Ann Jefferson – författare

This book, first published in 1984, is based on readings of the novels of three major representative practitioners of the nouveau roman. Since its beginnings in the 1950s the nouveau roman has posed a major challenge to the theory of the novel because its practitioners claimed to have jettisoned the mainstays of nineteenth-century fiction: plot, character and the representation of reality. Consequently the nouveau roman has tended to generate radical or even subversive theories of the novel which have little to contribute to our understanding of the main stream of the genre. In this study, Ann Jefferson reassesses the theoretical implications of the nouveau roman and the terms in which fiction is generally defined, in order to demonstrate that the nouveau roman, far from being anti-fiction, is both profoundly novelistic and extremely instructive about the nature of fiction in general.

This book takes a fresh look at the relations between literature and biography by tracing the history of their connections through three hundred years of French literature. The starting point for this history is the eighteenth century when the term 'biography' first entered the French language and when the word 'literature' began to acquire its modern sense of writing marked by an aesthetic character. Arguing that the idea of literature is inherently open to revision and contestation, Ann Jefferson examines the way in which biographically-orientated texts have been engaged in questioning and revising definitions of literature. At the same time, she tracks the evolving forms of biographical writing in French culture, and proposes a reappraisal of biography in terms not only of its forms, but also of its functions.Although Ann Jefferson's book has powerful theoretical implications for both biography and the literary, it is first and foremost a history, offering a comprehensive new account of the development of French literature through this dual focus on the question of literature and on the relations between literature and biography. It offers original readings of major authors and texts in the light of these concerns, beginning with Rousseau and ending with 'life-writing' contemporary authors such as Pierre Michon and Jacques Roubaud. Other authors discussed include Mme de Stäel, Victor Hugo, Sainte-Beuve, Barbey d'Aurevilly, Baudelaire, Nerval, Mallarmé, Schwob, Proust, Gide, Leiris, Sartre, Genet, Barthes, and Roger Laporte.

This book offers an examination of everyday life in the Iberian colonies of Central and South America—the indigenous peoples, their Spanish and Portuguese colonizers, and the Africans brought over as slaves.Drawing on a wealth of primary documents and recent research, Daily Life in Colonial Latin America gives readers a genuine sense of everyday living in Central and South America, from the age of the great explorers in the 16th century to the beginning of the era of independence three centuries later.Daily Life in Colonial Latin America considers the full range of people caught up in the sweep of history during this pivotal time—Indians, Spanish and Portuguese settlers, Africans brought to the region as slaves, Whites and Mestizos, and women and children. By focusing on the lives of those often overshadowed by history, the book offers a new way of understanding how peoples from the Iberian peninsula, sub-Saharan Africa, and the western hemisphere interacted to produce a uniquely Latin American culture.

Nathalie Sarraute (1900-99) is regarded as one of the major French novelists of the twentieth century. Initially hailed as a leading theorist and exemplar of the nouveau roman, she has come to be regarded as an important author in her own right with her own distinctive concerns. In this major 2000 study of Sarraute, the first in English since her death, Ann Jefferson offers a fresh perspective on Sarraute's entire oeuvre - her novels, her outstanding autobiography Enfance and her influential critical writings - by focusing on the crucial issue of difference which emerges as one of her central preoccupations. Drawing on a variety of critical approaches, Jefferson explores Sarraute's fundamental ambivalence to differences of various kinds including questions of gender and genre. She argues that difference is simultaneously asserted and denied in Sarraute's work, and that the notion of difference, so often celebrated by other writers and thinkers, is shown in Sarraute's work to the inseparable from ambiguity and anxiety.

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 (1900-99) is regarded as one of the major French novelists of the twentieth century. Initially hailed as a leading theorist and exemplar of the nouveau roman, she has come to be regarded as an important author in her own right with her own distinctive concerns. In this major 2000 study of Sarraute, the first in English since her death, Ann Jefferson offers a fresh perspective on Sarraute's entire oeuvre - her novels, her outstanding autobiography Enfance and her influential critical writings - by focusing on the crucial issue of difference which emerges as one of her central preoccupations. Drawing on a variety of critical approaches, Jefferson explores Sarraute's fundamental ambivalence to differences of various kinds including questions of gender and genre. She argues that difference is simultaneously asserted and denied in Sarraute's work, and that the notion of difference, so often celebrated by other writers and thinkers, is shown in Sarraute's work to the inseparable from ambiguity and anxiety.

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 philosophes such as Diderot. She then investigates the nineteenth-century notion of national and collective genius, the self-appointed role of Romantic poets as misunderstood geniuses, the recurrent obsession with failed genius in the realist novels of writers like Balzac and Zola, the contested category of female genius, and the medical literature that viewed genius as a form of pathology.She shows how twentieth-century views of genius narrowed through its association with IQ and child prodigies, and she discusses the different ways major theorists--including Sartre, Barthes, Derrida, and Kristeva--have repudiated and subsequently revived the concept. Rich in narrative detail, Genius in France brings a fresh approach to French intellectual and cultural history, and to the burgeoning field of genius studies.

The definitive biography of a leading twentieth-century French writerA 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 in Paris, a Jew in bourgeois French society, and a woman in a man’s literary world, Sarraute was educated at Oxford, Berlin, and the Sorbonne. She embarked on a career in law that was ended by the Nazi occupation of France, and she spent much of the war in hiding, under constant threat of exposure. Rising to literary eminence after the Liberation, she was initially associated with the existentialist circle of Beauvoir and Sartre, before becoming the principal theorist and practitioner of the avant-garde French novel of the 1950s and 1960s. Her tireless exploration of the deepest parts of our inner psychological life produced an oeuvre that remains daringly modern and resolutely unclassifiable.Nathalie Sarraute: A Life Between explores Sarraute's work and the intellectual, social, and political context from which it emerged. Drawing on newly available archival material and Sarraute's letters, this deeply researched biography is the definitive account of a life lived between countries, families, languages, literary movements, and more.

The definitive biography of a leading twentieth-century French writerA 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 in Paris, a Jew in bourgeois French society, and a woman in a man’s literary world, Sarraute was educated at Oxford, Berlin, and the Sorbonne. She embarked on a career in law that was ended by the Nazi occupation of France, and she spent much of the war in hiding, under constant threat of exposure. Rising to literary eminence after the Liberation, she was initially associated with the existentialist circle of Beauvoir and Sartre, before becoming the principal theorist and practitioner of the avant-garde French novel of the 1950s and 1960s. Her tireless exploration of the deepest parts of our inner psychological life produced an oeuvre that remains daringly modern and resolutely unclassifiable.Nathalie Sarraute: A Life Between explores Sarraute's work and the intellectual, social, and political context from which it emerged. Drawing on newly available archival material and Sarraute's letters, this deeply researched biography is the definitive account of a life lived between countries, families, languages, literary movements, and more.