The Nothing Machine: The Fiction of Octave Mirbeau - Couverture souple

Ziegler, Robert

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 904202237X ISBN 13 : 9789042022379

Editeur : Editions Rodopi B.V., 2007

Synopsis

The Nothing Machine: The Fiction of Octave Mirbeau

A propos du livre

Présentation de l'éditeur

In an era when reality was aestheticized as collectibles, Octave Mirbeau unleashed his fiction like a destructive machine, setting fire to stale material and discredited ideologies, burning them as fuel and expelling texts as clean emissions. In this first English-language overview of all the novels published under Mirbeaus name, this study argues that Mirbeau is unique among his fin-de-siècle peers. Unlike the Decadents, whose art was a reliquary in which dead inspiration was preserved, Mirbeau disengaged himself from the corpses of past works. Abhorring tradition and complacency, Mirbeau elaborated a kinetics of fiction that made the novel into an agent of violent transformation. Contrasting the Decadents aesthetic of elegant morbidity with Mirbeaus vitalistic view of fiction, this volume shows Mirbeau modeling himself on the figure of the torture artist, cutting up his finished works, building novels to disassemble them, fitting them together in revolutionary ways. Creativity for Mirbeau fertilizes un jardin des supplices, a cemetery smoldering with decomposing texts that are resolved into their constituent parts and then reemerge in different guises. In Mirbeaus writing, lives and art works are only transient aggregates of material, and creativity is immortalized through the perishing of old forms.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Editions Rodopi B.V.
• Date d'édition: 2007
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 904202237X
• ISBN 13: 9789042022379
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 250
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible