Through diaries and letters, Lorna Milne explores the life of Evelyn, an extraordinary photographer shaped by the harsh landscape of eastern Montana. Though originally from England, Evelyn's heart and temperament reflected her deep connection to the American West. The biography delves into her experiences and the challenges she faced, revealing the resilience and artistry that defined her life.
Inspired by the work of their colleague David Gascoigne, a group of scholars from the UK and France examine in this book the narrative strategies of some of the most interesting and important French writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Stretching chronologically from 1905 to 2005, the volume examines a wide variety of prose genres, from pornography to Bildungsroman to magic realism, as well as poetry. Michel Tournier figures in several of the contributions, emerging as something of a touchstone for many of the thematic preoccupations that are common throughout the period: values and authority, self and other, identity, spirituality, migration and exile, sexuality, the body, violence and war, and language. The authors also examine the flourishing of intertextuality, as well as the use of traditional forms, such as mythical structures and the ‘robinsonade’, to undermine authoritative ‘métarécits’. Probing these themes and forms, and their metamorphoses across 100 years, the essays demonstrate a striking degree of continuity, linking writers as different as Apollinaire and Houellebecq or Valéry and Fleutiaux, and highlight the difficulty of dividing the period neatly into chronologically ordered categories labelled ‘modern’ or ‘postmodern’.
This book is the first to examine postcolonial cultures and identities by investigating the way in which violence is represented by Francophone creative artists. Focusing chiefly on literature, but including discussion of both film and photography, the volume includes chapters on the representation of the colonial massacre in Paris and Thiaroye; of beatings, torture and murder in Congo and the Maghreb; of the Rwandan genocide; of slavery in the Antilles; and of violence – especially the rape and abuse of women – throughout the Francophone world. These analyses, while they make for troubling reading, permit interesting comparisons and confirm the existence of concerns that are common to postcolonial Francophone artists. A pressing interest in materiality and the physical body as a vehicle of representation, a preoccupation with gender, and a restless experimentation with creative form are some of the most insistent features of their work. Most importantly, perhaps, their portrayal of violence reveals a strong engagement not only with the politics of postcolonial culture and identity, but with their ethical dimensions.