Search Results - Stendhal, 1783-1842

Stendhal

Marie-Henri Beyle (; 23 January 1783 – 23 March 1842), better known by his pen name Stendhal (, , ), is the most common in France today, as shown by the entry ''stendhalien'' () in the Petit Robert dictionary and by the pronunciation recorded on the authoritative website ''Pronny the pronouncer'', which is run by a professor of linguistics and records the pronunciations of highly educated native speakers. The pronunciation is less common in France today, but was presumably the most common one in 19th-century France and perhaps the one preferred by Stendhal, as shown by the at the time well-known phrase "Stendhal, c'est un scandale" as explained by . On the other hand, many obituaries used the spelling ''Styndal'', which clearly indicates that the pronunciation was also already common at the time of his death (see ). Since Stendhal had lived and traveled extensively in Germany, it is of course also possible that he in fact pronounced his name as (as the German city of Stendal), using instead of (and perhaps also with instead of ), and that some French speakers approximated this but that most used one of the two common French pronunciations of the spelling ''-en-'' ( and ).}} was a French writer. Best known for the novels ''Le Rouge et le Noir'' (''The Red and the Black'', 1830) and ''La Chartreuse de Parme'' (''The Charterhouse of Parma'', 1839), he is highly regarded for the acute analysis of his characters' psychology and considered one of the early and foremost practitioners of realism. A self-proclaimed egotist, the neologism for the same characteristic in his characters was "Beylism".

Stendhal is also known for ''De l'amour'', his work on "passionate love" in which the concept of "crystallization" was invented. The book was mostly ignored after publishing, but has been lauded posthumously as one of the first "modern" attempts at understanding love. Sharon Brehm, a president of the APA, has called Stendhal "a first-rate psychologist before the official term was coined". Provided by Wikipedia