Based on the observation that the French poet Mallarme repeatedly used the 100 or so words in the French language that have no rhyme, this work argues that Mallarme's poems make sense as allegorical tales of their own creation.

Unlocking Mallarme

Robb, Graham

Yale University Press

Cols and Passes of the British Isles

History

Europe

Penguin

Almost a century after the death of the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé, readers still puzzle over his writings, still seek to understand his seemingly impenetrable philosophy. In this highly original book, Graham Robb reveals conclusive answers to the mysteries of Mallarmé. Robb's discovery of a "key" to Mallarmé's poetry is an exciting achievement that entirely redefines Mallarmé studies, illuminates large areas of French poetry, both before and after Mallarmé, and opens the way for new interpretations of some of the most complicated poems ever written. As Robb scrutinized the work of Mallarmé, he discovered that the poet repeatedly used the hundred or so words in the French language that have no rhyme. This discovery, as Robb tells it, "proved to be the first step of a staircase leading to a tomb which had remained sealed since Mallarmé built it." It revealed the only perspective from which his poems "made sense"―as allegorical tales of their own creation. The "theme" of the poem turns out to be just one surface of a brilliantly coordinated whole. In the first part of the book, Robb defines and explores the development of Mallarmé's approach; in the second he applies the method to specific poems; in the conclusion he suggests ways in which the key might be applied to other poems and poets; and in the epilogue he offers a guided tour through Mallarmé's famously uninterpretable shipwreck poem, Un coup de dés. The book reveals how Mallarmé's self-reflecting, self-destructive work poses, and perhaps answers, the central questions of twentieth-century criticism.

Unlocking Mallarmé

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Victor Hugo was the most important writer of the nineteenth century in leader of the Romantic movement; revolutionary playwright; poet; epic novelist; author of the last universally accessible masterpieces in the European tradition, among them Les Mis

Victor Hugo

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Mystery

Picador

Victor Hugo was the most important writer of the nineteenth century in France: leader of the Romantic movement, Revolutionary playwright, poet, epic novelist, author of the last universally accessible masterpieces in the European tradition, among them Les Misrables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. He was also a radical political thinker and eventual exile from France, a gifted painter and architect, and a visionary who conversed with Virgil, Shakespeare, and Jesus Christ in short, a tantalizing personality who dominated and maddened his contemporaries. Graham Robb has written an extraordinary biography that does full justice to the drama of his subjects life a life that Robb calls the most lucid case of madness in literature. By grasping the giant in his entirety and in his many disguises, Robb, bestselling author of The Discovery of France, rewards us with a panorama of French and European society from the Revolution to the dawn of the twentieth century. Victor Hugo won the Whitbread Award for Biography and the Royal Society of Literature award.

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

This is the Paris you never knew. From the Revolution to the present, Graham Robb has distilled a series of astonishing true narratives, all stranger than fiction. A young artillery lieutenant, strolling through the Palais-Royal, observes disapprovingly the courtesans plying their trade. A particular woman catches his eye; nature takes its course. Later that night, Napoleon Bonaparte writes a meticulous account of his first sexual encounter. An aristocratic woman, fleeing the Louvre, takes a wrong turn and loses her way in the nameless streets of the Left Bank. For want of a map-there were no reliable ones at the time-Marie-Antoinette will go to the guillotine. Baudelaire, Baron Haussmann, the real-life Mimi of La Bohème, Proust, Charles de Gaulle (who is suspected of having faked an assassination attempt on himself in Notre Dame)-these and many more make up Robb's cast of characters. The result is a resonant, intimate history with the power of a great novel.

Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris

Paris is one of the most alluring cities in the world; however well we know it, it never ceases to surprise. Reading this book, which retells its history through the lives of its inhabitants from Balzac to Baudelaire, Sartre to Sarkozy, is like stumbling upon a tiny restaurant frequented by eccentric locals. Robb is both a scholar and an adventurer, and from 250 years of urban history, he weaves a dazzling tapestry of fact and fantasy, memory and myth. Slightly off-mint.

Parisians /anglais

INTERART

Strangers : Homosexuality in the Nineteenth Century

In Strangers, award-winning author Graham Robb turns his attention to uncovering the real story of male and female homosexuality in the Victorian era. Ranging through Europe and America, Robb tells a tale that is in part familiar, and in part extremely surprising. Rather than believing, as many do, that a proud gay heritage dates back only a few decades, Robb uncovers elements from legislature, literature, medicine and daily life that point to what could almost be called a 'golden age'. He has an eye for the telling detail, and a great ability for deciphering the hidden codes and subterfuges of homosexuality: the green carnation, the 'musical' young men, the limp wrists. Some are familiar to us, while some have been lost in the mists of time. He examines society's growing understanding of homosexuality, tracing the move from prosecution and even execution of homosexuals, to the psychiatrist's chair. And he sheds light on various famous characters, from Hans Christen Anderson (fairy tales?!) to Oscar Wilde. Erudite and entertaining, Strangers bears all the hallmarks of one of Picador's most accomplished and well-respected non-fiction writers.

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Award-winning author Graham Robb explores the story - and history -of male and female homosexuality in the UK and US, uncovering elements from legislature, literature, medicine and day-to-day life that point to a particularly self-aware and sophisticated culture of Victorian homosexuality. Drawing on famous cases such as the Wilde trials, as well as a wide variety of previously neglected sources, Robb recreates this era with great insight, humour and aplomb, exploding modern myths and restoring the real and vibrant truth of homosexual love to today's readers: Strangers tells a tale that is in part familiar, and in part extremely surprising - a story of oppression and secrecy, but also of unexpected tolerance and familiarity.

World

When he was not yet 17, Arthur Rimbaud (1854-91) electrified Paris's literary society with the incendiary poems that later made him the guiding saint of 20th-century rebels, from Pablo Picasso to Jim Morrison. "A Season in Hell," "The Drunken Boat," and the prose poems of Illuminations were epochal works that changed the nature of an art form - and yet their author abandoned poetry at age 21 and spent the rest of his short life as a colonial adventurer in Arabia and Africa. "He was writing in a void," explains British scholar Graham Robb. "In 1876, most of Rimbaud's admirers either were still in the nursery or had yet to be conceived." Hardly surprising, since the poet was a difficult and frequently unpleasant person to actually know. The Parisian poets who took him under their wing soon discovered that Rimbaud was ungrateful, crude, and as scornful of their precious verse as he was of the Catholic Church, bourgeois proprieties, and everything else his disapproving mother held dear. Rimbaud's stormy affair with Paul Verlaine estranged the older poet from his wife and, eventually, from most of his artistic friends as well. In Robb's depiction, the poet possessed from his earliest youth a restless, searching intellect that permitted no compromise with convention nor tenderness for others' weaknesses. The author doesn't soften Rimbaud's "savage cynicism" or gloss over his frequently obnoxious behavior, yet Robb arouses our admiration for "one of the great Romantic imaginations, festering in damp, provincial rooms like an intelligent disease." Like Robb's excellent biographies of Hugo and Balzac, this sharp, subtle, unsentimental portrait is both erudite and beautifully written. --Wendy Smith

Rimbaud: A Biography

W.W.Norton

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Robb, Graham. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Robb, Graham

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Robb, Graham. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Unlocking Mallarme

Cols and Passes of the British Isles

Unlocking Mallarmé

Victor Hugo

Victor Hugo

Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris

Parisians /anglais

Strangers : Homosexuality in the Nineteenth Century

Strangers : Homosexuality in the Nineteenth Century

Rimbaud: A Biography