Claire d'Albe: The Original French Text

Cottin, Sophie

ISBN 10: 0873529251 / ISBN 13: 9780873529259

Published by Modern Language Association of America, 2002

Former library book; May have limited writing in cover pages. Pages are unmarked. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less. Seller Inventory # G0873529251I4N10

Synopsis:

Both Claire and her husband, M. d'Albe, are virtuous and upstanding, and Frédéric, her husband's nineteen-year-old adopted son and factory assistant, is honest and noble-hearted. But in the beautiful and secluded Loire Valley, the friendship between Claire and Frédéric gradually develops into a forbidden passion.

Claire d'Albe (1799) was audacious in its day for its representation of adulterous love as a positive act of self-fulfillment. As the volume editor, Margaret Cohen, indicates, Sophie Cottin's best-selling work of sentimentalism highlights the tension in Enlightenment liberalism between collective welfare and personal happiness. Although such later French authors as Stendhal and Balzac denigrated sentimentalism along with female novelists, Claire d'Albe influenced their realist aesthetics.

About the Authors:

Sophie Cottin, born in 1770, was raised in a Protestant, upper-middle-class family from Bordeaux. She received no formal education but corresponded and read extensively. Exiled from Paris by the Terror and displaced by the loss of her husband, mother, and fortune, she retired to a country house in 1794 to become one of France's preeminent novelists. Claire d'Albe was translated into several languages.

Margaret Cohen is professor of comparative literature at Stanford University. Her publications include The Novel and the Sea, Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution, and The Sentimental Education of the Novel.

Bibliographic Details

Title: Claire d'Albe: The Original French Text
Publisher: Modern Language Association of America
Publication Date: 2002
Binding: Paperback
Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket