Research Catalog

Title

The Countess von Rudolstadt / George Sand ; translated by Gretchen van Slyke.

Author

Sand, George, 1804-1876

Publication

Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, c2008.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Additional Authors

Van Slyke, Gretchen Jane

Description

xviii, 441 p.; 25 cm.

Summary

The first translation of "The Countess von Rudolstadt" in more than a century brings to contemporary readers one of George Sand's most ambitious and engaging novels, hailed by many scholars of French literature as her masterpiece. Consuelo, or the Countess von Rudolstadt, born the penniless daughter of a Spanish gypsy, is transformed into an opera star by the great maestro Porpora. Her peregrinations throughout Europe (especially Vienna, Berlin, and the Bohemian forest), become a quest undertaken on a number of levels: as a singer, as a woman, and as an unwilling subject of alienation and oppression. Sand's heroine moves through a mid-eighteenth-century Europe where absolute rulers mingle with Enlightenment philosophers and gender-bending members of secret societies plot moral and political revolution. As the old order breaks down, she undergoes a series of grueling initiations into radically redefined notions of marriage and social organization. In a novel by equal measures philosophical and lurid, nothing is what it seems. Written some fifty years after the French Revolution, the book taps into many of the political and religious currents that contributed to that social upheaval-and aims to channel their potential for future change. -- Book cover.

Uniform Title

Comtesse de Rudolstadt. English

Alternative Title

Comtesse de Rudolstadt.

Subject

• 1800-1899
• French literature > 19th century > Translations into English

Genre/Form

Translations

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. [427]-441).

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

ISBN

• 9780812240733
• 0812240731

OCLC

• 183261856
• SCSB-12064741

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library