Mallarmé: The Poet and His Circle - Softcover

Lloyd, Rosemary

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0801489938 ISBN 13: 9780801489938

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2005

Synopsis

Upon his death in 1898, the French Symbolist poet Stephane Mallarmé (b. 1842) left behind a body of published work which though modest in quantity was to have a seminal influence on subsequent poetry and aesthetic theory. He also enjoyed an unparalleled reputation for extending help and encouragement to those who sought him out. Rosemary Lloyd has produced a fascinating literary biography of the poet and his period, offering a subtle exploration of the mind and letters of one of the giants of modern European poetry.Every Tuesday, from the late 1870s on, Mallarmé hosted gatherings that became famous as the "Mardis" and that were attended by a cross section of significant writers, artists, thinkers, and musicians in fin-de-siecle France, England, and Belgium. Through these gatherings and especially through a voluminous correspondence―eventually collected in eleven volumes―Mallarmé developed and recorded his friendships with Paul Valery, Andre Gide, Berthe Morisot, and many others. Attractively written and scrupulously documented, Mallarme: The Poet and His Circle is unique in offering a biographical account of the poet's literary practice and aesthetics which centers on that correspondence.

About this title

Review:

"An extremely thoughtful and well-documented new study, a book that sheds as much light on the cultural dynamics of the fin-de-siecle as it does on the aesthetics, ethics, and personality of Mallarmé himself.... In the end, Lloyd skillfully demonstrates that Mallarmé's correspondence holds much hidden significance."

Source: French Forum

"Highly original in form and conception, Mallarmé: The Poet and His Circle stands out from other biographies. Rosemary Lloyd demonstrates the central importance of the letters for Mallarmé's aesthetic theory and practice, and their critical interest as a testing ground for the great experiments of Symbolism."

Author: Jill Anderson, University of Melbourne

"Lloyd's richly insightful study focuses on the way Mallarmé's correspondence with his friends and acquaintances (his circle) sheds light on the process of poetic composition.... Lloyd's style is elegant rather than artful, and the erudition of the author, while understated, is apparent on every page."

Source: French Review

"Rosemary Lloyd's book stands out among recent publications on Mallarmé for its readability and its intimate portrait of the poet in the context of his times."

Source: The European Legacy

"Rosemary Lloyd's Mallarmé occupies a peopled landscape rather than the desert of abstraction to which many recent critics have sought to confine him. But the remarkable thing about this book is that Lloyd's discussion of Mallarmé's people―the crowd of artists and litterateurs with whom he had dealings―offers us new ways of reading his poems, essays, and letters at their most difficult and provocative. This is a landmark in the historical understanding of an incomparable writer."

Author: Malcolm Bowie, Oxford University

"Taking the poet's correspondence as the focus of her study, Rosemary Lloyd brilliantly captures the savor of Mallarmé. Her delightful, finely drawn portrait illuminates Mallarmé's relationships with his many artist friends, from Zola to Redon."

Author: James Lawler, University of Chicago

"The book places Mallarmé within the blazing late-19th-century Parisian artistic ferment and offers credible looks at the origins of his endlessly complicated and beautiful work."

Source: Publishers Weekly

"This articulate literary biography... sheds new and important light on Mallarmé's own poems and essays.... An important addition to large public as well as scholarly collections,... this volume will be a sine qua non for any library supporting serious study in poetry, art, and music of late 19th-century France. Endnotes, a substantial bibliography, a useful index, and excellent print, paper, and binding add to the book's value."

Source: Choice

"Throughout her book Lloyd segues gracefully from the poet's life and milieu to his poems, always matched with her first-rate translations and subtle explications. While insisting on the everyday simplicity of Mallarmé's symbols (mirrors, sunsets, vases) she never tries to explain away the poems' irreducible complexity. This is biographical criticism of the highest order; it is also an absorbing portrait of a dazzling subculture."

Source: Times Literary Supplement

"To encounter this remarkable study of Mallarmé's life, character, and surroundings with a focus on a broad exchange of letters is to read, for once, from the inside out. At every turn, Rosemary Lloyd's lively and authoritative translations, her deep knowledge, and subtle grasp of what really matters―in a life and in a reading―make this book a triumph."

Author: Mary Ann Caws, Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature, Graduate School, City University of New York, editor of Stéphane Mallarmé, Selected Poetry and Prose

About the Author:

Rosemary Lloyd is Rudy Professor of French and Professor of Gender Studies and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Indiana University-Bloomington. She is the author, editor, and translator of several books, including Mallarmé: The Poet and His Circle, Baudelaire's World, Shimmering in a Transformed Light: Writing the Still Life, and Closer and Closer Apart: Jealousy in Literature, all from Cornell.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0801489938
• ISBN 13: 9780801489938
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288