Description: Timothy Mathews examines work by a range of writers and painters working in France in the twentieth century. This book engages with canonical figures--Guillaume Apollinaire, Marguerite Duras and Jean Genet, Roland Barthes, Pablo Picasso and René Magritte--as well as more neglected individuals including Robert Desnos and Jean Fautrier. Integrating theoretical and material approaches to reading and viewing, Mathews engages with the distinctive features of different literary genres and different types of painting to develop an original history of artistic ambition in twentieth-century France.
Brief description: Timothy Mathews is Professor in the French Department at University College London. He is the author of Reading Apollinaire: Theories of Poetic Language (1987) and co-editor of Violence, Théorie, Surréalisme (1994).
Review Quotes: "This book will be of interest to those intrigued by an alternatve approach to the avant-garde movement in literature and the visual arts of the twentieth century." Dalhusie French Studies