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Technical Literature | Literature | STERIS Corporation steris.com |
Wikipedia portals: Culture · Geography · Health · History · Mathematics · Natural sciences · Philosophy · Religion · Society · Technology The Literary Portal The history of literature begins with the history of writing, in the Bronze Age of Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt, although the oldest literary texts date to a full millennium after the invention of writing, to the late 3rd millennium BC. The earliest literary authors known by name are Ptahhotep and Enheduanna, dating to ca. the 24th and 23rd centuries BC, respectively. More about Literature... Selected article
Z. Marcas is an 1840 novelette by French author Honoré de Balzac. Set in contemporary Paris, it describes the rise and fall of a brilliant political strategist who is abandoned by the politicians he helps into power. Destitute and forgotten, he befriends a pair of students who live next door to him in a boarding-house. The story follows their many discussions about the political situation in France. Balzac was inspired to write the story after he spotted the name "Z. Marcas" on a sign for a tailor's shop in Paris. It was published in July 1840, in the Revue Parisienne, a magazine he had founded that year. One year later it appeared in a collection from various authors under the title La Mort d'un ambitieux ("The Death of an Ambitious Man"). Balzac later placed it in the Scènes de la vie politique section of his vast novel sequence La Comédie humaine. Although Z. Marcas features characters from other Balzac stories and elements of literary realism – both hallmarks of Balzac's style – it is remembered primarily for its political themes. Balzac, a legitimist, believed that France's lack of bold leadership had led to mediocrity and ruin, and that men of quality were being ignored or worse. He maintained that the youth of France were in danger of being abandoned by the government, and predicted unrest in the years to come. The story also explores Balzac's conviction that a person's name is a powerful indicator of his or her destiny, an idea he drew from the work of Laurence Sterne. The title character, with his keen intellect, is based on Balzac's conception of himself: a visionary genius who fails to achieve his true potential because of less talented individuals with more social power. Selected pictureDid you know ...... that a scene from I ... comme Icare, a 1979 political thriller by French playwright and filmmaker Henri Verneuil, depicts the Milgram experiment? ... that Goodbye to All That is Robert von Ranke Graves's 1929 autobiography, in which he details his experiences of the First World War, including trench warfare, as well as his aversion to an England dominated by middle-class morality? ... that in classical scholarship, editio princeps is the first printed edition of a work which previously existed only in manuscripts? ... that Amazon Marketplace is amazon.com's fixed-price online marketplace that allows sellers to purvey new and used items alongside amazon's offerings, and customers to buy those items directly from the third party sellers using amazon.com's infrastructure? ... that in Werner Schwab's 1990 play Die Präsidentinnen, Mariedl is the woman who is used to cleaning toilets without wearing protective gloves, and that she tells her two female friends how the vicar hides presents for her—perfume, a bottle of beer, a can of goulash—deep down in the jammed toilet? ... that mock-heroic works are typically satires or parodies that mock common Romantic or modern stereotypes of heroes, including being unusually brave, mighty and great in all respects? ... that Marcel Pagnol wrote his first play aged 15 although his mother had not allowed him to touch a book until he was six for fear of "cerebral explosion"? TopicsNew pagesQuotes
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