Biography: writers Books

Book SynopsisA Writer’s Topography examines French-Algerian Nobel Prize laureate Albert Camus’s intimate yet often unsettled relationship with natural and human landscapes. Much like the Greek hero Sisyphus about whom he wrote his famous philosophical essay, Camus sustained a deep awareness of and appreciation for what he termed le visage de ce monde—the face of this earth. This wide-ranging collection of essays by Camus scholars from around the world demonstrates to what extent topography is omnipresent in Camus’s life and works. Configurations and contemplations of landscape figure prominently in his fictional works on both a literal and figurative level—from the earliest writings of his youth to his final, unfinished novel, Le Premier Homme. Furthermore, as a core component of the way in which Camus perceived, conceived and expressed the human condition, topography constitutes an over-arching and particularly profound dimension of his personal, public and philosophical thought.Table of ContentsJason HERBECK and Vincent GRÉGOIRE: Introduction Part I. Camus and His Works: Openings and Closings Agnès SPIQUEL-COURDILLE: Les lieux ouverts et le royaume Raymond GAY-CROSIER: Exiled in a Spiritual Geography: Albert Camus’s Road to Values Part II. Ontological Spaces Vincent GRÉGOIRE : Réflexion sur le thème du plateau dans la vie et l’œuvre de Camus Guy BASSET : Topographies suspendues Jacquelyn LIBBY : Tipasa and le monde: Metonymic Displacement in “Noces à Tipasa” Sophie BASTIEN : Formes et fonctions de la prison chez Camus Part III. Literal Meeting Places of the Imaginary Steven WINSPUR : Paysages et d’autres réseaux de vie chez Camus John WALSH: The Cooper and the Painter: The Topography of the Atelier in L’Exil et le Royaume Lorenzo GIACHETTI: A Psychogeography of the Monstrous in Le Premier Homme Part IV. Literary Meeting Places: Camus and His Contemporaries Thierry DURAND : Blanchot, Camus: une approche préliminaire Martine BENJAMIN : Le tombeau parental, ou « le temps d’un retour » dans Le Premier Homme d’Albert Camus, et dans Adieu ma mère, adieu mon cœur de Jules Roy Ben STOLTZFUZ: Hemingway’s Influence on Camus: The Iceberg as Topography Part V. In (the) Place of Writing: Literal and Literary Constructions Jason HERBECK: Bridging Consciousness: A Topographical Reading of La Chute Marie-Thérèse BLONDEAU : La Peste ou les métamorphoses d’Oran Matthew MOYLE : Écrire le lieu qui s’inscrit: topographies toponymiques dans La Peste et La Chute John LAMBETH: The Figure of the Labyrinth in “Le Renégat” and “La Pierre qui pousse” Author Information

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Book SynopsisAgnon’s Story is the first complete psychoanalytic biography of the Nobel-Prize-winning Hebrew writer S.Y. Agnon. It investigates the hidden links between his stories and his biography. Agnon was deeply ambivalent about the most important emotional objects of his life, in particular his “father-teacher," his ailing, depressive and symbiotic mother, whom he left when she was very ill, and about whose death he felt guilty all his life, his emotionally-fragile wife, whom he named after his mother, and his adopted motherland, “the Land of Israel." Yet he maintained an incredible emotional resiliency and ability to sublimate his emotional pain into works of art. This biography seeks to investigate the unconscious emotional forces that drove his stories, his ambivalence about his family, and the underlying narcissistic grandiosity of his famous “modesty.”Trade Review"A brief review of Falk’s lengthy biography cannot possibly do justice to the book’s full complexity and richness. For those individuals keen to know all about Agnon’s life and personality, warts and all, this book is heartily recommended." - David Rodman, Independent Scholar,Israeli Affairs, 2019, DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2019.1670459.Table of ContentsAcknowledgements List of Figures Introduction: The Mind of S.Y. Agnon 1 The Home Town as Mother 2 The Land of Israel as the Idealized Mother 3 The Adoptive German Motherland 4 The Wife as Mother 5 A Daughter Named Faith 6 Catastrophic Change and Traumatic Flight 7 The Nobel Prize as Mother’s Love 8 Escape to Germany 9 Back to the Dead Mother 10 The Turning Point: Agnon, Kafka and Freud 11 The Writer, His Wife, and Her Psychoanalyst 12 Agnon vs. Freud: Hostility and Fascination 13 The Middle-Aged Hebrew Writer 14 Nobel Ambitions and the Quest for Mother’s Love 15 A Heart Attack in Sweden 16 My Way of Life is Fallen into the Sere, the Yellow Leaf 17 Losses, Eulogies and Stories 18 The “Jewish Messiah” and the “King of Flesh and Blood” Epilogue: After Life’s Fitful Fever Figures Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisInvestigating the oeuvre of the Italian humanist Francesco Filelfo (1398-1481), this collection is the