Adventurer : the life and times of Giacomo Casanova / Leo Damrosch.
| Author/creator |
Damrosch, Leopold author. |
| Format | Book and Print |
| Publication Info | New Haven ; London : Yale University Press, [2022] |
| Copyright Notice | ©2022 |
| Description | vii, 422 pages, 24 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color), map ; 24 cm |
| Subject(s) |
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| Contents | Introduction: The challenge of Casanova -- City of masks and mirrors -- Awakenings -- An erotic education -- A career in the church -- The mysterious Castrato -- Casanova's children -- Corfu and Constantinople -- Metamorphosis -- Playboy -- Libertinism -- "You will also forget Henriette" -- Paris at last -- Nuns and lovers -- The great escape -- In search of the blind goddess -- Manon -- Rolling stone -- Jousting with Voltaire -- Still rolling -- Magus -- The end of Act I -- At the courts of Frederick and Catherine -- The duel -- "This phantom liberty" -- Spain -- Whiling away the years in Italy -- Trieste, and Venice at last -- The gathering gloom -- A pink Louis XV armchair -- Chronology. |
| Summary | The iconic libertine Giacomo Casanova (1725-1798) was a storied adventurer through the Enlightenment's shadowy underside. Known as a serial seducer, he was also an aspiring priest, an army officer, a fortune teller, a con man, a violinist, a mathematician, a Masonic master, an entrepreneur, a diplomat, a gambler, and a spy. The first to tell his own story, in his massive autobiography Histoire de Ma Vie, he recorded at least a hundred and twenty love affairs, as well as dramatic sagas of duels, swindles, arrests, and escapes. He knew kings and an empress, Catherine the Great, and most of the famous writers of the time, including Voltaire and Benjamin Franklin. Drawing on seldom used materials, Leo Damrosch situates Casanova fully in the multiple subcultures he inhabited. Reading Casanova's memoir with a critical eye and engaging extensively with his non-autobiographical writings, he brings alive this extraordinary figure and the eighteenth-century world that Casanova knew so intimately. Casanova aspired to a life of freedom from restraints, but, Damrosch asks, freedom at whose expense? |
| Bibliography note | Includes bibliographical references (pages 379-406) and index. |
| Genre/form | Biographies. |
| Genre/form | Biographies. |
| Genre/form | History. |
| ISBN | 0300248288 (hardcover) |
| ISBN | 9780300248289 (hardcover) |
Available Items
| Library | Location | Call Number | Status | Item Actions | |
| Joyner | General Stacks | D285.8 .C4 D357 2022 | ✔ Available | Place Hold |