Sean Latham
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- May 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195379990
- eISBN:
- 9780199869053
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195379990.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
The continuing expansion of the mass media in the 20th century, and particularly the emergence of mass-mediated celebrity culture, meant that an ever-growing audience imagined they had access to even ...
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The continuing expansion of the mass media in the 20th century, and particularly the emergence of mass-mediated celebrity culture, meant that an ever-growing audience imagined they had access to even the most exclusive circles. Uniquely positioned to exploit this fraught tension between the public and the private, the roman à clef became an increasingly popular genre, catering to a market hungry for scandal and snobbery. This chapter focuses narrowly on two such coteries, one in England and the other in Paris. The first organized itself around the imposing figure of Lady Ottoline Morrell, who, despite her generosity, was frequently satirized in romans à clef by D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, and others. Far from simpleminded acts of revenge, these works deliberately exploit the genre in order to escape the hermetic aestheticism of highbrow modernism and thus reap the considerable rewards of the wider literary marketplace. In expatriate Paris, Jean Rhys deployed the roman à clef in similarly strategic ways, using the masochistic protagonist in Quartet to attack Ford Madox Ford’s misogynistic bohemianism. Poised at the boundary between public and private, the roman à clef thrives at the intersection between gender, genre, modernism, and celebrity.Less
The continuing expansion of the mass media in the 20th century, and particularly the emergence of mass-mediated celebrity culture, meant that an ever-growing audience imagined they had access to even the most exclusive circles. Uniquely positioned to exploit this fraught tension between the public and the private, the roman à clef became an increasingly popular genre, catering to a market hungry for scandal and snobbery. This chapter focuses narrowly on two such coteries, one in England and the other in Paris. The first organized itself around the imposing figure of Lady Ottoline Morrell, who, despite her generosity, was frequently satirized in romans à clef by D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, and others. Far from simpleminded acts of revenge, these works deliberately exploit the genre in order to escape the hermetic aestheticism of highbrow modernism and thus reap the considerable rewards of the wider literary marketplace. In expatriate Paris, Jean Rhys deployed the roman à clef in similarly strategic ways, using the masochistic protagonist in Quartet to attack Ford Madox Ford’s misogynistic bohemianism. Poised at the boundary between public and private, the roman à clef thrives at the intersection between gender, genre, modernism, and celebrity.
Sean Latham
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- May 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195379990
- eISBN:
- 9780199869053
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195379990.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
By the end of the 19th century, the realist novel’s distinctive mode of organizing social, historical, and aesthetic knowledge came under increasing pressure from the roman à clef. Amidst a rapidly ...
More
By the end of the 19th century, the realist novel’s distinctive mode of organizing social, historical, and aesthetic knowledge came under increasing pressure from the roman à clef. Amidst a rapidly expanding, mass-mediated celebrity, this long suppressed genre abruptly emerged from the margins of culture to play a key role in the founding texts of modernism. Using the work of Oscar Wilde and Sigmund Freud, this chapter contends that these two figures help initiate the onset of modernism precisely by turning toward the roman à clef, releasing narrative powers they quickly realized were well beyond their control. Unlike most of his predecessors, Freud regularly adopted the conventions of the roman à clef for his case studies, using this device as a way to mask (and sometimes mutilate) the identities of his often affluent patients while exploring the fraught boundary between fact and fiction in their psychic lives. Wilde, too, exploits these same ambiguities throughout his work. Like Freud, he attempts to cultivate and to exploit a central, organizing secret in his work that articulates the provisional identities and social practices hovering imprecisely between history and the novel.Less
By the end of the 19th century, the realist novel’s distinctive mode of organizing social, historical, and aesthetic knowledge came under increasing pressure from the roman à clef. Amidst a rapidly expanding, mass-mediated celebrity, this long suppressed genre abruptly emerged from the margins of culture to play a key role in the founding texts of modernism. Using the work of Oscar Wilde and Sigmund Freud, this chapter contends that these two figures help initiate the onset of modernism precisely by turning toward the roman à clef, releasing narrative powers they quickly realized were well beyond their control. Unlike most of his predecessors, Freud regularly adopted the conventions of the roman à clef for his case studies, using this device as a way to mask (and sometimes mutilate) the identities of his often affluent patients while exploring the fraught boundary between fact and fiction in their psychic lives. Wilde, too, exploits these same ambiguities throughout his work. Like Freud, he attempts to cultivate and to exploit a central, organizing secret in his work that articulates the provisional identities and social practices hovering imprecisely between history and the novel.
