John Leigh

Touche: The Duel in Literature John Leigh

Marc Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.; Many of the greatest names in Western literature wrote about or even fought in duels. As John Leigh explains, in this history of the duel, it was a gift as a plot device. However, writers also sought to discover in duels something more fundamental about human conflict and how we face our fears of humiliation, pain, and death. For some, it was a social issue, a scourge to be mocked or lamented, although even its critics could be seduced by its risk and glamour. Others defended duelling by arguing that the man of noble bearing who cared less about living than living with honour was everything that the contemporary bourgeois was not. Thus, the literary history of the duel, as this volume makes clear, illuminates the tensions that attended the birth of the modern world. Review Quotes: This is an excellent study of the strange survival of the duel into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and its imaginative appeal in literature. The author s unexpected and illuminating insights come across in a pleasing, infectious way.--Ritchie Robertson, University of Oxford"Review Quotes: "Touche" is remarkable. Through the insightful analysis of classic works in English, French, German, Russian, and Italian literature from the past three centuries, the book generates a vivid history of dueling. It is brilliantly written, filled with apt allusions to contemporary art and music a pleasure to read.--Theodore Ziolkowski, Princeton University"Publisher Marketing: 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 of the greatest names in Western literature wrote about or even fought in duels, among them Corneille, Moliere, Richardson, Rousseau, Pushkin, Dickens, Hugo, Dumas, Twain, Conrad, Chekhov, and Mann. As John Leigh explains, the duel was a gift as a plot device. But writers also sought to discover in duels something more fundamental about human conflict and how we face our fears of humiliation, pain, and death. The duel was, for some, a social cause, a scourge to be mocked or lamented; yet even its critics could be seduced by its risk and glamour. Some conservatives defended dueling by arguing that the man of noble bearing who cared less about living than living with honor was everything that the contemporary bourgeois was not. The literary history of the duel, as "Touche" makes clear, illuminates the tensions that attended the birth of the modern world." Review Citations:

Publishers Weekly 04/13/2015 (EAN 9780674504387, Hardcover)

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