Becoming Stendhal: The Performance of Authenticity and the Making of a Novelist

How the master of French realism formulated a new, distinctly modern theory of authenticity and identity Is there such a thing as an authentic self?Can an author translate an authentic self onto the written page?Stendhal-considered one of the earliest and foremost practitioners of French realism-addressed these questions with style and acumen in his celebrated novels The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma at a time when authenticity was increasingly becoming a preoccupation of nineteenth-century French culture. In this book, Hadley Suter draws on Stendhal's novels-as well as his travel narratives, criticism, biographies, and private journals-to examine the writer's conception of authenticity as a theater composed of three distinct performances: the private, the social, and the written.In accessible terms, Suter argues that Stendhal's notion of authenticity appears not so much as an ontological conundrum as a crisis of literacy-the story of how the self relates to the writt