| book details |

Diaries Real and Fictional in Twentieth-Century French Writing

By (author) Sam Ferguson

| on special |

normal price: R 5 244.95

Price: R 4 720.95

| add to trolley |

| book description |

This volume is the first study of the diary in French writing across the twentieth century, as a genre which includes both fictional and non-fictional works. From the 1880s it became apparent to writers in France that their diariesâ€”a supposedly private form of writing â€”would probably come to be published, strongly affecting the way their readers viewed their other published works, and their very persona as an author. More than any other, AndrÃ© Gide embraced the literary potential of the diary: the first part of this book follows his experimentation with the diary in the fictional works Les Cahiers d'AndrÃ© Walter (1891) and Paludes (1895), in his diary of the composition of his great novel, Le Journal des faux-monnayeurs (1926), and in his monumental Journal 1889-1939 (1939). The second part follows developments in diary-writing after the Second World War, inflected by radical changes in attitudes towards the writing subject. Raymond Queneau's works published under the pseudonym of Sally Mara (1947-1962) used the diary playfully at a time when the writing subject was condemned by the literary avant-garde. Roland Barthes's experiments with the diary (1977-1979) took it to the extremes of its formal possibilities, at the point of a return of the writing subject. Annie Ernaux's published diaries (1993-2011) demonstrate the role of the diary in the modern field of life-writing. Throughout the century, the diary has repeatedly been used to construct an oeuvre and author, but also to call these fundamental literary concepts into question.