Sean Latham
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- May 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195379990
- eISBN:
- 9780199869053
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195379990.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
As gateway to the book’s arguments, this chapter broadly explores the shadowy history of the roman à clef and its intersection with the collection of narrative innovations we now call modernism. ...
More
As gateway to the book’s arguments, this chapter broadly explores the shadowy history of the roman à clef and its intersection with the collection of narrative innovations we now call modernism. Because the roman à clef depends upon an unstable mixture of fact and fiction, it presents a unique set of critical, aesthetic, ethical, and epistemological challenges. This has often led readers and scholars to dismiss it as mere ephemera, but this chapter argues that modernist writers drew on its unstable structures in order to launch their own thoroughgoing critique of literary realism. Understanding modernism thus requires us to take the roman à clef seriously and this chapter develops a pragmatic, social theory of genre criticism to locate it squarely within a larger history of narrative. Doing so, however, reveals that the roman à clef has an uncanny agency of its own and thus cannot be easily constrained either by the authors who invoke it or the critics who attempt to understand its complex workings.Less
As gateway to the book’s arguments, this chapter broadly explores the shadowy history of the roman à clef and its intersection with the collection of narrative innovations we now call modernism. Because the roman à clef depends upon an unstable mixture of fact and fiction, it presents a unique set of critical, aesthetic, ethical, and epistemological challenges. This has often led readers and scholars to dismiss it as mere ephemera, but this chapter argues that modernist writers drew on its unstable structures in order to launch their own thoroughgoing critique of literary realism. Understanding modernism thus requires us to take the roman à clef seriously and this chapter develops a pragmatic, social theory of genre criticism to locate it squarely within a larger history of narrative. Doing so, however, reveals that the roman à clef has an uncanny agency of its own and thus cannot be easily constrained either by the authors who invoke it or the critics who attempt to understand its complex workings.
Sean Latham
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- May 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195379990
- eISBN:
- 9780199869053
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195379990.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
A history of the roman à clef’s slow rise and abrupt decline, this chapter explores its invention in the 17th and 18th centuries, where it at once contested and facilitated the emergent novel’s claim ...
More
A history of the roman à clef’s slow rise and abrupt decline, this chapter explores its invention in the 17th and 18th centuries, where it at once contested and facilitated the emergent novel’s claim to moral authority and aesthetic autonomy. Both narrative forms developed unique yet interrelated strategies for negotiating the expanding divide between history and fiction. The novel’s eventual rise, in fact, came to depend precisely on its ability to suppress and eventually supplant the far more disruptive—and innovative—energies of the roman à clef. This chapter first explores the ways in which the two genres became intertwined with one another in texts like Moll Flanders and Clarissa. It then traces the subtle ways in the novel eventually managed to incorporate elements of its shadowy double, which was, in turn, roundly denigrated as inartistic and insipid. The earlier genre did not disappear entirely, however, but continued to stalk the novel in works like Dickens’s Bleak House and Disraeli’s Coningsby. The chapter concludes by emphasizing the anarchic and innovative potential of the roman à clef, a genre whose energies had only been temporarily constrained rather than fully controlled.Less
A history of the roman à clef’s slow rise and abrupt decline, this chapter explores its invention in the 17th and 18th centuries, where it at once contested and facilitated the emergent novel’s claim to moral authority and aesthetic autonomy. Both narrative forms developed unique yet interrelated strategies for negotiating the expanding divide between history and fiction. The novel’s eventual rise, in fact, came to depend precisely on its ability to suppress and eventually supplant the far more disruptive—and innovative—energies of the roman à clef. This chapter first explores the ways in which the two genres became intertwined with one another in texts like Moll Flanders and Clarissa. It then traces the subtle ways in the novel eventually managed to incorporate elements of its shadowy double, which was, in turn, roundly denigrated as inartistic and insipid. The earlier genre did not disappear entirely, however, but continued to stalk the novel in works like Dickens’s Bleak House and Disraeli’s Coningsby. The chapter concludes by emphasizing the anarchic and innovative potential of the roman à clef, a genre whose energies had only been temporarily constrained rather than fully controlled.
Sean Latham
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- May 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195379990
- eISBN:
- 9780199869053
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195379990.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter explores the way James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis negotiated the legal consequences of their narrative experiments with libel and defamation in key romans à clef like Ulysses and The Apes ...
