Baroque Fictions: Revisioning the Classical in Marguerite Yourcenar

This in-depth study of the French novelist Marguerite Yourcenar’s fiction contends that the author’s texts exhibit, in unexpected ways, numerous characteristics of the neobaroque, the subversive, postmodern aesthetic that privileges extravagant artistic play, flux, and heterogeneity. In demonstrating the affinity of Yourcenar’s texts with the neobaroque, the author of this study casts doubt on their presumed transparency and stability, qualities associated with the French neoclassical tradition of the past century, where the Yourcenarian oeuvre is most often placed.
Yourcenar’s election to the prestigious, tradition-bound French Academy in 1981 as its first female “immortal” cemented her already well-established niche in the twentieth-century French literary pantheon. A self-taught classicist, historian, and modern-day French moralist, Yourcenar has been praised for her polished, “classical” style and analyzed for her use of myth and universal themes.
While those factors at first seem to justify amply the neoclassical label by which Yourcenar is most widely recognized, this study’s close reading of four of her fictions reveals instead the texts’ opacity and subversive resistance to closure, their rejection of stable interpretations, and their deconstruction of postmodern Grand Narratives. Theirs is a neobaroque “logic,” which stresses the absence of theoretical assurances and the limitations of reason.
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
I. A Frontispiece
II. Introduction Marguerite Yourcenar and the Writing of Fiction: An Aesthetic Imperative
III. Chapter 1 Anna,Soror…: Neobaroque Sacralizes the Abject
IV. Chapter 2 Denier du rêve : Baroque Discourses, Fascist Practices
V. Chapter 3 Neobaroque Humanism: “Sounding the Abyss ” in ‘L ’Œuvre au Noir’
VI. Chapter 4 Neobaroque Confessions: Un homme obscur and the Oppressive Superficiality of Words
VII. Conclusion An Author for the New Millennium
VIII. Selected Works Cited and Consulted
IX. Index of Proper Names
This study will be of interest to students of twentieth-century French fiction and comparative literature, especially that of the latter half of the twentieth century.