Can I read The Nothing Machine : The Fiction of Octave Mirbeau on EtoBox?

The Nothing Machine : The Fiction of Octave Mirbeau by Robert Ziegler is a nonfiction available to read on EtoBox.

What is The Nothing Machine : The Fiction of Octave Mirbeau about?

In an era when reality was aestheticized as collectibles, Octave Mirbeau unleashed his fiction like a destructive machine, setting fire to stale material and discredited ideologies, burning them as fuel and expelling texts as clean emissions. In this first English-language overview of all the novels published under Mirbeau's name, this study argues that Mirbeau is unique among his fin-de-siècle peers. Unlike the Decadents, whose art was a reliquary in which dead inspiration was preserved, Mirbeau disengaged himself from the corpses of past works. Abhorring tradition and complacency, Mirbeau elaborated a kinetics of fiction that made the novel into an agent of violent transformation.Contrasting the Decadents'aesthetic of elegant morbidity with Mirbeau's vitalistic view of fiction, this volume shows Mirbeau modeling himself on the figure of the torture artist, cutting up his finished works, building novels to disassemble them, fitting them together in revolutionary ways. Creativity for Mirbeau fertilizes un jardin des supplices, a cemetery smoldering with decomposing texts that are resolved into their constituent parts and then reemerge in different guises. In Mirbeau's writing, live

Who reads The Nothing Machine : The Fiction of Octave Mirbeau?

Author

Robert Ziegler

Publisher

Brill

Published

2007

Language

EN

ISBN

9789042022379

Category

nonfiction

Subjects

Literary Criticism, Sociology, Science