Bibliograph

Adventurer, the life and times of Giacomo Casanova, Leo Damrosch

Type

Label

Adventurer, the life and times of Giacomo Casanova, Leo Damrosch

Language

eng

Bibliography note

Includes bibliographical references and index

resource.biographical

individual biography

Illustrations

illustrationsmaps

Index

index present

Literary Form

non fiction

Main title

Adventurer

Nature of contents

bibliography

Responsibility statement

Leo Damrosch

Sub title

the life and times of Giacomo Casanova

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.0 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?

Classification