Le Père Goriot — Honoré de Balzac | Reader’s Companion | Coleman’s Notes CN-060

Enter Balzac’s Paris — a city where money buys access, marriage can become a financial transaction, family affection carries a price and ambition demands increasingly difficult choices.

At the shabby Maison Vauquer, three very different lives converge.

Père Goriot has sacrificed almost everything for the two daughters he adores. Eugène de Rastignac arrives in Paris as an ambitious young law student and discovers that education alone may not provide the success he desires. And the mysterious Vautrin offers him a brutally simple alternative: stop pretending society is fair and learn to exploit its rules.

Coleman’s Notes® CN-060 guides you through Balzac’s complete novel while examining the extraordinary social system surrounding its characters.

Explore Goriot’s destructive self-sacrifice, Rastignac’s moral education, Vautrin’s cynical philosophy, Delphine and Anastasie’s marriages, Madame de Beauséant’s aristocratic world, the Maison Vauquer, money and debt, inheritance, class, gender, marriage, crime and social mobility.

The companion goes further into Balzac’s literary achievement through his Realist method, recurring characters within La Comédie humaine, use of rooms and material objects as social evidence, treatment of Paris itself as a character, and fusion of family tragedy with economic and social analysis.

Also included are Eight Extended Close Readings, a Social Map of Paris, Following the Money, Goriot and the tradition of the tragic father, historical and literary context, a Translation & Edition Guide, critical debates, comparative and independent-study ideas, 50 Reading and Discussion Questions, and Quick Revision & Recall.

63 A5 pages

Digital Reader’s Companion — £10.95

French Literature Collection 1

Complete the five-volume collection:

The Count of Monte Cristo • The Three Musketeers • Nana • Madame Bovary • Le Père Goriot

Individual price: £10.95 each

Five separately: £54.75

Collection price: £49.95

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