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This chapter explores the way James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis negotiated the legal consequences of their narrative experiments with libel and defamation in key romans à clef like Ulysses and The Apes of God. Both drew heavily on their own lives—as well as those of nearly everyone they knew—to launch a deliberate critique of the moral, aesthetic, and legal divide between fact and fiction. This forms, in fact, a fundamental aspect of their high modernist aesthetics. The interpenetration of world and text in their major works, however, also led both men into often grave legal trouble, putting their books in limbo and, in Lewis’s case, leading to a seemingly endless string of crippling lawsuits. Far from purely extraliterary events, these legal entanglements are instead an organizing component of the works themselves: the core element of a largely forgotten modernism structured around social, aesthetic, and legal contests between fiction and reality. Forged and circulated in this complex field of force, this chapter examines the ways these experimental texts not only exploit the ambiguities of libel law but are themselves inevitably constrained by its potent ability to adjudicate fact and thereby define the limits of fiction.Less
This chapter explores the way James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis negotiated the legal consequences of their narrative experiments with libel and defamation in key romans à clef like Ulysses and The Apes of God. Both drew heavily on their own lives—as well as those of nearly everyone they knew—to launch a deliberate critique of the moral, aesthetic, and legal divide between fact and fiction. This forms, in fact, a fundamental aspect of their high modernist aesthetics. The interpenetration of world and text in their major works, however, also led both men into often grave legal trouble, putting their books in limbo and, in Lewis’s case, leading to a seemingly endless string of crippling lawsuits. Far from purely extraliterary events, these legal entanglements are instead an organizing component of the works themselves: the core element of a largely forgotten modernism structured around social, aesthetic, and legal contests between fiction and reality. Forged and circulated in this complex field of force, this chapter examines the ways these experimental texts not only exploit the ambiguities of libel law but are themselves inevitably constrained by its potent ability to adjudicate fact and thereby define the limits of fiction.
Sean Latham
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- May 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195379990
- eISBN:
- 9780199869053
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195379990.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This book advances a relatively simple claim with far-reaching consequences for modernist studies: writers and readers throughout the early 20th century revived the long-despised codes of the roman ...
More
This book advances a relatively simple claim with far-reaching consequences for modernist studies: writers and readers throughout the early 20th century revived the long-despised codes of the roman à clef as a key part of that larger assault on Victorian realism we now call modernism. In the process, this resurgent genre took on a life of its own, reconfiguring the relationship between literature, celebrity, and the law. This book explores the complex process in which the roman à clef emerged to challenge fiction’s apparent autonomy from the social and political world. These diffuse yet potent experiments conducted by readers, writers, and critics provoked not only a generative aesthetic crisis, but a gradually unfolding legal quandary that led Britain’s highest courts to worry that fiction itself might be illegal. Writers like James Joyce, Jean Rhys, Oscar Wilde, and D. H. Lawrence deliberately employed elements of the roman à clef, only to find that it possessed an uncanny and even dangerous agency of its own. Close reading and archival excavation mix in chapters on the anonymous case study, Oscar Wilde’s trial, libel law, celebrity salons, and Parisian bohemia. This book thus both salvages the roman à clef and traces its weird itinerary through the early 20th century. In the process, it elaborates an expansive concept of modernism that interweaves coterie culture with the mass media, psychology with celebrity, and literature with the law.Less
This book advances a relatively simple claim with far-reaching consequences for modernist studies: writers and readers throughout the early 20th century revived the long-despised codes of the roman à clef as a key part of that larger assault on Victorian realism we now call modernism. In the process, this resurgent genre took on a life of its own, reconfiguring the relationship between literature, celebrity, and the law. This book explores the complex process in which the roman à clef emerged to challenge fiction’s apparent autonomy from the social and political world. These diffuse yet potent experiments conducted by readers, writers, and critics provoked not only a generative aesthetic crisis, but a gradually unfolding legal quandary that led Britain’s highest courts to worry that fiction itself might be illegal. Writers like James Joyce, Jean Rhys, Oscar Wilde, and D. H. Lawrence deliberately employed elements of the roman à clef, only to find that it possessed an uncanny and even dangerous agency of its own. Close reading and archival excavation mix in chapters on the anonymous case study, Oscar Wilde’s trial, libel law, celebrity salons, and Parisian bohemia. This book thus both salvages the roman à clef and traces its weird itinerary through the early 20th century. In the process, it elaborates an expansive concept of modernism that interweaves coterie culture with the mass media, psychology with celebrity, and literature with the law.
