The Red And The Black
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Very good
Jacket: No dust jacket - cloth/board in good condition
Pages: Good
Few novels in the Western canon cut as deeply into the marrow of ambition and desire as The Red and the Black, Stendhal's masterwork of psychological realism set against the turbulent social landscape of post-Napoleonic France. At its centre stands Julien Sorel, a carpenter's son of fierce intelligence and volcanic pride, who schemes his way from provincial obscurity into the drawing rooms and bedchambers of the Parisian elite — only to find that the society he so desperately craves is as corrupt and hollow as the institutions propping it up. Rendered into English by Charles Tergie and adorned with the illustrations of Jean Paul Quint, this Franklin Library edition presents the novel in a form befitting its stature: a physical object as elegant as the world Julien longs to conquer. Published in 1830 under Stendhal's pen name — the pseudonym of Marie-Henri Beyle — the novel stands as a foundational text of literary realism and an unflinching chronicle of class warfare waged not on battlefields, but in salons and confessionals. Stendhal's prose is surgical in its irony, dissecting the hypocrisies of the Church, the aristocracy, and the bourgeoisie with a scalpel wit that would later influence Balzac, Tolstoy, and Nietzsche alike. The twin symbols of the title — the red of military glory and the black of clerical ambition — frame Julien's impossible choice between two paths in a world that offers a brilliant outsider no honest road to greatness. The question Stendhal ultimately poses is as urgent today as it was two centuries ago: what does a society deserve from the very souls it refuses to embrace?
Author: Stendhal
Format: Hardback
Published: 1981, The Franklin Library, Franklin Center, Pennsylvania
Genre: Classic fiction
Condition remarks:
Book: Very good
Jacket: No dust jacket - cloth/board in good condition
Pages: Good
Few novels in the Western canon cut as deeply into the marrow of ambition and desire as The Red and the Black, Stendhal's masterwork of psychological realism set against the turbulent social landscape of post-Napoleonic France. At its centre stands Julien Sorel, a carpenter's son of fierce intelligence and volcanic pride, who schemes his way from provincial obscurity into the drawing rooms and bedchambers of the Parisian elite — only to find that the society he so desperately craves is as corrupt and hollow as the institutions propping it up. Rendered into English by Charles Tergie and adorned with the illustrations of Jean Paul Quint, this Franklin Library edition presents the novel in a form befitting its stature: a physical object as elegant as the world Julien longs to conquer. Published in 1830 under Stendhal's pen name — the pseudonym of Marie-Henri Beyle — the novel stands as a foundational text of literary realism and an unflinching chronicle of class warfare waged not on battlefields, but in salons and confessionals. Stendhal's prose is surgical in its irony, dissecting the hypocrisies of the Church, the aristocracy, and the bourgeoisie with a scalpel wit that would later influence Balzac, Tolstoy, and Nietzsche alike. The twin symbols of the title — the red of military glory and the black of clerical ambition — frame Julien's impossible choice between two paths in a world that offers a brilliant outsider no honest road to greatness. The question Stendhal ultimately poses is as urgent today as it was two centuries ago: what does a society deserve from the very souls it refuses to embrace?