Böcker av Ann Jefferson

This book poses the question: what happens when reading enters the realist process?

Drawing on a wealth of primary documents and recent research, Daily Life in Colonial Latin America gives readers a genuine sense of everyday living in Central and South America, from the age of the great explorers in the 16th century to the beginning of the era of independence three centuries later.Daily Life in Colonial Latin America considers the full range of people caught up in the sweep of history during this pivotal time-Indians, Spanish and Portuguese settlers, Africans brought to the region as slaves, Whites and Mestizos, and women and children. By focusing on the lives of those often overshadowed by history, the book offers a new way of understanding how peoples from the Iberian peninsula, sub-Saharan Africa, and the western hemisphere interacted to produce a uniquely Latin American culture.

Nathalie Sarraute (1900-99) is regarded as one of the major French novelists of the twentieth century. Initially hailed as a leading theorist and exemplar of the nouveau roman, she has come to be regarded as an important author in her own right with her own distinctive concerns. In this major 2000 study of Sarraute, the first in English since her death, Ann Jefferson offers a fresh perspective on Sarraute's entire oeuvre - her novels, her outstanding autobiography Enfance and her influential critical writings - by focusing on the crucial issue of difference which emerges as one of her central preoccupations. Drawing on a variety of critical approaches, Jefferson explores Sarraute's fundamental ambivalence to differences of various kinds including questions of gender and genre. She argues that difference is simultaneously asserted and denied in Sarraute's work, and that the notion of difference, so often celebrated by other writers and thinkers, is shown in Sarraute's work to the inseparable from ambiguity and anxiety.

This engaging book spans three centuries to provide the first full account of the long and diverse history of genius in France. Exploring a wide range of examples from literature, philosophy, and history, as well as medicine, psychology, and journalism, Ann Jefferson examines the ways in which the idea of genius has been ceaselessly reflected on and redefined through its uses in these different contexts. She traces its varying fortunes through the madness and imposture with which genius is often associated, and through the observations of those who determine its presence in others.Jefferson considers the modern beginnings of genius in eighteenth-century aesthetics and the works of philosophes such as Diderot. She then investigates the nineteenth-century notion of national and collective genius, the self-appointed role of Romantic poets as misunderstood geniuses, the recurrent obsession with failed genius in the realist novels of writers like Balzac and Zola, the contested category of female genius, and the medical literature that viewed genius as a form of pathology. She shows how twentieth-century views of genius narrowed through its association with IQ and child prodigies, and she discusses the different ways major theorists-including Sartre, Barthes, Derrida, and Kristeva-have repudiated and subsequently revived the concept.Rich in narrative detail, Genius in France brings a fresh approach to French intellectual and cultural history, and to the burgeoning field of genius studies.

In this study, Ann Jefferson reassesses the theoretical implications of the nouveau roman and the terms in which fiction is generally defined, in order to demonstrate that the nouveau roman, far from being anti-fiction, is both profoundly novelistic and extremely instructive about the nature of fiction in general.