Bel-Ami
By: Guy de Maupassant ; translated by Margaret Mauldon ; with an introduction and notes by Robert Lethbridge.
Contributors: Mauldon, Margaret.; Lethbridge, Robert.
Series: Oxford world's classics
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2001
Place of publication: Oxford; New York
Language: eng; fre
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 303
ISBN-13: 9780192836830
Description: Maupassant's second novel, Bel-Ami (1885), is the story of a ruthlessly ambitious young man (Georges Duroy, christened "Bel-Ami" by his female admirers) making it to the top in fin-de-siecle Paris. It is a novel about money, sex, and power, set against the background of the politics of the French colonization of North Africa. It explores the dynamics of an urban society uncomfortably close to our own and is a devastating satire of the sleaziness of contemporary journalism. Bel-Ami enjoys the status of an authentic record of the apotheosis of bourgeois capitalism under the Third Republic. But the creative tension between its analysis of modern behavior and its identifiably late nineteenth-century fabric is one of the reasons why Bel-Ami remains one of the finest French novels of its time, as well as being recognized as Maupassant's greatest achievement as a novelist. - Back cover.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [il]-lii).
Table of contents: title: Introduction; title: Note on the translation; title: Select bibliography; title: A chronology of Guy de Maupassant; title: Bel-Ami; title: Explanatory notes