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This is a classic portrait of a boy''s psychological, sexual and political coming of age in provincial France, set against the background of the Belle Epoque'
In an era when reality was aestheticized as collectibles, Octave Mirbeau unleashed his fiction like a destructive machine, setting fire to stale material and discredited ideologies, burning them as fuel and expelling texts as clean emissions. In this first English-language overview of all the novels published under Mirbeau's name, this study argues that Mirbeau is unique among his fin-de-siècle peers. Unlike the Decadents, whose art was a reliquary in which dead inspiration was preserved, Mirbeau disengaged himself from the corpses of past works. Abhorring tradition and complacency, Mirbeau elaborated a kinetics of fiction that made the novel into an agent of violent transformation. Contrasting the Decadents' aesthetic of elegant morbidity with Mirbeau's vitalistic view of fiction, this volume shows Mirbeau modeling himself on the figure of the torture artist, cutting up his finished works, building novels to disassemble them, fitting them together in revolutionary ways. Creativity for Mirbeau fertilizes un jardin des supplices, a cemetery smoldering with decomposing texts that are resolved into their constituent parts and then reemerge in different guises. In Mirbeau's writing, lives and art works are only transient aggregates of material, and creativity is immortalized through the perishing of old forms.
"I can't remember when I've learned as much from something I've read—or laughed as much while doing it." —Jacob Weisberg, Slate This international bestseller is an encyclopedic A-Z masterpiece—the perfect introduction to the very core of Western humanism. Clive James rescues, or occasionally destroys, the careers of many of the greatest thinkers, humanists, musicians, artists, and philosophers of the twentieth century. Soaring to Montaigne-like heights, Cultural Amnesia is precisely the book to burnish these memories of a Western civilization that James fears is nearly lost.
The essays in this volume discuss the overlap between philosophical, aesthetic, and political concerns in the 1790s either in the work of individuals or in the transfer of cultural materials across national borders, which tended to entail adaptation and transformation. What emerges is a clearer understanding of the “fate” of the Enlightenment, its radicalization and its “overcoming” in aesthetic and political terms, and of the way in which political “paranoia”, generated by the fear of a spreading revolutionary radicalism, facilitated and influenced the cultural transfer of the “radical”. The collection will be of interest to scholars in French, German, English, and comparative studies working on the later 18th century or early 19th century. It is of particular interest to those working on the impact of the French Revolution, those engaged in reception studies, and those researching the interface between political and cultural activites. It is also of key interest to intellectual historians of this period, as well as general historians with an interest in modern conservatism and radicalism.
The World of the Salons is a revisionist study of the French salon of the eighteenth century, arguing that it was a place governed by social hierarchy, not equality, connected to the world of the Court, and not the fount of the Enlightenment as has traditionally been believed.
Political firebrand, tireless reformer, champion of the avant-garde, Octave Mirbeau embraced his role as disturber of the peace. Inspired by Kropotkin and Dostoyevsky, Mirbeau became the social conscience of the era, speaking in a clear voice to impugn capitalist ideology, to defend the cause of the worker, the child, the pauper, the prostitute, and the soldier sacrificed as cannon fodder. Mirbeau’s critiques of society seethe with indictments of indoctrinating agencies: the family, which stifled the child’s freedom and expressive creativity, the school, which besotted students with the aridity of its curriculum, the army, which privileged patriotism over the sanctity of life, the church, which sanctified suffering, perverted instinct, and alienated the faithful from nature. Yet Mirbeau shared the admiration of fin-de-siècle zealots for the pariahs, tramps, and beggars rehabilitated in the Scripture. The personal trials of the misbegotten became an insignia of election. Those marginalized by society experienced damnation here below yet had glimpses of the bliss they hoped might await them somewhere higher. Yet it was not just in the less fortunate that Mirbeau sought evidence of the supra-rational. Generally neglected by critics, Mirbeau’s interest in the unknown and the inexpressible informed virtually all of his writing and helped shape his views on artistic work and political struggle. For this reason, this study sets out to analyze the spiritual politics of the author. As Mirbeau was becoming involved in the escalating controversy over the Dreyfus case and cementing his alliance with prominent anarchists, he was also undergoing a uniquely personal spiritual evolution. This volume breaks new ground, exploring the author’s secular metaphysic, charting his investigation of the spiritually transfiguring experience that redeems man’s desolate existence. What begins as Mirbeau’s indictment of Catholicism’s death-glorifying ethos, his attempt to find refuge from life’s pain in the blessedness of Nirvana, becomes a pursuit of mystical diffusion into the community of others. Showing how Mirbeau controverts the existence of a Christian god, this study argues that Mirbeau never abandons his exploration of life’s mysteries, apprehensions of the infinite that come from a refinement of his art and an identification with his brothers.
Classics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties showcases Edmund Wilson's critical writings spanning decades and continents. Many of these essays first appeared in the New Yorker. Here is Wilson on Jane Austen, Thackeray, Edith Wharton, Tolstoy, Swift (the classics) as well as brilliant observations on Poe, H.P Lovecraft, detective stories, and other commercial literature. This wide-ranging study from one of the most influential man of letters demonstrates Wilson's supreme skills as both literary and cultural critic.
With the possible exception of Great Britain, France can justifiably lay claim to possess the richest literary history of any country in Western Europe. This book covers the authors and their works, literary movements, and philosophical and social developments that have had a direct impact on style or content, and major historical events such as the two world wars, the Franco-Prussian War, the Algerian War, or the events of May 1968 that are directly reflected in a substantial body of imaginative writing. Historical Dictionary of French Literature, Second Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 500 cross-referenced entries on individual writers and key texts, significant movements, groups, associations, and periodicals, and on the literary reactions to major national and international events such as revolutions and wars. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about French literature.