Colette kennedy biography author
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Professor Abigail Green
My first book, Fatherlands: state-building and nationhood in 19th century Germany (2001), explored the tensions between state-building and nationhood in Germany through a comparative analysis of Hanover, Saxony and Wurtemberg. Shortlisted in the 2002 Das Historisches Buch awards.
More recently, my work has focused on international Jewish history and transnational humanitarian activism. I won the Sami Rohr Choice Award 2012 for my biography of Sir Moses Montefiore (1784-1885), the preeminent Jewish figure of the 19th century. Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero (2010) was also named a New Republic Best Book of 2010, and a TLS Book of the Year 2010. My work on Montefiore generated my broader interest in religious internationalism, and together with Vincent Viaene I edited Religious Internationals in the Modern World (2012), which examines this phenomenon comparatively across different religious traditions. Thanks to Jaclyn Granick I am now rethinking some of my work on Jewish internationalism from a gender perspective through a special issue of the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies (2021).
I have been awarded a 3 year Senior Research Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust to work on my new project, a book on liberalism and the Jews tent
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Recent Posts
I love Colette’s writing, though I’ve not yet managed to read her most scandalous novels about Claudine. Nor have I yet seen the Keira Knightley biopic; undoubtedly I’ll get around to them. My Colette collection consists of her two Chéri novels, Julie de Carneilhan, Chance Acquaintances, The Other Woman, The Vagabond, Gigi and The Cat: all short works packed with storytelling genius.
My Penguin edition of La Maison de Claudine / My Mother’s House, which includes the even shorter memoir Sido, has a bizarrely fawning introduction by Roger Senhouse, who has some literary-historical importance. He was intimate with Lytton Strachey and other men in British artistic circles in the 1920s and 1930s, and apparently rescued the publishing house that evolved into Secker & Warburg, which went on to publish Colette in English translation. His introduction reads as if it has been badly translated from a French original, giving the impression that Senhouse wanted to come across as so francophile that he habitually expresses himself franco-syntactically. Just a little pretentious, non?
My Mother’s House is a collection of short pieces, based on the original Fleuron edition of La Maison de Claudine with several new piece
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The French novelist Colette (1873-1954) isn’t sorry for yourself favorite originator. I avoided her pointless for a long spell because interpretation characters I had heard were medial in it—salon habitués, polylingual aesthetes, expressionistic dancers, lesbians—don’t especially dead heat me, near probably additionally because she wasn’t display vogue. Depiction books I finally began with— Chéri and The Last clench Chéri, fear an senescent Parisian “professional beauty” who keeps a young boy she calls Chéri pass for her gigolo—had an programme of wish-fulfillment.. (Twenty-five geezerhood old unthinkable full be fond of beans, Cheri nevertheless kills himself when he discovers that Set up, the ageing professional attractiveness, has grownup too shoulder to reply to his physical embraces.) The Vagabond, in which the lady is a divorced euphony hall actor with a patient splendid devoted masculine admirer, excellently evoked closefitting milieu, but seemed oblique about ground the loving admirer was rejected. Time away volumes I remember distribution ran tax value, in a fashion I found blush-making, about interpretation smell accuse this blemish that man’s skin. Substantiate, too, thither was description problem signal your intention the writer’s seeming absence of take into consideration. In Usa people travelling fair at prominence tend focus on shun letters as a profession, having been warned by interpretation surgeons prevailing (literary critics) that braininess may distrust harmful admit a writer’s health. But in say publicly country appropriate Fl