Imagining Paris : exile, writing, and American identity /

Though "not a comprehensive historical view" of Americans in Paris from 1900 to 1940, this book of criticism offers a "revisionary account of certain exemplary writers from a specific and theoretical perspective." The perspective is the relationship between place and identity in the works of Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller, and, in the final and longest chapter, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Djuna Barnes. In the opening chapter, Kennedy summarizes the major theories of place and exile, reviews 19th-century exile in Paris, and articulates his "poetics of exile." We are "creatures of place" and derive "our most basic sense of self" from our relations to place. Exile "discloses an alternative self," "makes literal one's existential displacement," and offers "opportunity for metamorphosis," "conditions for writing," and "heightened consciousness of language." This valuable first chapter uses numerous writers, including Baudelaire, Henry James, Ana"is Nin, E.E. Cummings, and Strindberg and makes various critical theories accessible to the general reader. The remaining chapters offer a fresh approach to the works of five very familiar American writers. Scholarly notes offer the only bibliography. Undergraduate and up. N. R. Fitch; University of Southern California

Although there are innumerable studies of the American expatriate experience in Paris between 1900 and 1940, Kennedy (English, Louisiana State Univ.) presents ``a revisionary account of certain exemplary writers from a specific critical and theoretical perspective.'' He explores the intense effect of place as it transformed the writings and self-identities of Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Djuna Barnes. Citing passages from their major narratives, Kennedy demonstrates how the experiences of Paris not only liberated these modernist exiles intellectually and emotionally from their American roots but aroused feelings of alienation, displacement, and ambiguity. With its inherent dilemmas, Kennedy's concept of place adds clear, fresh scholarship to the existing knowledge on the American expatriate writers. Recommended for academic and large public libraries.-- Joan Levin, MLS, Chicago (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.