Plotting to Kill
Will be published approx. on 1. March 1991
Book
Hardback
XIV, 222 pages
978-0-8204-1435-5 (ISBN)
Description
In seven highly autobiographical French novels from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, fiction brings to real life a simple resolution. These novels plot to kill a female character based on a woman in the author's life, a person who was still alive when the novel was published.Because these novels both depend on and radically diverge from autobiographical reality, they are uniquely instructive about the nature of fiction itself. Reading the life stories in relation to the plots, Mortimer brings into sharp critical focus plot, plotting, and the plotable. Always interesting, often revealing, this probing analysis of a special type of autobiographical fiction, with its distinctive treatment of real and fictionalized women, will stimulate and entertain the reader.Corinne, Constant's Adolphe, Gide's L'immoraliste and La porte étroite, Alain-Fournier's Le grand Meaulnes, Radiguet's Le diable au corps, and Beauvoir's L'invitée.
More details
Person
The Author: Armine Kotin Mortimer, who received her Ph.D. from Yale in 1974, is Professor of French Literature and Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of three previous books, including La clôture narrative and The Gentlest Law: Roland Barthes's «The Pleasure of the Text» (Peter Lang 1989). She has published many articles in both French and English, on topics largely in narrative literature ranging across five centuries.
Content
Contents: Critical reading of autobiographical fiction - Plot, plotting, the plotable - French realistic novels: Staël, Corinne (1807); Constant, Adolphe (1816); Gide, L'immoraliste (1902) and La porte étroite (1909); Alain-Fournier, Le grand Meaulnes (1913); Radiguet, Le diable au corps (1923); Beauvoir, L'invitée (1943).