Marguerite Yourcenar: The Other/Reader (English and French Edition)

This critical work, 'Marguerite Yourcenar: The Other/Reader,' analyzes the narrating and authorial figures in Yourcenar's realist corpus, focusing specifically on how these figures establish and maintain authority. Moral issues quickly assert themselves as a prime locus of narrational power: to read well is to submit completely to the narrator's moral codes. However, close studies of Yourcenar's six novels, and of the three stories of 'Comme l'eau qui coule,' reveal that an initial, profound mistrust of language and, especially readers, eventually gave way to an acceptance of the complexities and ambiguities of all communication. This thematic is revealed, and plays itself out in part, in Yourcenar's very gradual move from first-person to third-person narration. Writing for an unknown 'other' in the latest works, the career author opens herself to moral codes that are not her own; she embraces them and the misreadings that produced them as both valid and admirable.