first to make extensive use of the critical editions of Filelfo’s numerous writings – in particular of his Epistolarium, published in 2016 by Jeroen De Keyser, who also edited this volume. Uncovering a lot of new information not previously mentioned in the literature on Filelfo, twelve specialized scholars draw attention to long-neglected material, shedding new light on Filelfo’s intellectual endeavors and his literary journey between Greek and Latin. This illuminating collection offers historians of ideas as well as literary scholars and Neo-Latinists new inroads into Filelfo’s vast oeuvre, and through it to the world of Quattrocento humanism. Contributors include: Jean-Louis Charlet, Guy Claessens, Jeroen De Keyser, Tom Deneire, Ide François, James Hankins, Noreen Humble, Gary Ianziti, Han Lamers, David Marsh, John Monfasani, and Jan Papy.Trade Review"...ricca miscellanea [...] con una bibliografia corposa e un prezioso indice dei nomi." Simone Miolano, Università Firenze, in Medioevo greco, vol. 20, pp. 404-405.Table of ContentsList of Contributors Introduction: A Century of Filelfo Studies  Jeroen De Keyser Greekness Filelfo and the Byzantines  John Monfasani Hellenism and Cultural Unease in Italian Humanism: The Case of Francesco Filelfo  Han Lamers Philosophy Filelfo’s Plato: Always Already There  Guy Claessens Epicureanism and Stoicism in Francesco Filelfo’s Letters: A Reconsideration  Jan Papy Histories Filelfo and the Spartans  James Hankins Filelfo and the Writing of History  Gary Ianziti Rivalry Erudition, Emulation and Enmity in the Dedication Letters to Filelfo’s Greek to Latin Translations  Noreen Humble Francesco Filelfo as a Writer of Invective  David Marsh Form La métrique latine de Filelfo: épopée, satire, élégie, ode  Jean-Louis Charlet Filelfo, Cicero and Epistolary Style: A Computational Study  Tom Deneire Bibliography Index Nominum

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Book SynopsisAgnon’s Story is the first complete psychoanalytic biography of the Nobel-Prize-winning Hebrew writer S.Y. Agnon. It investigates the hidden links between his stories and his biography. Agnon was deeply ambivalent about the most important emotional objects of his life, in particular his “father-teacher," his ailing, depressive and symbiotic mother, whom he left when she was very ill, and about whose death he felt guilty all his life, his emotionally-fragile wife, whom he named after his mother, and his adopted motherland, “the Land of Israel." Yet he maintained an incredible emotional resiliency and ability to sublimate his emotional pain into works of art. This biography seeks to investigate the unconscious emotional forces that drove his stories, his ambivalence about his family, and the underlying narcissistic grandiosity of his famous “modesty.”Trade Review"A brief review of Falk’s lengthy biography cannot possibly do justice to the book’s full complexity and richness. For those individuals keen to know all about Agnon’s life and personality, warts and all, this book is heartily recommended." - David Rodman, Independent Scholar,Israeli Affairs, 2019, DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2019.1670459.Table of ContentsAcknowledgements List of Figures Introduction: The Mind of S.Y. Agnon 1 The Home Town as Mother 2 The Land of Israel as the Idealized Mother 3 The Adoptive German Motherland 4 The Wife as Mother 5 A Daughter Named Faith 6 Catastrophic Change and Traumatic Flight 7 The Nobel Prize as Mother’s Love 8 Escape to Germany 9 Back to the Dead Mother 10 The Turning Point: Agnon, Kafka and Freud 11 The Writer, His Wife, and Her Psychoanalyst 12 Agnon vs. Freud: Hostility and Fascination 13 The Middle-Aged Hebrew Writer 14 Nobel Ambitions and the Quest for Mother’s Love 15 A Heart Attack in Sweden 16 My Way of Life is Fallen into the Sere, the Yellow Leaf 17 Losses, Eulogies and Stories 18 The “Jewish Messiah” and the “King of Flesh and Blood” Epilogue: After Life’s Fitful Fever Figures Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisConcerning itself with biography and bio-fiction written in English and in French and also taking in American and Australian subjects, Outsider Biographies focuses on writers who have a criminal record and on notorious criminals who authors of bio-fiction consider as writers. It pursues an understanding of the formal effects of life-writers’ struggles between championing their subjects and a deep ambivalence towards their subjects’ crimes. The book analyses the challenge that these literary outsiders present to the mainstream French- and English-language traditions where many biographers assign merit to productive lives well lived. The book’s approach illuminates both differences in those traditions from the mid-eighteenth, to the twenty-first century and a convergence between them, evident in the experimental-cum-fictional