McCaffrey, Enda

About the author: Dr. Enda McCaffrey is a lecturer in French at the Nottingham Trent University. His research interests cover nineteenth and twentieth century French Literature and French anarchism. He is currently working on a co-edited volume of French

Octave Mirbeau’s Literary and Intellectual Evolution as a French Writer 1880-1914

2000 0-7734-7792-6
This study demonstrates how the fusion of literary and political ideas in Mirbeau generated a vision of reality that foreshadowed Modernity. Through Mirbeau’s descriptions of the effects of technological, scientific developments of the day and the temporal and spatial implications of such developments (the automobile, for instance) on the literary process, coupled with his advocacy of a radical political ideology to expose the inadequacies of social democracy, it explores the relationship between literature and politics by highlighting how innovation in the creative process provides a more accommodating and reflective framework for the expression of political difference. Examines Le Calvaire; Sébastian Roch; L’Abbé Jules; Le Jardin des supplices; Le Journal d’une femme de chambre; Dans le ciel; Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique; La 628-E8; Dingo.