Forms of temporality and environmental context: the interweave of literature and history in the Labyrinthe du monde of Marguerite Yourcenar

Mearns, R

Oxford Thesis Collection

Thesis

Forms of temporality and environmental context: the interweave of literature and history in the Labyrinthe du monde of Marguerite Yourcenar

Abstract:: In her text, Le Labyrinthe du monde, Marguerite Yourcenar creates a double triptych, firstly a three-volume work, but also one on a lesser scale which sits at the beginning of the second volume, Archives du Nord. This design enables her to open the whole up to consideration as a four-fold division of time: geological, deep time, historical conjuncture and the personal or individual time of her parents. Other than drawing on it to provide the setting, the first is discarded by the writer. Taking a deep time perspective enables the writer to engage with a longue durée approach to the larger regional destruction of animal and vegetable worlds which since man's arrival have been and continue to be constantly and unremittingly under duress. The argument is that the fate of the way of life of her predecessors is inextricably bound up with this dilemma, thereby constituting a serious warning to man and contemporary society. There is hope: it is to be found in a sensitising child education and a consequential responsiveness among young people as they waken to the centrality in their lives of a non-hierarchical biosphere. The thesis is arguably innovative in its putting forward of these matters of structure, theme, content and extended Yourcenarian argument in the Mémoires. Critical commentary of the Labyrinthe du monde, authorial title of Marguerite Yourcenar's Mémoires, generally takes the form of individual essays on an aspect or point raised in the course of the work. There does not appear to have been a single full-length study which looks at the work in the manner in which it is examined here as a whole. Not doing so amounts to a limitation. Commentary notes, for instance, the triptych character of the work, but does not follow through the implications.

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APA Style

Mearns, R. (2020). Forms of temporality and environmental context: the interweave of literature and history in the Labyrinthe du monde of Marguerite Yourcenar [PhD thesis]. University of Oxford.

MLA Style

Mearns, R. Forms of Temporality and Environmental Context: the Interweave of Literature and History in the Labyrinthe Du Monde of Marguerite Yourcenar. 2020. University of Oxford, PhD thesis.

Chicago Style

Mearns, R. 2020. “Forms of Temporality and Environmental Context: the Interweave of Literature and History in the Labyrinthe Du Monde of Marguerite Yourcenar.” PhD thesis, University of Oxford.
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