Paris Bride : A Modernist Life
- Submitting institution
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The University of Lancaster
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 255120211
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
-
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- Publisher
- Punctum Books
- ISBN
- 9781950192632
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- January
- Year of publication
- 2020
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- Yes
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- This book is 75000 words, with only an earlier version of the first 8000 pre-published. Secondly, it is of exceptional originality, being a work of experimental life-writing that seeks to know its subject by means of a whole series of formal innovations. Thirdly, it is of exceptional substance, drawing as it does on extensive archival research, and a vast range of literary and historical texts. Finally, it is of exceptional significance by virtue of making a major contribution to not only life-writing but also experimental literary criticism and modernist studies.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Paris Bride is an exploration of the lost life of one Marie Schad (née Wheeler), a woman who in 1905 was married in Paris, and in 1924 found her marriage annulled in London on grounds of non-consummation. At this point Marie was declared incapable of ‘the act of generation’ and sent back to Paris. Little else is known of her save legal papers, a few letters, photographs, and diaries of a friend.
With so little known of Marie’s life, Paris Bride seeks to reads her back into existence by catching glimpses of her, or her shadow, within a whole array of contemporaneous literary lives and texts. The writings of Mallarmé, Wilde, Kafka, and Benjamin all play leading parts; as do Mansfield’s ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ (1922), Desnos’s Liberty or Love! (1924), Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), Aragon’s Paris Peasant (1926), and Breton’s Nadja (1928). These particular authors and texts are selected as each one, in some way, connects with Marie’s life through a coincidence of time, place, or theme.
The dominant theme, given the annulment, is that of negation, a theme which lies at the very heart of modernism. Paris Bride is, then, not only a work of experimental biography but also of experimental literary criticism, seeking as it does to give a name and local habitation to modernism’s great fascination with negation. What follows is a host of insights into this fascination, each of which is touched by the complexity of annulment – an ‘event’ that proves
astonishingly rich in juridical, theological, medical, political, and philosophical significance.
Schad has given readings from Paris Bride on BBC R3’s The Verb, and to audiences at Queen Mary London, and the universities of York, South Wales, Malta, and Nottingham Trent. Paris Bride was reviewed in the Los Angeles Review of Books.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
