The Loneliness of the Dying and Humana Conditio (Volume 6) (The Collected Works of Norbert Elias)

In ""Mozart: the Sociology of a Genius"", Elias paints a portrait of this extraordinarily gifted artist born into a society that did not yet possess either the concept of ""genius"" or (at least in music) that of freelance artist. The apparent contradictions of his character - the refined elegance of his compositions and the coarseness of his humor - reflect his uncomfortable and eventually tragic straddling of two social worlds. The volume also includes two major essays on cognate topics, previously unpublished in English: on the courtly painter Watteau's Embarkation for Cythera, and on ""The fate of German Baroque poetry: between the traditions of court and middle class"". ""Sociologists can be immensely grateful to UCD Press for insuring that future scholars will have the writings of this essential theorist in a definitive eidtion.""-Canadian Journal of Sociology