Empire of Desire, the second volume of Thierry Hentsch’s epic survey of the formative texts of the Western narrative tradition, completes the work he began in the first: Truth or Death. It traces western civilization’s quest for immortality across a further four centuries—from Molière to Proust, by way of Voltaire and Rousseau, Goethe and Hegel, Melville and Joyce—ending in 1922, coincidentally the year Ulysses was published and Marcel Proust breathed his last.
Empire of Desire: The Abolition of Time
Translated by Fred A. Reed
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