The French Genealogy of the Beat Generation: Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac's Appropriations of Modern Literature, from Rimbaud to Michaux - Paperback

by Véronique Lane (Author)

The Francophilia of the Beat circle in the New York of the mid-1940s is well known, as is the importance of the Beat Hotel in the Paris of the late 1950s and early 1960s, but how exactly did French literature and culture participate in the emergence of the Beat Generation? French modernism did much more than inspire its first major writers, it materially shaped their works, as this comparative study reveals through close textual analysis of William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac's appropriations of French literature and culture. Sometimes acknowledged, sometimes not, their appropriations take multiple forms, ranging from allusions, invocations and citations to adaptations and translations, and they involve a vast array of works, including the poetic realist films of Carné and Cocteau, the existentialist philosophy of Sartre, and the poems and novels of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Proust, Gide, Apollinaire, St.-John Perse, Artaud, Céline, Genet and Michaux.

Author Biography

Véronique Lane is Teaching Associate in French Studies at Lancaster University, UK. She has taught French critical thought on the Vassar-Wesleyan Program in Paris, France, and has been Assistant Professor of French at Wesleyan University, USA, as well as Postdoctoral Fellow in the Research Institute for the Humanities at Keele University, UK. She has a PhD on Artaud and Genet from the Université Paris Diderot - Paris VII.