Sean Latham
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- May 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195379990
- eISBN:
- 9780199869053
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195379990.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Despite the often heroic narratives of modernism’s campaign against antiobscenity laws, writers in the period were much more likely to run afoul of libel suits sometimes brought successfully by ...
More
Despite the often heroic narratives of modernism’s campaign against antiobscenity laws, writers in the period were much more likely to run afoul of libel suits sometimes brought successfully by plaintiffs entirely unknown to them. This chapter surveys the surprisingly rich yet almost entirely unexplored intersection between literature and libel in the period by providing a broad overview of key cases and legal decisions. As writers increasingly experimented with the roman à clef, judges, juries, and eventually legislators in Great Britain struggled to maintain a clear legal conception of fiction—and the consequences were broad and far-reaching. Publishers demanded sometimes vast changes to manuscripts and the inherent conservatism of libel law became, in the words of one commentator, a “terror to authorship.” Following the particularly far-reaching case of E. Hulton & Co. v. Jones in 1909, the novel itself seemed to teeter on the edge of illegality as the courts proved almost incapable of meeting both the legal and aesthetic challenged posed by the roman à clef’s ability to broach the public sphere. The chapter concludes with a short digest of key acts and legal decisions in Britain and Ireland.Less
Despite the often heroic narratives of modernism’s campaign against antiobscenity laws, writers in the period were much more likely to run afoul of libel suits sometimes brought successfully by plaintiffs entirely unknown to them. This chapter surveys the surprisingly rich yet almost entirely unexplored intersection between literature and libel in the period by providing a broad overview of key cases and legal decisions. As writers increasingly experimented with the roman à clef, judges, juries, and eventually legislators in Great Britain struggled to maintain a clear legal conception of fiction—and the consequences were broad and far-reaching. Publishers demanded sometimes vast changes to manuscripts and the inherent conservatism of libel law became, in the words of one commentator, a “terror to authorship.” Following the particularly far-reaching case of E. Hulton & Co. v. Jones in 1909, the novel itself seemed to teeter on the edge of illegality as the courts proved almost incapable of meeting both the legal and aesthetic challenged posed by the roman à clef’s ability to broach the public sphere. The chapter concludes with a short digest of key acts and legal decisions in Britain and Ireland.
Patrick Parrinder
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199264858
- eISBN:
- 9780191698989
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199264858.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
History has been used in different novels during the late 17th century and the beginning of the 18th century. A connection between romance and history is explored in the chapter. Several writers ...
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History has been used in different novels during the late 17th century and the beginning of the 18th century. A connection between romance and history is explored in the chapter. Several writers recommend that history romance be written in a natural way in the same way that history itself employs. Roman à clef, a way of narrating a ‘secret’ history through fiction, also became a popular literary form during this time. Other instances where fictions could be disguised to avoid censorship are examined in the chapter. Samuel Richardson's Virtue and Rebellion and several works of Tobias Smollet are all reviewed in the chapter to decipher their connection to the political events that happened.Less
History has been used in different novels during the late 17th century and the beginning of the 18th century. A connection between romance and history is explored in the chapter. Several writers recommend that history romance be written in a natural way in the same way that history itself employs. Roman à clef, a way of narrating a ‘secret’ history through fiction, also became a popular literary form during this time. Other instances where fictions could be disguised to avoid censorship are examined in the chapter. Samuel Richardson's Virtue and Rebellion and several works of Tobias Smollet are all reviewed in the chapter to decipher their connection to the political events that happened.
Toni Bowers
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- May 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199592135
- eISBN:
- 9780191725340
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199592135.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature, 17th-century and Restoration Literature
Delarivier Manley's fictional narratives dramatize and valorize new‐tory principles in their deployment of seduction topoi. The New Atalantis (1709), Manley's most famous roman à clef and the ...
