{"title":"Books by Peter Brooks","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9781681379210","title":"Henry James Comes Home","description":"\u003cb\u003eIn this enthralling re-creation of American novelist Henry James' famous ten-month trip around the United States, lauded critic Peter Brooks brings to life both the literary giant and America in its Gilded Age.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn 1904, after two decades of living and travelling abroad, Henry James returned to the United States to discover a world drastically different from the one he had left behind. Suddenly, the future of the world seemed to be in his native land, which he had once considered provincial, lacking in nourishment for the novelist. James thus set forth to refamiliarize himself with the United States, travelling the breadth of the land and exercising his acute powers of observation to document all that he saw. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJames's ten-month journey across America and its product, the ethnographic work \u003ci\u003eThe American Scene, \u003c\/i\u003eare the focus of \u003ci\u003eHenry James Comes Home\u003c\/i\u003e, scholar and literary critic Peter Brooks’s dazzling follow-up to his book \u003ci\u003eHenry James Goes to Paris\u003c\/i\u003e. Brooks combines biography and criticism to recreate James's American journey, tracing his travels around New England, down south to Florida, across the Midwest, up the coast of California, and eventually to Seattle and Portland. For James, being American was \"a complex fate,\" and Brooks shows how James's keen remarks on rampant materialism and the challenges at the heart of democracy are still of enduring relevance to us in this day.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55206120718709,"sku":"9781681379210","price":16.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781681379210_8b7cd285-bfe4-4091-82a8-2c144c7510ea.jpg?v=1786024622"},{"product_id":"9780192846709","title":"Honoré de Balzac","description":"A book on the experience of reading Honoré de Balzac's La Comédie Humaine which recounts the process of Peter Brooks's own discovery of Balzac.This volume is a personal account of coming to terms with Balzac: moving from more classical and restrained authors to the highly-coloured melodramatic novels of the Human Comedy, which give us the dynamics of a new and challenging world on the threshold of modernity. It shows readers how to read, and to love reading, Balzac, and how to engage with his vast work.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":57685959016821,"sku":"9780198994480","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"Hardback","offer_id":56225814937973,"sku":"9780192846709","price":19.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780198994480_e211f822-f3f1-4926-9332-5f0f2f309d5d.jpg?v=1792599218"},{"product_id":"9781681376639","title":"Seduced by Story","description":"\u003cb\u003eIn this spiritual sequel to his influential \u003ci\u003eReading for the Plot\u003c\/i\u003e, Peter Brooks examines the dangerously alluring power of storytelling.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“There’s nothing in the world more powerful than a good story. Nothing can stop it. Nothing can defeat it.” So begins the scholar and literary critic Peter Brooks’s reckoning with today’s flourishing cult of story. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eForty years after publishing his seminal work \u003ci\u003eReading for the Plot\u003c\/i\u003e, his important contribution to what came to be known as the “narrative turn” in contemporary criticism and philosophy, Brooks returns to question the unquestioning fashion in which story is now embraced as an excuse or explanation and the fact that every brand or politician comes equipped with one. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn a discussion that ranges from \u003ci\u003eThe Girl on the Train\u003c\/i\u003e to legal argument, Brooks reminds us that among the powers of narrative is the power to deceive.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56303427191157,"sku":"9781681376639","price":16.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781681376639_d5dea70b-d5ae-4e9f-9dec-a03d661b7a2c.jpg?v=1786024562"},{"product_id":"9780192849762","title":"The Guermantes Way","description":"'the social kaleidoscope was shifting'The Guermantes Way, the third volume of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, provides a transition from the realm of adolescence into the adult social world of Belle Epoque Paris. Its pages buzz with worldly conversations, with bravado and posturing, infatuation, scandal, prejudice, and intrigue. To the fore is Proust's ear for spoken language and how it provides a stage for human foibles as well as inventiveness and panache. This is a broad canvas studded with amusing anecdotes, surprising vignettes and touching scenes, as well as fascinating characters including the indomitable Duchesse de Guermantes and her enigmatic relation the Baron de Charlus. The Guermantes Way immerses readers into a society in flux, as the old aristocracy cedes to a wealthy, rising bourgeoisie and everyone, regardless of class or standing, must navigate the perilous waters of the Dreyfus Affair. Through these lenses, Proust explores questions of substance and superficiality, and identity and belonging, in highly memorable scenes concerning friendship, love, mortality, and loss. The novel is an extraordinary chronicle of pre-war Paris as well as a vital stepping stone in Proust's novel, building on the formative, partially learned lessons of the second volume, In the Shadow of Girls in Blossom, and preparing the ground for the portentous challenges of the volumes that lie ahead.ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56367723774325,"sku":"9780192849762","price":10.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780192849762_ba8eb6cf-e618-4ce0-94f4-8148d12fe957.jpg?v=1786011101"},{"product_id":"reading-for-the-plot-design-intention-in-narrative","title":"Reading for the Plot – Design \u0026 Intention in Narrative","description":null,"brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57481457860981,"sku":"9780674748927","price":30.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780674748927.jpg?v=1786089720"},{"product_id":"thinking-in-cases","title":"Thinking in Cases","description":"How the form of the case history became an important way of studying the individual as an exemplary case in medicine, psychoanalysis, law, and the novel.   What does it mean when we address ourselves to a specific problem and treat it as a “case” that needs resolution, a resolution that may in turn offer us more general lessons? The “case history” has become a central form of thought and analysis in our culture, but rarely has it been studied on its own. In Thinking in Cases, the distinguished critic Peter Brooks zeroes in on a kind of thinking that we all know—and often use—without understanding its dimensions and its history.   This book ponders what we do and mean when we think in cases—when we take up specific instances with a view to making them exemplary. Brooks brings to this study decades of reflection on the psychoanalytic case history, the rhetoric of the legal case, and novels that unfold as cases seeking solutions. Brooks focuses on the case-history’s emergence in the late nineteenth century: first, he examines how Henry James’s uses of narrative parallel case-study methods in law, medicine, and psychoanalysis. Elsewhere, he traces the case history from Hippocratic medicine through Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective fiction to a startling legal case from Victorian England involving shipwreck and cannibalism. Other chapters discuss a tale of madness by Balzac and Freud’s most speculative works, especially Moses and Monotheism. A final chapter examines recent novels—Duras’s The Ravishing of Lol Stein, Coetzee’s Disgrace, Modiano’s Dora Bruder, and Erpenbeck’s Kairos—as case studies.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":57682782093685,"sku":"9780226856469","price":18.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"Hardback","offer_id":57680103965045,"sku":"9780226856452","price":92.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}]}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-peter-brooks.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}