish to read the original. So, too, does Leigh s treatment of duelling in those central European masterpieces -- The Spectator

About the Author:

John Leigh is University Lecturer in the Faculty of Modern & Medieval Languages, University of Cambridge.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0674504380
• ISBN 13: 9780674504387
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 352