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This investigation of J.-K. Huysmans' representation of temporality sheds light on the complex and paradoxical nature of this late-nineteenth-century novelist and art critic, who was a modernist steeped in nostalgia as well as a nostalgic steeped in modernity. To unveil and understand the mechanisms and logic of this paradox, Elisabeth M. Donato examines Huysmans' characters' dealings with measured time and schedules, investigates the failure of des Esseintes' aesthetic experiment, and relates the novelist's construct of «spiritualist naturalism» to his increasingly frequent and intense longings for his own medieval utopia. Donato's new perspective onto the intricate relationship between modernity and nostalgia underscores Huysmans' firm and very modern stance à rebours of commonality in his never ending search for a solution to his dilemma.
The Pataphysician’s Library is a study of aspects of 1890s French literature, with specific reference to the traditions of Symbolism and Decadence. Its main focus is Alfred Jarry, who has proved, perhaps surprisingly, to be one of the more durable fin-de-siècle authors. The originality of this study lies in its use of the enigmatic list of books termed the livres pairs, which appears in Jarry’s 1898 novel Gestes et Opinions du docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien, his best-known prose work. The greatest interest of the livres pairs lies in a group of works by Jarry’s friends and contemporaries, primarily Leon Bloy, Georges Darien, Gustave Kahn, Catulle Mendes, Josephin Madan, Rachilde, and Henri de Regnier. Several of these authors feature as the lords of islands visited by the pataphysician Dr Faustroll in his curious voyage around Paris. In conjunction with Jarry’s own works, the contemporary livres pairs serve to illustrate the vibrant and experimental atmosphere in which these authors worked.
A biographical and bibliographical guide to current writers in all fields including poetry, fiction and nonfiction, journalism, drama, television and movies. Information is provided by the authors themselves or drawn from published interviews, feature stories, book reviews and other materials provided by the authors/publishers.
The contributors to the present volume, in espousing and extending the programme of such writers as Edward Said, Benedict Anderson, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Spivak, lay bare the genealogy of 'writing' empire (thereby, in a sense, 'un-writing' it). One focus is the Caribbean: the retrograde agenda of francophone créolité; the re-writing of empire in the postmodern disengagement of Edouard Glissant; resistance to post-colonial allegiances, and the dissolving of binary categories, in contemporary West Indian writing. Essays on India, Malaysia, and Indonesia explore various aspects of cultural self-understanding in Asia: un-writing high culture through hybrid 'shopping' among Western styles; t...
Twenty-five years after his death, critics and academics, film-makers and journalists continue to argue over Sartre's legacy. But certain interpretations have congealed around his iconic text Nausea, tending to confine it within the framework provided by the later philosophical work, Being and Nothingness. This volume opens up the text to a range of new approaches within the fields of English and Comparative Literature, as well as Philosophy and French Studies, under the headings: ‘Text’, ‘Context’, and ‘Intertext’: the textual strategies at work within the novel; the literary, cultural and philosophical context of its production; and the intertextual web within which it is situated. This volume will interest a wide public of teachers, students and all those who want to reconsider Sartre’s legacy in the twenty–first century.
In American Creoles, leading authorities examine the cultural, social, and historical affinities between the Francophone Caribbean and the American South. The essays focus on issues of history, language, politics, and culture in various forms and consider figures as diverse as Barack Obama, Frantz Fanon, Miles Davis, James Brown, Edouard Glissant, William Faulkner, and Lafcadio Hearn. Exploring the ideas of Creole culture and creolization—terms rooted in the history of contact between European and African people and cultures in the Americas—the essays provide productive ways to conceive of the larger Caribbean as a single cultural and historical entity.
The Family in Crisis in Late Nineteenth-Century French Fiction, first published in 1999, focuses on a key moment in the construction of the modern view of the family in France. Nicholas White's analysis of novels by Zola, Maupassant, Hennique, Bourget and Armand Charpentier is fashioned by perspectives on a wide cultural field, including legal, popular and academic discourses on the family and its discontents. His account encourages a close rereading of canonical as well as overlooked texts from fin de siècle France. What emerges between the death of Flaubert in 1880 and the publication of Bourget's Un divorce in 1904 is a series of Naturalist and post-Naturalist representations of transgressive behaviour in which tales of adultery, illegitimacy, consanguinity, incest and divorce serve to exemplify and to offer a range of nuances on the Third Republic's crisis in what might now be termed 'family values'.
In Jacques Réda: Being There, Almost, Aaron Prevots studies the work of this major contemporary French writer since the 1950s—poetry, novels, literary essays, short prose, jazz histories. He particularly examines Réda’s explorations of place, including how the ‘world’s energy’ becomes the ideal dancing partner, poetry incarnate in one’s arms. Réda embodies ‘being there, almost’ because he wanders with great wisdom yet renounces any glory in this metaphorical dance. He aligns us with the outer world’s rhythms and time’s passage. Fleeting waves of perception create a voluptuous, unified whole. In considering the arc of Réda’s works from 1952-2015, Aaron Prevots locates a progression from post-Baudelairean flânerie to commemoration of childhood, classical antiquity, fellow writers, jazz, physics, swing, theology, and trains.
Reflets réciproques: A Prismatic Reading of Stéphane Mallarmé and Hélène Cixous evokes the refractory aspect of a prism that bends and deflects light in order to produce a spectrum of twentieth-century thought emanating from the late nineteenth-century French literary avant-garde. Because the works of Mallarmé and Cixous are often described as hermetic and illisible, Jacques Derrida intervenes to play the role of intermediary through his separate writings on these poets. Important questions arise: How does the elliptical writing of Mallarmé relate to the hyperbolic writing of Cixous? What common strategies emerge and how do these strategies address the critical areas of sexual difference and political testimony for each writer?