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Delarivier Manley's fictional narratives dramatize and valorize new‐tory principles in their deployment of seduction topoi. The New Atalantis (1709), Manley's most famous roman à clef and the centerpiece of this chapter, uses ad hominem satire to attack individual Whig partisans and general whig principles, and does so through a series of scenes representing relations of “collusive resistance” within “force or fraud.” Close readings of key interpolated seduction tales from Atalantis demonstrate the importance of the seventeenth‐century topoi inherited by (and transformed in) eighteenth‐century seduction stories to new‐tory self‐justifications. In Manley's work in particular, these inherited topoi also contribute directly to the construction of a viable Tory partisan identity in the first decades of the eighteenth century.Less
Delarivier Manley's fictional narratives dramatize and valorize new‐tory principles in their deployment of seduction topoi. The New Atalantis (1709), Manley's most famous roman à clef and the centerpiece of this chapter, uses ad hominem satire to attack individual Whig partisans and general whig principles, and does so through a series of scenes representing relations of “collusive resistance” within “force or fraud.” Close readings of key interpolated seduction tales from Atalantis demonstrate the importance of the seventeenth‐century topoi inherited by (and transformed in) eighteenth‐century seduction stories to new‐tory self‐justifications. In Manley's work in particular, these inherited topoi also contribute directly to the construction of a viable Tory partisan identity in the first decades of the eighteenth century.
William Todd Schultz
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- March 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780199752041
- eISBN:
- 9780190255961
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199752041.001.0001
- Subject:
- Psychology, Social Psychology
Truman Capote was one of the most gifted and flamboyant writers of his generation. What has received little attention, however, is Capote's last, unfinished book, Answered Prayers, a merciless ...
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Truman Capote was one of the most gifted and flamboyant writers of his generation. What has received little attention, however, is Capote's last, unfinished book, Answered Prayers, a merciless skewering of cafe society and the high-class women Capote called his “swans.” When excerpts appeared he was immediately blacklisted, ruined socially, labeled a pariah. Capote recoiled—disgraced, depressed, and all but friendless. In this book, the book sheds light on the life and works of Capote and answers the perplexing mystery—why did Capote write a book that would destroy him? Drawing on an arsenal of psychological techniques, the book illuminates Capote's early years in the South—a time that Capote himself described as a “snake's nest of No's”—no parents to speak of, no friends but books, no hope, no future. Out of this dark childhood emerged Capote's prominent dual life-scripts: neurotic Capote, anxious, vulnerable, hypersensitive, expecting to be hurt; and Capote the disagreeable destroyer, emotionally bulletproof, nasty, and bent on revenge. The book shows how Capote would strike out when he felt hurt or taken for granted, engaging in caustic feuds with Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams, and many other writers. And the book reveals how this tendency fed into Answered Prayers, an exceedingly corrosive and thinly disguised roman à clef that trashed his high-society friends.Less
Truman Capote was one of the most gifted and flamboyant writers of his generation. What has received little attention, however, is Capote's last, unfinished book, Answered Prayers, a merciless skewering of cafe society and the high-class women Capote called his “swans.” When excerpts appeared he was immediately blacklisted, ruined socially, labeled a pariah. Capote recoiled—disgraced, depressed, and all but friendless. In this book, the book sheds light on the life and works of Capote and answers the perplexing mystery—why did Capote write a book that would destroy him? Drawing on an arsenal of psychological techniques, the book illuminates Capote's early years in the South—a time that Capote himself described as a “snake's nest of No's”—no parents to speak of, no friends but books, no hope, no future. Out of this dark childhood emerged Capote's prominent dual life-scripts: neurotic Capote, anxious, vulnerable, hypersensitive, expecting to be hurt; and Capote the disagreeable destroyer, emotionally bulletproof, nasty, and bent on revenge. The book shows how Capote would strike out when he felt hurt or taken for granted, engaging in caustic feuds with Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams, and many other writers. And the book reveals how this tendency fed into Answered Prayers, an exceedingly corrosive and thinly disguised roman à clef that trashed his high-society friends.
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9781846316432
- eISBN:
- 9781846317163
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/UPO9781846317163.016
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
Coppet's tripartite division could accommodate members of Madame de Staël's immediate family, the visiting English, the local intellectuals of a liberal cast, and some princes, dukes, and titled ...
