Stendhal in the context of "Egotism"

Literary realism is a movement and genre of literature that attempts to represent mundane and ordinary subject-matter in a faithful and straightforward way, avoiding grandiose or exotic subject-matter, exaggerated portrayals, and speculative elements such as supernatural events and alternative worlds. It encompasses both fiction (realistic fiction) and nonfiction writing. Literary realism is a subset of the broader realist art movement that began with mid-nineteenth-century French literature (Stendhal) and Russian literature (Alexander Pushkin). It attempts to represent familiar things, including everyday activities and experiences, as they truly are.

Ten Novels and Their Authors (originally published as Great Novelists and Their Novels) is a 1948 work of literary criticism by William Somerset Maugham. Maugham collects together what he considers to have been the ten greatest novels and writes about the books and the authors. The ten novels are:

1. The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling by Henry Fielding (1749)
2. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (1813)
3. The Red and the Black by Stendhal (1830)
4. Le Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac (1835)
5. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1849)
6. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (1856)
7. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851)
8. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847)
9. The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky (1880)
10. War and Peace by Tolstoy (1869)

This book was originally a series of magazine articles commissioned by Redbook.

Andrea Maffei (1798 – 1885) was an Italian poet, translator and librettist. He was born in Molina di Ledro, Trentino. A follower of Vincenzo Monti, he formed part of the 19th-century Italian classicist literary culture. Gaining laurea in jurisprudence, he moved for some years to Verona, then to Venice and finally to Milan, where in 1831 he married contessa Clara Spinelli. They separated by mutual consent on 15 June 1846.

As well as Verdi, Maffei also built up close relationships with others in the Italian cultural scene of the time, including Vincenzo Monti, Antonio Rosmini, Gino Capponi, Mario Rapisardi, Carlo Tenca, the painter Francesco Hayez, and the sculptors Vincenzo Vela and Giovanni Duprè. Key cultural figures from the rest of Europe also passed through the lounge of his house in Milan, including Liszt and Stendhal. In 1879 Andrea Maffei was made a senator of the Kingdom of Italy and participated in Italian political life. In the mid-19th century he frequently lived at Riva del Garda, where he organised his rich art collection and where, in 1935, the town's Liceo classico was named after him.

William Hazlitt (10 April 1778 – 18 September 1830) was an English essayist, drama and literary critic, painter, social commentator, and philosopher. He is now considered one of the greatest critics and essayists in the history of the English language, placed in the company of Samuel Johnson and George Orwell. He is also acknowledged as the finest art critic of his age. Despite his high standing among historians of literature and art, his work is currently little read and mostly out of print.

During his lifetime he befriended many people who are now part of the 19th-century literary canon, including Charles and Mary Lamb, Stendhal, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and John Keats.