Becoming Stendhal

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How the master of French realism formulated a new, distinctly modern theory of authenticity and identity

Is there such a thing as an authentic self? Can an author translate an authentic self onto the written page? Stendhal—considered one of the earliest and foremost practitioners of French realism—addressed these questions with style and acumen in his celebrated novels The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma at a time when authenticity was increasingly becoming a preoccupation of nineteenth-century French culture.

In this book, Hadley Suter draws on Stendhal's novels—as well as his travel narratives, criticism, biographies, and private journals—to examine the writer's conception of authenticity as a theater composed of three distinct performances: the private, the social, and the written. In accessible terms, Suter argues that Stendhal's notion of authenticity appears not so much as an ontological conundrum as a crisis of literacy—the story of how the self relates to the written word. Becoming Stendhal reveals how the famed author became the first proponent in Western literature of our prevailing idea of the authentic self.