Book excerpt: Violence is one of the main themes in the novels of Hanore de Balza. Executions, muders, savagery and death accompany the conspiracies and the turbulence that characterise his post-Revolutionary times, from the terror to Napoleonic campaigns and then to the upheavals of 1830 and 1848. Despite the importance of violence in Balzac, this is the first book-length study of the topic. The book begins by tracing the links between violence and Balzac's approach to the novel, not merely in terms of violent content, but, equally importantly, in terms of the form associated with that content. From and content combine to perpetuate and naturalise violence and suffering. After charting examples of this combination in one of Balzac's earliest fictions, the books moves on to the links between violence and place violence and history (Catherine de Medicis; the Terror), between violence and place(from his native Touraine to sickness in Paris), and between violence and gender/sexuality. It alos examines the representiation of violence in the form of spoken or written death. Throughout the analysis, the bokk asks the following question: do Balzac's novels reinforce or counteract the literary text's apparent love-affair with violence?