The Environment and Marguerite Yourcenar

This study is the first full-length discussion of Le Labyrinthe du monde by Marguerite Yourcenar along environmental lines. Yourcenar emerges as an insightful writer with an important contemporary message, responsive to the urgent environmental concerns of the present day.

This book is the first full-length study of Marguerite Yourcenar's Le Labyrinthe du monde along environmental lines. Written by the first académicienne more than twenty years after Mémoires d'Hadrien, the three-volume work was her most ambitious undertaking. Drawing extensively on the rich reserves of Yourcenar scholarship as well as on environmental humanities, this study entails a broad review of time, place and interconnectedness. While Yourcenar's work often engages in detail with her parents and their forebears, the analysis here includes a focus on notions such as fragility and vulnerability, qualities common to human beings and to the rest of the natural world. Through a quasi-plot structure and a range of concerns carefully orchestrated and examined, Yourcenar proffers her extensive genealogical heritage as a reading of the global and the modern, opening the way to possible grounds for optimism. Yourcenar emerges as an insightful and deeply reflective writer with an important contemporary message, responsive to the urgent environmental concerns of the present day.

Autorentext

Rodney Mearns completed his initial studies in Dublin and at Jesus College, Oxford, and subsequently pursued his doctoral degree at St Cross College, Oxford. He taught for many years, in the course of which he published a critical edition of a fifteenth-century English text. His doctoral research focused on Marguerite Yourcenar's Le Labyrinthe*du monde*.

Klappentext

This study is the first full-length discussion of Le Labyrinthe du monde by Marguerite Yourcenar along environmental lines. Her most ambitious undertaking, the three-volume work, composed over a decade and a half, was written by the first académicienne more than twenty years after Mémoires d Hadrien. The study draws extensively on the rich reserves of Yourcenar scholarship as well as on environmental humanities. The result is a review of a broad set of considerations of time, place and interconnectedness. While Yourcenar s text engages often in detail and certainly in depth with her parents and their forebears, this study seeks to show how, through its loose-limbed, quasi-plot structure, the author proffers her extensive genealogical heritage as a way of reading and understanding the global and the modern. Yourcenar emerges as an insightful and deeply reflective writer with an important contemporary message, responsive to the urgent environmental concerns of the present day.

Inhalt

Contents: Introduction - Time - Environment: Fauna - In Quest of a World Remade - Conclusion.