Patrick B Coleman

In his Confessions Jean-Jacques Rousseau tells the story of his life, from the formative experience of his humble childhood in Geneva, through the achievement of international fame as novelist and philosopher in Paris, to his wanderings as an exile, persecuted by governments and alienated from the w...

In his Confessions Jean-Jacques Rousseau tells the story of his life, from the formative experience of his humble childhood in Geneva, through the achievement of international fame as novelist and philosopher in Paris, to his wanderings as an exile, persecuted by governments and alienated from the w...

Anger, Gratitude, and the Enlightenment Writer examines how writers as diverse as Rousseau, Diderot, Marivaux, and Challe discuss the social appropriateness of anger and gratitude in regulating social life. Emotions are social transactions, with rules identifying when and where it is appropriate to ...

The Art of Music is a handsomely illustrated and rich interdisciplinary look at the mutual influence between music and the visual arts across cultures and eras. The book sheds new light on more familiar artists at the intersection of the visual and the musical, such as Wassily Kandinsky and Arnold S...

'For certain men the stronger their desire, the less likely they are to act.'With his first glimpse of Madame Arnoux, Frederic Moreau is convinced he has found his romantic destiny, but when he pursues her to Paris the young student is unable to translate his passion into decisive action. He also fi...

Sexual attraction, artistic insight, and the often ironic relationship between them are the dominant themes in the three short works by Balzac collected in this volume. In Sarrasine, an impetuous young sculptor falls in love with a diva of the Roman stage, but rapture turns to rage when he discovers...

In his Discourses (1755), Rousseau argues that inequalities of rank, wealth, and power are the inevitable result of the civilizing process. If inequality is intolerable - and Rousseau shows with unparalledled eloquence how it robs us not only of our material but also of our psychological independenc...