A sympathetic, nuanced exploration of the fiction and turbulent life of this best-selling author A best-selling novelist in the 1930s, Irène Némirovsky (1903-1942) was rediscovered in 2004, when her Suite Française, set during the fall of France and the first year of German occupation, became a popular and critical success both in France and in the United States. Surviving in manuscript for sixty years after the author's deportation to Auschwitz, the work drew respectful attention as the voice of an early Holocaust victim. However, as remaining portions of Némirovsky's oeuvre returned to print, many twenty-first-century readers were appalled. Works such as David Golder and The Ball were condemned as crudely anti-Semitic, and when biographical details such as her 1938 conversion to Catholicism became known, hostility toward this "self-hating" Jew deepened. Countering such criticisms, Understanding Irène Némirovsky offers a sympathetic, nuanced reading of Némirovsky's fiction. Margaret Scanlan begins with an overview of the writer's life—her upper-class Russian childhood, her family's immigration to France, her troubled relationship with her neglectful mother—and then traces how such experiences informed her novels and stories, including works set in revolutionary Russia, among the nouveau riche on the Riviera, and in struggling French families and failing businesses during the Depression. Scanlan examines the Suite Française and other works that address the rise of fascism and anti-Semitism. Viewing Némirovsky as a major talent with a distinctive style and voice, Scanlan argues for Némirovsky's keen awareness of the unsettled times in which she lived and examines the ways in which even her novels of manners analyze larger social issues. Scanlan shows how Némirovsky identified with France as the center of culture and Enlightenment values, a nation where a thoughtful artist could choose her own identity. The Russian Revolution had convinced Némirovsky that violent liberations led to further violence and repression, that interior freedom required political stability. In 1940, when French democracy had collapsed and many seemed reconciled to the Vichy state, Némirovsky's idea of private freedom faltered—a recognition that her last work, Suite Française, for all its seeming reticence, makes poignantly clear.
Scanlan (English, Indiana University South Bend) considers several novels about terrorists and considers what they say about the role of the writer in modern society and politics. She examines the figure of the writer as a rival or a mirror of the terrorist, tracing the development of this relationship from its Romantic origins to the age of the Unabomber. The works of DeLillo, Rushdie, McNamee, Mary McCarthy, Lessing, Coetzee, Durrenmatt, Roth, Robert Stone, Volodine, and Conrad are specifically considered. c. Book News Inc.
Is the historical novel the outmoded genre that some people imagine--form inseparable from romanticism, nationalism, and the nineteenth century? In this stimulating volume, Margaret Scanlan answers a convincing "no," as she demonstrates the relevance of historical novels by well-known figures such as Anthony Burgess, John le Carr, Graham Greene, Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch, and Paul Scott, as well as by less well established writers such as Joseph Hone and Thomas Kilroy. Scanlan shows what a skeptical, experimental approach to the relationship between history and fiction these writers adopt and how radically they depart from the mimetic conventions usually associated with historical novels. Drawing on contemporary historiography and literary theory, Scanlan defines the problem of writing historical fiction at a time when people see the subject of history as fragmentary and uncertain. The writers she discusses avoid the great events of history to concentrate on its margins: what interests them is history as it is experienced, usually reluctantly, by human beings who would rather be doing something else. The first section of the book looks at fictional representations of England's difficult history in Ireland; the second examines spies, aliens, and the loss of public confidence; and the third probes the theme of Apocalypse, nuclear or otherwise, and depicts the collapse of the British Empire as an instance of the greatly diminished importance of Western culture in the world. Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Drawing on a three-year multidisciplinary study of children of divorced parents, the authors, leading academics in their fields, present a much-needed guide to understanding the experience of children who are experiencing parental separation. This book provides an in-depth account of how children are actively involved in the process of divorce and how they shape that experience. The topics discussed include how children find out that their parents are separating; how children tell other people about what is happening to them and their family; how parent-child relationships change after separation and ways in which children adapt and cope during and immediately after their parents' divorce. The authors show what children want and need to know as the process of divorce unfolds and how professionals can respond appropriately to help them to understand and adjust to their changing circumstances. Divorcing Children addresses the weaknesses of current legislation in family justice and suggests ways of improving the skills and knowledge of all professionals who work with children during this difficult period in children's lives.
When her philandering brother-in-law is accused of murdering a rival in a grand San Francisco Victorian, reluctant psychic Claire Scanlan must risk a perilous journey into the past to find the only witness-a time-traveling "soiled dove" from the 1890s who is invisible to everyone but Claire.
Using interviews and activities, this report examines, with children, how they negotiate their involvement in family functioning, rule-making and day-to-day decision making.
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