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BestsellerE-book
Author Ziegler, Robert, 1947-

Title The nothing machine : the fiction of Octave Mirbeau / Robert Ziegler.

Publication Info. Amsterdam ; New York : Rodopi, 2007.

Item Status

Description 1 online resource (250 pages).
Physical Medium polychrome
Description text file
Series Faux titre ; 298
Faux titre ; no. 298.
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 243-248) and index.
Summary In an era when reality was aestheticized as collectibles, Octave Mirbeau unleashed his fiction like a destructive machine, setting fire to stale material and discredited ideologies, burning them as fuel and expelling texts as clean emissions. In this first English-language overview of all the novels published under Mirbeau?s name, this study argues that Mirbeau is unique among his fin-de-siecle peers. Unlike the Decadents, whose art was a reliquary in which dead inspiration was preserved, Mirbeau disengaged himself from the corpses of past works. Abhorring tradition and complacency, Mirbeau elaborated a kinetics of fiction that made the novel into an agent of violent transformation. Contrasting the Decadents? aesthetic of elegant morbidity with Mirbeau?s vitalistic view of fiction, this volume shows Mirbeau modeling himself on the figure of the torture artist, cutting up his finished works, building novels to disassemble them, fitting them together in revolutionary ways. Creativity for Mirbeau fertilizes un jardin des supplices, a cemetery smoldering with decomposing texts that are resolved into their constituent parts and then reemerge in different guises. In Mirbeau?s writing, lives and art works are only transient aggregates of material, and creativity is immortalized through the perishing of old forms.
Local Note eBooks on EBSCOhost EBSCO eBook Subscription Academic Collection - North America
Subject Mirbeau, Octave, 1848-1917 -- Criticism and interpretation.
Mirbeau, Octave, 1848-1917.
Criticism and interpretation.
Genre/Form Electronic books.
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Other Form: Print version: Ziegler, Robert. Nothing machine. Amsterdam ; New York : Rodopi, 2007 9789042022379 904202237X (OCoLC)172716911
ISBN 9781435611924 (electronic book)
1435611926 (electronic book)
904202237X
9789042022379
9789042022379
904202237X