Nathalie Sarraute, Fiction and Theory: Questions of Difference

Paperback / softback

Main Details

Title Nathalie Sarraute, Fiction and Theory: Questions of Difference
Authors and Contributors      By (author) Ann Jefferson
SeriesCambridge Studies in French
Physical Properties
Format:Paperback / softback
Pages:232
Dimensions(mm): Height 228,Width 152
Category/GenreLiterary studies - from c 1900 -
Literary studies - fiction, novelists and prose writers
ISBN/Barcode 9780521027267
ClassificationsDewey:843.914
Audience
Professional & Vocational
Illustrations Worked examples or Exercises

Publishing Details

Publisher Cambridge University Press
Imprint Cambridge University Press
Publication Date 22 June 2006
Publication Country United Kingdom

Description

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.

Reviews

'... innumerable insights and illuminations offered by this important book which no Sarraute scholar will want to be without.' Modern Language Review