The theme of The Walnut Trees Of Altenburg is most closely related to its immediate predecessor in Malraux's array of novels: Man's Hope ( 1937 ).

Steven Ungar compares Nausea with French novels of different periods, such as Madame de La Fayette's La Princesse de Clèves ( 1678 ), Honoré de Balzac's Le Père Goriot ( 1835 ), André Malraux's La Condition humaine ( 1933 ), and Annie Ernaux's Une femme ( 1988 ), all of which have scenes with men and women faced with choices and " provide literary expressions to concerns with personal identity that vary over time more in detail than in essence.

Andre Malraux's The Walnut Trees Of Altenburg was written in the early years of the second World War, during a period of enforced leisure when he was taken prisoner by the Germans after the fall of France.

Nowhere before in Malraux's pages have we met such impassioned defenders of a `` quality of man '' which transcends the realm of politics and even the realm of action altogether -- both the action of Malraux's early anarchist-adventurers like Perken and Garine, and the self-sacrificing action of dedicated Communists like Kyo Gisors and Katow in Man's Fate.

Beevor's reference to " claims of martial heroism " is also dubious since although Malraux's books sometimes describe military action, he never presents his own role as especially heroic.

Here as elsewhere, Malraux's participation in major historical events inevitably brought him determined adversaries as well as strong supporters, and the resulting polarization of opinion has colored, and rendered questionable, much that has been written about his life.

and this first section was somehow preserved ( there are always these annoying little mysteries about the actual facts of Malraux's life ) when the Gestapo destroyed the rest.

If we are to believe the list of titles printed in Malraux's latest book, La Metamorphose Des Dieux, Vol. 1 ( ( 1957 ), he is still engaged in writing a large novel under his original title.

It is this larger theme of the `` quality of man '', a quality that transcends the ideological and flows into `` the human '', which now forms the pulsating heart of Malraux's artistic universe.

Malraux's novel La Condition Humaine ( Man's Fate ) ( 1933 ) won the Prix Goncourt.

There are suggestions that Malraux's paternal grandfather committed suicide in 1909.

Either way, most critics have not seen this as a significant factor in Malraux's life or literary works.

His experiences and observations while in Indochina led to Malraux's becoming highly critical of the French colonial authorities.

However, other biographical sources, including fellow combatants, express very different views, praising Malraux's leadership and sense of camaraderie.

French writer André Brincourt commented that Malraux's books on art have been " skimmed a lot but very little read ", and it is true that critical commentary has often given superficial and distorted accounts of their arguments.

There is now a large and steadily growing body of critical commentary on Malraux's literary œuvre, including his very extensive writings on art.

Malraux's artistic tastes included the modern arts and the avant-garde, but on the whole he remained conservative.

Many of his novels are set in fictional realms that resemble real places during real historical periods, such as Constantinople during the reign of Justinian I or Spain during the time of El Cid.

Indeed, in order to understand the historical context that led to the development of these paradigmatic picaresque novels in Spain during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it is essential to take into consideration the circumstances surrounding the lives of conversos, whose ancestors had been Jewish, and whose New Christian faith was subjected to close scrutiny and mistrust.

The earliest novels to deal with the concept of autodidacticism were the Arabic novels, Philosophus Autodidactus, written by Ibn Tufail in 12th-century Islamic Spain, and Theologus Autodidactus, written by Ibn al-Nafis in 13th-century Egypt.

George Orwell, on his return from Spain, recommended Cary to the Liberal Book Club, which requested Cary to put together a work outlining his ideas on freedom and liberty, a basic theme in all his novels.

He took refuge in Spain, where he continued to write: his acclaimed novels Cantaclaro ( 1934 ) and Canaima ( 1935 ) date from this period.

The novels have described periods when Saint-Germain has resided in the Roman Empire during reigns of Nero and Elagabalus, France during the reigns of Charlemagne and Louis XV, Russia during the reigns of Ivan the Terrible and Nicholas II, Germany in the 10th Century, Germany, Spain, and England between the First and Second World Wars, China during the Mongol invasion, Peru during the Spanish invasion, and the United States in the modern era.

Quim Monzó () ( born 24 March 1952 in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain ), is a contemporary Catalan writer of novels, short stories and discursive prose, mostly in Catalan.

She also wrote travel books, or rather accounts of places and experiences, on both Ireland and Spain, a country she loved, and which features in a number of her novels.

