Marie-Claire Blais (World Authors Series) - Hardcover

Jean, Mary

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805745475 ISBN 13: 9780805745474

Publisher: Twayne Publishers, 1995

Synopsis

Series Editors: Bernth Lindfors, University of Texas at Austin; Robert Lecker, McGill University; David OConnell, Georgia State University; David William Foster, Arizona State University; Janet Pérez, Texas Tech University

Twaynes United States Authors, English Authors, and World Authors Series present concise critical introductions to great writers and their works. Devoted to critical interpretation and discussion of an authors work, each study takesaccount of major literary trends and important scholarly contributions and provides new critical insights with an original point of view. An Authors Series volume addresses readers ranging from advanced high school students to university professors. The book suggests to the informed reader new ways of considering a writers work. A reader new to the work under examination will, after reading theAuthors Series, be compelled to turn to the originals, bringing to the reading a basic knowledge and fresh critical perspectives. Each volume features:

• A critical, interpretive study and explication of the authors works
• A brief biography of the author
• An accessible chronology outlining the life, work, and relevant historical background of the author
• Aids for further study -- complete notes and references, a selected annotated bibliography and an index
• A readable style presented in a manageable length

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About this title

From the Back Cover:

The tradition-bound Catholic Quebec of the 1950s from which the young Marie-Claire Blais hoped to escape was the very world she wrote about with such intensity, precision, and poignance in her many acclaimed novels, theater pieces, and essays. Even after she had found her personal and artistic freedom in other cultures, Blais spent many peripatetic years casting a backward glance at Quebec's people and their ways - observations borne out in such works as Une saison dans la vie d'Emmanuel (1965), the three-volume Manuscrits de Pauline Archange (1968-70), and Visions d'Anna (1980). In this first book-length English-language study of Blais, Mary Jean Green pays especially close attention to what she considers the author's four major works - La Belle Bete (1959), Une saison dans la vie d'Emmanuel, Le Sourd dans la ville (1979), and Visions d'Anna - and addresses Blais's other novels according to their focus on various themes: the life of the couple, the alienation of adolescence, love among women. In addition to the novels, Green covers Blais's plays for the stage, radio, and television and explores what Blais has written - both fiction and nonfiction - about the omnipresent danger of war, the lives of the homeless, the devastation of AIDS, and the desperation of young drug addicts. Green provides an excellent account of Blais's evolving awareness of feminist concerns and the parameters society has placed on women, and she masterfully weaves together the threads of Blais's life through a close reading of the autobiographical trilogy Manuscrits de Pauline Archange and the biographical memoir Parcours d'un ecrivain: Notes americaines (1993). This comprehensive study should prove as invaluableto students of Quebecois literature as it is to those of Blais's work.

About the Author:

Mary Jean Green is professor of French and associate dean of the faculty for the humanities at Dartmouth College.

About this edition

• Publisher: Twayne Publishers
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0805745475
• ISBN 13: 9780805745474
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 152