Octavio Paz

#2

"In The Double Flame, Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz explores the intimate connection between sex, eroticism, and love - themes that have been a constant in his writing, from his first published poems to the great works of his maturity. Beginning with Plato's Symposium, he gives a short history of love and eroticism in literature throughout the ages: from the influence of the great cities Alexandria and Rome on the development of love poetry, to courtly love in Heian Japan and twelfth-century France, to love in modern novels such as Madame Bovary and Ulysses. Rich in scope, The Double Flame examines everything from taboo to repression, Carnival to Lent, Sade to Freud, Original Sin to artificial intelligence."--BOOK JACKET.

#3

A novel is an extended work of narrative fiction usually written in prose and published as a book. The word derives from the Italian: novella for 'new', 'news', or 'short story (of something new)', itself from the Latin: novella, a singular noun use of the neuter plural of novellus, diminutive of novus, meaning 'new'. According to Margaret Doody, the novel has "a continuous and comprehensive history of about two thousand years", with its origins in the Ancient Greek and Roman novel, Medieval chivalric romance, and the tradition of the Italian Renaissance novella. The ancient romance form was revived by Romanticism, in the historical romances of Walter Scott and the Gothic novel. Some novelists, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Ann Radcliffe, and John Cowper Powys, preferred the term romance.