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17%OFFJohn Leigh - Touché: The Duel in Literature - 9780674504387 - V9780674504387
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Touché: The Duel in Literature

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Description for Touché: The Duel in Literature Hardcover. Many of the West's best writers fought in duels or wrote about them, seduced by glamour or risk or recklessness. A gift as a plot device, the duel also offered a way to discover how we face fears of humiliation, pain, and death. John Leigh's literary history of the duel illuminates these and other tensions attending the birth of the modern world. Num Pages: 342 pages, illustrations. BIC Classification: DSBD; JHBT. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 245 x 163 x 32. Weight in Grams: 648.

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 ... Read more

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Product Details

Publisher
Harvard University Press
Format
Hardback
Publication date
2015
Condition
New
Weight
648g
Number of Pages
352
Place of Publication
Cambridge, Mass, United States
ISBN
9780674504387
SKU
V9780674504387
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 7 to 11 working days
Ref
99-50

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

Reviews for Touché: The Duel in Literature
An intriguing book… Ranging over two dozen examples of novels, poems and plays, Leigh describes how this ‘medieval anomaly’ continued to preoccupy writers, even as they dismissed dueling as an old-fashioned folly… The strength of Leigh’s book is that it makes sense of such an anachronistic act… Some of the most striking moments are when he invokes potential modern parallels ... Read more

Goodreads reviews for Touché: The Duel in Literature


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