Balzac and British criticism (part two)
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97
The second part begins in the 1880s, with the dissemination of Balzac through translations of significant segments of La Comédie humaine, both mainstream translations and amateur editions. Balzac is celebrated not only through the innocuous (but influential) appraisals of figures like Saintsbury but also by the works of prominent writers of the following century, such as Havelock Ellis, Yeats, or Powell. The twentieth century witnessed the birth of academic criticism, a descendant of the journalistic criticism of Saintsbury and Helm, and represented by the works of erudite French academics such as Brunetière, Lanson, and Rudler, with the latter eventually settling in England. The interwar period saw the publication of more substantial critical studies foreshadowing those of later decades. But the establishment of a vibrant, scholarly, and academic criticism of Balzac was far from certain in England in 1950, at the centenary of his death, a time when the strange ebb of sometimes unhealthy, on occasion Nietzschean, enthusiasms from a past that was far from over could still be felt. It was the unknown masterpiece, or rather the ghost of the unknown masterpiece by a now forgotten scholar, H. O. Stutchbury, which heralded a golden age of British Balzacian criticism—diverse, prolific, and modern—capable of both responding to and adapting to the shiting and dynamic concerns of contemporary times, and far from reaching its conclusion.
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