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Consuming Autobiographies
"Since 1975, French literary writing has been marked by an autobiographical turn which has seen authors increasingly often tap into the vein of what the French term ecriture de soi. This coincides, paradoxically, with the 'death of autobiography', as these authors self-consciously distance themselves and their writings from conventional autobiography, founding a 'nouvelle autobiographie' where the very possibility of autobiographical expression is questioned. In the first book-length study in English to address this phenomenon, Claire Boyle sheds a new light on this hostility toward autobiography through a series of ground-breaking studies of estrangement in autobiographical works by major post-war authors Nathalie Sarraute, Georges Perec, Jean Genet and Helene Cixous. She identifies autobiography as a site of conflict between writer and reader, as authors struggle to assert the unknowableness of their identity in the face of a readership resolutely desiring privileged knowledge. Autobiography emerges as a deeply troubling genre for authors, with the reader as an antagonistic consumer of the autobiographical self."
Queens and Revolutionaries
Queens and Revolutionaries proposes new readings of Genet that focus on the two areas that Saint Genet does not adequately address: sex and politics. The book first demonstrates how Sartre's empasis on a range of binary oppositions fails to do justice to the complex interplay of agency and determinism in Genet's novels of the 1940s. Using contemporary feminist and gender theory to elucidate the fluctuations, oscillations, and reversals in Genet's representations of cross-dressing and homosexuality, the readings show how these representations in turn reveal those theories limitations. The second half of the book turns to lesser known work dating from the late 1960s onward, and to 'Prisoner of Love', in order to contest Sartre's insistence on the non-political nature of Genet's work. It examines Genet's texts on the Black Panthers and the Palestinians, highlighting his political engagement after May 1968. It also traces the continuities from his earlier work, and shows how revolutionary aesthetics, theatricality, and performance are now increasingly reconceptualised as explicitly political acts.
Political Stylistics
First published in 1992, Political Stylistics is a way of studying the formal properties of texts based on the principle that all linguistic production operates within the intricate network of power relations that structure the social realm.
Political Stylistics
First published in 1992, Political Stylistics draws together ideas about society and language from a range of theorists including Pratt, Bourdieu, Goody and Watt, and Bakhtin, to establish a political stylistics: a way of studying the formal properties of texts based on the principle that all linguistic production operates within the intricate network of power relations that structure the social realm. On a practical level, this methodology is used to analyse the representation of popular French and argot in three literary works where it extends beyond the speech of the characters and enters the narrative. The book is articulated along three axes: the trajectory of the French working class from mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century; the trajectory of popular language from social margin to literary centre; and the evolution of the novel from naturalism to modernism, to post-modernism. This book will be of interest to students of literature, linguistics, literary theory, and cultural studies.
From Creole to Standard
This book gives a fascinating account of the unique history of the national – creole – language of Mauritius and the process of standardization that it is undergoing in postcolonial times. The central question is how far a creative writer's activity may affect the status and linguistic forms of a regional language. The book focuses on the work of the author Dev Virahsawmy, who, particularly through his Shakespeare translations, is an active agent in the standardization of Mauritian creole. The approaches employed in From Creole to Standard combine a sociolinguistic examination of (changing) language attitudes with detailed textual studies of some of Virahsawmy's works to show the relatio...
Literary Slumming
Literary Slumming: Slang and Class in Nineteenth-Century France applies a sociolinguistic approach to the representation of slang in French literature and dictionaries to reveal the ways in which upper-class writers, lexicographers, literary critics, and bourgeois readers participated in a sociolinguistic concept the author refers to as “literary slumming”, or the appropriation of lower-class and criminal language and culture. Through an analysis of spoken and embodied manifestations of the anti-language of slang in the works of Eugène François Vidocq, Honoré de Balzac, Eugène Sue, Victor Hugo, the Goncourt Brothers, and Émile Zola, Literary Slumming argues that the nineteenth-century French literary discourse on slang led to the emergence of this sociolinguistic phenomenon that prioritized lower-class and criminal life and culture in a way that ultimately expanded class boundaries and increased visibility and agency for minorities within the public sphere.
Minstrelsy and Murder
In Minstrelsy and Murder, Andrew Silver locates the foundation of the South’s dark humor in the great and violent cultural upheavals of the nineteenth century. Examining the connection between comic victimization and real acts of aggression, Silver shows southern humor to be a product not of America’s wholeness and national unity but of its internal fears, divisiveness, and perpetual civil strife. He focuses on the work of southern writers Augustus B. Longstreet, George Washington Harris, Charles Chesnutt, and Mark Twain, exploring a strain of regional humor that runs counter to the more familiar American comic tradition. A profound distress about class emerges clearly in Silver’s read...
Lofty Dogmas
Compiled by three noted poets, this is an eclectic, stimulating, and informed selection of poets' remarks on poetry spanning eras, ethnicities, and aesthetics. The 102 selections from nearly as many poets reach back to the Greeks and Romans, then draw on Chaucer, Shakespeare, Sidney, and Milton, on to Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, and Poe, then Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot, Rilke, and Pound, concluding with many of our contemporaries, including Hall, Clifton, Mackey, Kunitz, and Rukeyser. The book is divided into three sections. "Musing" concerns issues of inspiration, "Making," issues of craft, from diction to meter to persona and voice, and "Mapping," the role of poetry and the poet. Headnotes at th...
Colonialism, Race, and the French Romantic Imagination
This book investigates how French Romanticism was shaped by and contributed to colonial discourses of race. It studies the ways in which metropolitan Romantic novels—that is, novels by French authors such as Victor Hugo, George Sand, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, François René de Chateaubriand, Claire de Duras, and Prosper Mérimée—comprehend and construct colonized peoples, fashion French identity in the context of colonialism, and record the encounter between Europeans and non-Europeans. While the primary texts that come under investigation in the book are novels, close attention is paid to Romantic fiction’s interdependence with naturalist treatises, travel writing, abolitionist tex...
Masculinities in Twentieth- and Twenty-first Century French and Francophone Literature
The study of masculinities and gender identity in contemporary literature is relatively new and, with each year of this millennium, gains momentum. Indeed, as the women’s movement becomes forceful in developing nations, the question of tolerance to gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transvestites undergoes a similar process. At a time when women refuse to be subjected to war crimes, when they begin entering the workforce and realize the need to support their families independently, and when they refuse to remain in abusive marriages or remain silent in countries, where governments ignore their needs, men and women are questioning the meaning of gender in their culture and often seek alternativ...