He now lives in Spain, where he continues to write novels.

Evangelisti's novels are greatly appreciated in France ( where he won several literary awards ), Spain, Germany and Portugal.

It is a tacit assumption in many wuxia novels that the law and order in the actual historical setting were dysfunctional or poor, like the change of dynastic China from Song Dynasty to Yuan Dynasty, to Ming Dynasty and to Qing Dynasty, periods in time correlating to tremendous upheavals and turmoil in the society.

In Louis Cha's novels the dysfunctionality can come in two levels: firstly, law and order broken down locally within China and secondly, the sovereignty of China came to be challenged by invaders.

Here, Mao was taught the value systems of Confucianism, one of the dominant moral ideologies in China, but he would later admit that he did not enjoy reading the classical Chinese texts which preached Confucian morals, instead favouring popular novels such as Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Water Margin.

* The Road to Samarcand is one of Patrick O ' Brian's early novels ( 1954 ) about an American teenage boy, the son of recently deceased missionary parents, who travels from China with a small party on the Silk Road en route to the West.

In China, however, there was no counterpart to the 19th century European explosion of revolution and romanticism The classic novels of the Ming and early Qing dynasties, represented a pinnacle not reached again.

His novels include: Shike, set in medieval Japan ; All Things Are Lights, a story that entwines the fate of Cathars of southern France with the occult traditions of Courtly Love and the troubadours ; The Saracen, describing the intricate politics of medieval Italy through the eyes of an Islamic warrior ; Shaman, tracing the fate of the survivors of the Black Hawk War in 19th century Illinois ; Lady Yang, a tragic story of an idealistic empress of medieval China.

Jin sets many of his stories and novels in China, in the fictional Muji City.

After being relegated to cookbooks and autobiographies for most of the 20th century, Asian American literature achieved widespread notice through Maxine Hong Kingston's fictional memoir, The Woman Warrior ( 1976 ), and her novels China Men ( 1980 ) and Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book.

The novels Moment in Peking () ( 1939 ), A Leaf in the Storm ( 1940 ), and The Vermillion Gate () ( 1953 ) were well received epics of China in turmoil, while Chinatown Family ( 1948 ) presented the lives of Chinese Americans in New York.

* Bas-Lag, the fictional world for several of China Miéville's novels

* In China Miéville's Bas-Lag novels, the Vodyanoi are an aquatic people skilled in water-based magic.

* is a 26 year-old agent ; in the novels, Joker recruits her in China.

* Pearl S. Buck ( 1892-1973 ), American author of The Good Earth and other novels set in China

Tanaka is an avid fan of the Chinese history and writing some novels set in China.

It is also one of the most well-known contemporary Chinese novels in China, and was made into a popular television series in the early 1990s.

* Pearl S. Buck ( 1892 – 1973 ), Nobel Prize-winning author of The Good Earth and other novels about China, lived in Zhenjiang with her missionary parents until the age of 18.

His longer The Roof Tile of Tempyo deals both with art and ancient China ; Lou-Lan and The Flood are short historical novels of China.

Schori is sympathetically portrayed as Peter Sorman in the fellow 1968-radical Jan Guillou's Hamilton novels, with a clearly anti-imperialist attitude, at least as critical against the United States as against China or the Soviet Union.

One of the unique elements included in the novel are poems and letters from Vietnam sent by Marine officer Dan Guenther ( U. of Iowa, MFA, 1973 ), who later published the novels China Wind ( Ivy, 1990 ) and Dodge City Blues ( Redburn Press, 2007 ).

He is best known for his Chinese novels that focuses on the people of the southern provinces of China and Southeast Asia.

Wiebe's novels include Peace Shall Destroy Many ( 1962 ), First and Vital Candle ( 1966 ), The Blue Mountains of China ( 1970 ), The Temptations of Big Bear ( 1973 ), The Scorched-wood People ( 1977 ), The Mad Trapper ( 1980 ), My Lovely Enemy ( 1983 ), A Discovery of Strangers ( 1994 ), and Sweeter Than All the World ( 2001 ).

The novels present a future history of an Earth dominated by China.

In the 1930s, the popularity of Pearl Buck's novels, especially The Good Earth, as well as growing American sympathy for China in its struggles with Japanese Imperialism, opened up opportunities for more positive Chinese roles in U. S. films.