The Heathen by Narcyza Zmichowska

The Heathen by Narcyza Zmichowska

Narcyza Zmichowska (1819–76) was the most accomplished female writer to come out of Poland in the mid-nineteenth century. In terms of influence and popularity, she was the George Eliot of East European letters, but her fiction was written less in the realist style than in the Romantic one. Her novel The Heathen, rendered here in a crystalline English translation by Ursula Phillips, is the tale of a doomed love affair between Benjamin, a young man from a poor but patriotic rural family, and Aspasia, a femme fatale who is older, beautiful, worldlier, and more sexually liberated. As the story unfolds, Benjamin falls in love with Aspasia, accompanies her to Warsaw, and under her influence achieves incredible intellectual and professional heights—until she tires of him and takes another lover. Jealous, Benjamin murders Aspasia's new paramour and flees to his mother in the countryside—where he realizes the full extent of what he has lost and betrayed. Hence the fundamental tension in this work, represented by the two women who compete for Benjamin's affection: the mother, who represents self-abnegation and redemption from sin, and Aspasia, who represents self-indulgence and sin itself. In the end, The Heathen embodies a profound meditation on the limits of these typecasts: the novel not only explores the restrictions they placed on women during the nineteenth century, but on human happiness, and Poland's then tenuous impulse toward modernity.

Narcyza Zmichowska was the author of four acclaimed novels in her day: The Heathen, Book of Memories, White Rose, and Is this a Novel?
Ursula Phillips is a translator of both literary and academic works and a writer on Polish literature. Her most recent translation, the novel Malvina, or the Heart's Introduction by Maria Wirtemberska.

SKU	Nicht verfügbar
ISBN 13	9780875806846
ISBN 10	0875806848
Titel	The Heathen
Autor	Narcyza Zmichowska
Buchzustand	Nicht verfügbar
Bindungsart	Paperback
Verlag	Cornell University Press
Erscheinungsjahr	2012-11-15
Seitenanzahl	264
Hinweis auf dem Einband	Die Abbildung des Buches dient nur Illustrationszwecken, die tatsächliche Bindung, das Cover und die Auflage können sich davon unterscheiden.