devices in recent English-language biography. Outsider Biographies advances wide-ranging new interpretations of the biographical writing on each of its seven subjects, but does so in a way that invites the reader picking up the book out of a passion for just one of those subjects, to follow the thread onto another and yet another.Trade Review“Throughout, Magedera is attentive both to the blind spots and to the moments of intimate exchange between biographer and subject, and teases out some of their ethical implications. Magedera’s study of the discourse of the ‘outsider’ prompts important questions which will be evaluated for a long time to come, resulting in some cases in a narrative framed by the ignominious killing of the outsider (Kelly, Billy the Kid) and elsewhere, as in Genet, in a standpoint of generalized opposition to ‘everything else about the culture in whose language, by a broad consensus, he was held to excel’ (p. 288).” -David Houston Jones, University of Exeter, in: Modern Language review, Vol. 111, Iss. 2 (2016), pp. 535-536 "In Outsider Biographies, Ian Magedera offers a fascinating and nimble exploration of a specific sub-set of biographies of writers, the authors who combine their authorship with a documented criminal record. This is a markedly original and substantial contribution to life-writing studies." -Jean-Marc Moura, professeur de littératures francophones et de littérature comparée à l'Université de Paris Ouest; membre de l'Institut Universitaire de France "A well-researched, original and frequently entertaining contribution to the burgeoning field of biography studies. By focusing on a fascinating range of outsiders, from Johnson’s Savage to Ondaatje’s Billy the Kid, via biographers of de Sade and Rimbaud, Magedera casts light on a host of fascinating issues raised by biographical texts, often experimental in form, which explore deviant life histories. Engagingly written, Outsider Biographies will appeal to all those interested in new approaches to life-writing.” -Michael Sheringham, Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature in the University of Oxford "How do biographers interrogate towering figures such as Sade or Genet, Richard Savage or Billy the Kid? When criminal acts become the hinge between life and oeuvre, how do they enquire after presence, without eschewing the profound enigma of life and writing? With these biographical subjects, the ethical dimension inevitably sharpens fundamental epistemological questions. Ian Magedera expertly leads us through the maze of this fascinating subject, pursuing the genre's formal tensions by comparing francophone and anglophone traditions, from the eighteenth century to the present. Outsider Biographies is a masterpiece of analytical criticism." -Jean-Pierre Dubost, professeur émérite de Littérature Générale et Comparée, l'Université Blaise Pascal, Clermont-Ferrand “As a comparative study, Outsider Biographies is always well argued and thought provoking, and the sections on French writers are particularly valuable (especially as all the French language material is cited in both the original and in English).” -Joanne Wilkes, University of Auckland in New Zealand, in: Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 53, Iss. 1 (2016), pp. 201-204 "Corralling biographical subjects from as wide a range as 1744-2000 into a coherent framework is hard enough: choosing ones who fit the themes of both 'base crime' and 'high art' makes this harder still. Yet Ian Magedera's engaging study accepts the risks head on. By using the very obliqueness of some of the connections as a means of interrogating biographical theories 'at the edge,' he obtains results which are ultimately original and productive." -Jane Darcy, in: Biography, Vol. 38, Iss. 4 (2015), pp. 711-713Table of ContentsAcknowledgements and Dedication Introduction: Outsider Biography: Definitions and Corpus Part One: Richard Savage 1698-1743 1. Partial Biographies by Samuel Johnson and Richard Holmes Part Two: Le Marquis De Sade 1740-1814 2. De Sade According to Sainte-Beuve, Apollinaire, Lely and Lever 3. Barthes’ and Pauvert’s Questioning of De Sade Biography Part Three: Outlaws in Fictional Biography 4. An Outlaw in Fictional Biography: Andrew Motion’s Thomas Griffiths Wainewright 1794-1847 5. An Outlaw in Fictional Biography: Peter Carey’s Ned Kelly 1855-1880 6. An Outlaw in Fictional Biography: Michael Ondaatje’s Billy the Kid 1859-1881 Part Four: Arthur Rimbaud 1854-1891 7. ‘Family Biographies’ of Rimbaud, Followed by Scepticism and Anti-biography 8. Arthur Rimbaud: Steinmetz’s Biography and Michon’s Biographical Fiction Part Five: Jean Genet 1910-1986 9. Jean Genet: Biography and Saint Genet 10. Jean Genet: Biography after Saint Genet Conclusions: The Outsider’s Solitude Bibliography Index

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