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The definitive biography of a leading twentieth-century French writer A leading exponent of the nouveau roman, Nathalie Sarraute (1900–1999) was also one of France's most cosmopolitan literary figures, and her life was bound up with the intellectual and political ferment of twentieth-century Europe. Ann Jefferson's Nathalie Sarraute: A Life Between is the authoritative biography of this major writer. Sarraute's life spanned a century and a continent. Born in tsarist Russia to Jewish parents, she was soon uprooted and brought to the city that became her lifelong home, Paris. This dislocation presaged a life marked by ambiguity and ambivalence. A stepchild in two families, a Russian émigré...
Containing critical readings of some major French authors in the light of the evolving relations between biography and literature, this book offers a history of French literature over a 300-year period, and also a discussion of biography - its forms, history, and functions
This engaging book spans three centuries to provide the first full account of the long and diverse history of genius in France. Exploring a wide range of examples from literature, philosophy, and history, as well as medicine, psychology, and journalism, Ann Jefferson examines the ways in which the idea of genius has been ceaselessly reflected on and redefined through its uses in these different contexts. She traces its varying fortunes through the madness and imposture with which genius is often associated, and through the observations of those who determine its presence in others. Jefferson considers the modern beginnings of genius in eighteenth-century aesthetics and the works of philosoph...
An important collection of essays which treats Bakhtin as a provocative theorist whose work must be tested, explored and compared with the work of others. Contributors assess Bakhtin's contribution to difficult issues of colonialism, feminism, reception theory and theories of the body, amongst others. New articles explore the origins, previously unacknowledged, of Bakhtin's theory of language and provide a vivid account of the dramatic scandal surrounding Bakhtin's thesis on Rabelais. Contains dramatic new material, drawn from post-perestroika sources, which demythologizes the image of this important writer. A new bibliographical essay and introduction bring the English-language reader up-to-date with the progress of Bakhtin studies in Russia.
This book poses the question: what happens when reading enters the realist process? and answers it by way of a critical study of Stendhal's writing. Ann Jefferson argues that a recognition of the role of reading in representation is particularly crucial to an understanding of Stendhal's realism, and her account includes substantial discussions of De l'Amour, Le Rouge et le Noir, the Vie de Henry Brulard and La Chartreuse de Parme. Her study also draws a number of illuminating parallels between Stendhal and aspects of modern critical theory, and uses them in order to reveal the high degree of sophistication and self-consciousness in Stendhal's writing, qualities which are attributed here to the intensity of his preoccupation with his readers. By focusing on the issue of reading in Stendhal this book not only proposes a reassessment of Stendhal's own work, but also opens up lines of enquiry on the critical problem that is realism.
Nathalie Sarraute, initially hailed as a leading theorist and exemplar of the nouveau roman, is now regarded as a major French novelist in her own right. Ann Jefferson offers a new perspective on Sarraute's entire oeuvre--her fiction, her outstanding autobiography Enfance and her influential critical writings--by focusing on the crucial issue of difference that emerges as one of her central preoccupations. Jefferson explores Sarraute's fundamental ambivalence to differences of various kinds, including questions of gender and genre.