Louis Guilloux (Faux Titre)

(This is the first truly comprehensive study, in any langu...)

This is the first truly comprehensive study, in any language, of the writings of Louis Guilloux. It embraces all his fiction, including his short stories, to which little or no attention has previously been paid. The title refers to Guilloux's lifelong stance: an empathetic witness and listener to the lives of other people, who lifts anecdotes to the level of social and psychological life-studies. Highly valued by writers such as Malraux and Camus, Guilloux's work is studied here under several key categories (which represent overlaps and tensions rather than bleak opposites): memory and forgetfulness; the shifting relationship of individual and community; roots (stasis) and escape (movement); Guilloux and committed literature (La Maison du Peuple, Les Batailles perdues, and the trip to the USSR with Gide and Dabit). A long chapter is devoted to a close reading of Guilloux's baroque masterpiece, Le Sang noir, a much richer and less cerebral epic of an intellectual enmeshed in a provincial society than its successor, Sartre's La Nausee. Detailed attention is given to Guilloux's recycling of the model for the hero Cripure, the rogue elephant thinker Georges Palante. Le Sang noir is a haunted book. Guilloux's experiments with chronological dislocation (Le Jeu de patience), with narrative voices, essais de voix, (Coco perdu), with multiple personality (La Confrontation), and with the ambiguous pseudo-science of physiognomy (passim) are all fully analysed. Throughout, wherever called for, the culturally cosmopolitan Guilloux is compared or contrasted with writers from various countries: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gorky, Silone, Dickens, Valles, Camus, and Sartre. This is a matter less of influence than of Guilloux's choice of companions.

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Georges Darien: Robbery and Private Enterprise (Faux Titre, No 18)

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Writing on the Move: Albert Londres and Investigative Journalism (European Connections)

(Albert Londres (1884-1932) was a much-translated French i...)

Albert Londres (1884-1932) was a much-translated French investigative journalist, distinguished by the application of humour to serious reporting. His journalistic coverage was extremely wide (Europe, Soviet Russia, the Middle East, the Far East, Africa, South America), as were his themes: war, revolution, racism, prison and asylum conditions, the slave trade, colonialism, sport. This study compares and contrasts Londres with other globetrotting reporters from France, Britain and the USA who deal courageously and innovatively with history in the making. The approach is historical, sociological and rhetorical. The author investigates the shifting borderline between journalism and literature and critically examines the numerous clichés about, and by, journalists.

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All Puns Intended: The Verbal Creation of Jean-Pierre Brisset (Research Monographs in French Studies, 9)

(Nineteenth-century France spawned numerous ‘fous litterai...)

Nineteenth-century France spawned numerous ‘fous litteraires’, one of the most fascinating being Jean-Pierre Brisset (1837-1919). An individualist par excellence, he dismantled the existing French tongue, reshaping it to suit his own grandiose purpose, which was that of explaining the development of human beings from frogs and of their language from croaks. Continuous and ubiquitous punning was a unique feature of his writing. In this study, Walter Redfern examines such themes as the nature of literary madness, the phenomenon of deadpan humour, the role of analogy, and the place of institutional religion in Brisset’s inventive rewriting of the Creation.

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Paul Nizan: Committed Literature in a Conspiratorial World

( Sartre's friend and sometime rival, Paul Nizan was a pr...)

Sartre's friend and sometime rival, Paul Nizan was a prototype of the angry young man. Ideologically a Marxist, politically a Communist, professionally a writer, endowed--Sartre conceded--with a sharper mind and greater literary ability than his own, Nizan diagnosed the ills of French society in the 1930's. His writings, vilified by the Party he left in September 1939, are being rediscovered in France. W. D. Redfern gives now the first full-length appraisal in English of his life and work. Nizan as a writer and a critical intelligence is seen in Mr. Redfern's analysis of his radical imagination and its deployment in his novels, polemical essays, journalism, and correspondence. His place among his contemporaries is also assessed, Mr. Redfern thus illuminating the political and literary worlds of the philosophical rebels (Berl, Politzer, Friedmann), the Communists and idealists (Aragon, Malraux, Weil) in Paris during the 1920"s and 1930's. Originally published in 1972. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

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