Men at arms

Fun in tights

Touché: The Duel in Literature. By John Leigh. Harvard University Press; 334 pages; $35 and £20.

FOR centuries the idea of two men facing each other in a duel has seemed anachronistic. Guy de Maupassant, a 19th-century writer, declared it to be “the last of our unreasonable customs”. Two centuries before that Louis XIV, king of France, tried to outlaw it as a feudal archaism. Yet despite this, the literature of the 19th and even the early 20th century is peppered with accounts of swashbuckling men. Why?

“Touché”, an intriguing book by John Leigh, a specialist in 18th-century French literature at Cambridge University, provides some of the answers. Ranging over two dozen examples of novels, poems and plays, Mr Leigh describes how this “medieval anomaly” continued to preoccupy writers, even as they dismissed duelling as an old-fashioned folly. 

In the early 18th century many writers depicted men who fought duels as hot-headed. By the 19th century, although it still seemed to spring from an older, medieval age, duelling was regarded as...

from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1C0UdLo