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Coppet's tripartite division could accommodate members of Madame de Staël's immediate family, the visiting English, the local intellectuals of a liberal cast, and some princes, dukes, and titled dignitaries from continental Europe. Part of de Staël's small family group was Jean Rocca, who was rumoured to be her lover despite being much younger than her. In truth, Rocca and de Staël had been secretly married in 1811. Born in 1766 and widowed in 1802, de Staël was known for falling for handsome young men who could match her intellectually. One such man was Benjamin Constant, who wrote a novel entitled Adolphe to describe his early experience of trying to break up with de Staël. Whereas Adolphe is a modified roman à clef, another novel, Glenarvon, is a glaring example of the genre and one which cannot be considered a masterpiece. Glenarvon was Caroline Lamb's fictionalised account of her affair with Lord Byron.Less
Coppet's tripartite division could accommodate members of Madame de Staël's immediate family, the visiting English, the local intellectuals of a liberal cast, and some princes, dukes, and titled dignitaries from continental Europe. Part of de Staël's small family group was Jean Rocca, who was rumoured to be her lover despite being much younger than her. In truth, Rocca and de Staël had been secretly married in 1811. Born in 1766 and widowed in 1802, de Staël was known for falling for handsome young men who could match her intellectually. One such man was Benjamin Constant, who wrote a novel entitled Adolphe to describe his early experience of trying to break up with de Staël. Whereas Adolphe is a modified roman à clef, another novel, Glenarvon, is a glaring example of the genre and one which cannot be considered a masterpiece. Glenarvon was Caroline Lamb's fictionalised account of her affair with Lord Byron.
Chris Forster
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- November 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780190840860
- eISBN:
- 9780190840907
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190840860.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter draws on the records of the British Home Office to reconsider the censorship of two novels by women in the late 1920s: Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness and the Norah James’s less ...
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This chapter draws on the records of the British Home Office to reconsider the censorship of two novels by women in the late 1920s: Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness and the Norah James’s less well-known Sleeveless Errand. It argues that the suppression of these novels was a function of the way they were positioned and received as “serious” works, capable of effecting social change. The chapter argues that specific circumstances in the late 1920s also shaped the perception of the novels. A perception that World War I had radically imbalanced the British population by creating two million "surplus women" created an context where representations of women's sexuality were perceived as especially dangerous. Hall’s representation in The Well of Loneliness of the book as a medium with authority and social agency made both novels seem especially dangerous in this context, and thus, in the eyes of the Home Office, worthy of suppression.Less
This chapter draws on the records of the British Home Office to reconsider the censorship of two novels by women in the late 1920s: Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness and the Norah James’s less well-known Sleeveless Errand. It argues that the suppression of these novels was a function of the way they were positioned and received as “serious” works, capable of effecting social change. The chapter argues that specific circumstances in the late 1920s also shaped the perception of the novels. A perception that World War I had radically imbalanced the British population by creating two million "surplus women" created an context where representations of women's sexuality were perceived as especially dangerous. Hall’s representation in The Well of Loneliness of the book as a medium with authority and social agency made both novels seem especially dangerous in this context, and thus, in the eyes of the Home Office, worthy of suppression.
Jerome Boyd Maunsell
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- December 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780198789369
- eISBN:
- 9780191831232
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198789369.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Prose (inc. letters, diaries), 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter begins with an account of H. G. Wells’s extremely autobiographical tendencies in his fiction, and discomfort with these elements. The World of William Clissold (1926), a late novel very ...
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This chapter begins with an account of H. G. Wells’s extremely autobiographical tendencies in his fiction, and discomfort with these elements. The World of William Clissold (1926), a late novel very close to “an” autobiography, is discussed early on. The chapter then examines Wells’s thoughts about the genre of biography, before moving on to his “formal” autobiographies: the two-volume Experiment in Autobiography (1934), and his posthumous autobiography H. G. Wells in Love (1984). The implicatory nature of autobiography and its impact on others is discussed, as well as the revision of autobiography, as Wells rewrote his life in official and more explicit, secret posthumous versions. The biographical circumstances around the writing of all three volumes, beginning in the spring of 1932, are explored in detail. Wells’s portrayals of Conrad, Ford, and James are also studied, as are his satirical “picshuas,” his notions of character, and his relations with women.Less
This chapter begins with an account of H. G. Wells’s extremely autobiographical tendencies in his fiction, and discomfort with these elements. The World of William Clissold (1926), a late novel very close to “an” autobiography, is discussed early on. The chapter then examines Wells’s thoughts about the genre of biography, before moving on to his “formal” autobiographies: the two-volume Experiment in Autobiography (1934), and his posthumous autobiography H. G. Wells in Love (1984). The implicatory nature of autobiography and its impact on others is discussed, as well as the revision of autobiography, as Wells rewrote his life in official and more explicit, secret posthumous versions. The biographical circumstances around the writing of all three volumes, beginning in the spring of 1932, are explored in detail. Wells’s portrayals of Conrad, Ford, and James are also studied, as are his satirical “picshuas,” his notions of character, and his relations with women.
