University Press Copublishing Division / University of Delaware Press
Pages: 222
•
Trim: 6½ x 9¼
978-1-61149-561-4 • Hardback • April 2015 • $107.00 • (£82.00)
978-1-61149-562-1 • eBook • April 2015 • $101.50 • (£78.00)
Robert Ziegler is professor emeritus of liberal studies at Montana Tech of the University of Montana.
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1: The Pardoner
Le Calvaire
L’Abbé Jules
Sébastien Roch
Chapter 2: The Seer
Dans le ciel
Chapter 3: The Stranger
Le Jardin des supplices
Le Journal d’une femme de chambre
Chapter 4: The Brother
Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique
La 628-E8
Dingo
Conclusion
Bibliography
Companion to Ziegler’s The Nothing Machine (2007)—which describes the 19th-century journalist, novelist, and public intellectual Octave Mirbeau’s solidarity with social outsiders such as the Impressionist painters, Alfred Dreyfus, and Oscar Wilde—the present volume scrutinizes Mirbeau's more personal impulses: his overlooked spiritual yearnings, his interest in mystery, and his search for the transcendental. Ziegler devotes chapters to various eras of Mirbeau’s literary production, from his early autobiographical novels and his unfinished manuscript Dans le ciel to his anti-Christian novels (Jardin des supplices and Journal d’une femme de chambre) and his later fiction on cars, pets, and neurasthenia. Ziegler explores Mirbeau’s desire to forgive, to express the ineffable, and to 'experience the ecstasy induced by speed, disorientation, novelty, leave-taking, and ego disintegration,' to quote from the introduction. A chronicle of several touchstone events, both political and creative, that shaped the French fin-de-siècle, this original, well-crafted study targets Mirbeau's aspirations of social justice as it traces his personal and professional shift from combative nihilism to spiritual equilibrium. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.
— Choice Reviews
Octave Mirbeau’s Fictions of the Transcendental is the sole book-length study to trace the spiritual trajectory of Mirbeau, an author best known for his relentless struggle for social and political justice…. This extremely rich and complex book is perhaps best suited to connoisseurs of Octave Mirbeau’s multifaceted literary production.... A more experienced student of Mirbeau’s œuvre will read Ziegler’s latest book with immense gratitude that so much has been detected and skillfully examined through a psychoanalytical lens that had not been systematically applied to this prolific and prodigious author of fin-de-siècle France…. Mirbeau’s case, masterfully analyzed by Ziegler in The Nothing Machine and Octave Mirbeau’s Fictions of the Transcendental, serves as a caution to scholars who would content themselves with applying simple political grids to the writings of firebrand authors.
— Nineteenth-Century French Studies