André Malraux's output, spanning some 55 years, ranges from novels to philosophical essays, studies on the plastic arts and memorialist essays. The present volume is significantly innovative in that it sets out to elucidate this diversity by focusing, for the first time and from a variety of perspectives, on the erosion of boundaries which characterises Malraux's work. This erosion is multi-faceted and includes the crossing of genre boundaries; the appropriation of the literary text as political vehicle; the exploitation of the literary text as historical document; contemporary history as a source of literary texts; the slippage between autobiography and the novel, autobiography and the memorialist essay and between fiction and the memorialist essay. Contributors to this volume explore the complex relationship between fact and fiction underpinning Malraux's writing, and also his life. An understanding of Malraux's determination to ignore boundaries is crucial to the understanding of his life and work. In this respect the present study will interest academics and students, both undergraduate and postgraduate, of French literary and cultural studies.

Moving beyond merely biographical or textual interpretation, Claude Tannery traces the philosophy of life and art developed by André Malraux. With both sensitivity and expert interpretation he defines the issues—personal and artistic as well as political—that underlie Malraux's writings—including early as well as late works, novels, speeches, and essays. The result is a new and subtle portrait of Malraux.

André Malraux’s output, spanning some 55 years, ranges from novels to philosophical essays, studies on the plastic arts and memorialist essays. The present volume is significantly innovative in that it sets out to elucidate this diversity by focusing, for the first time and from a variety of perspectives, on the erosion of boundaries which characterises Malraux’s work. This erosion is multi-faceted and includes the crossing of genre boundaries; the appropriation of the literary text as political vehicle; the exploitation of the literary text as historical document; contemporary history as a source of literary texts; the slippage between autobiography and the novel, autobiography and the memorialist essay and between fiction and the memorialist essay. Contributors to this volume explore the complex relationship between fact and fiction underpinning Malraux’s writing, and also his life. An understanding of Malraux’s determination to ignore boundaries is crucial to the understanding of his life and work. In this respect the present study will interest academics and students, both undergraduate and postgraduate, of French literary and cultural studies.

Traces the life and career of the French novelist, describing his participation in the Spanish Civil War, command of a World War II resistance brigade, and his position as a government minister

The authorized biography of the most important man of letters in twentieth century France: André Malraux, French novelist, art theorist, and France’s Minister of Cultural Affairs.

The two principal axes of inquiry are Malraux's ongoing quest for a dimension of transcendence within human life and, at lest as compelling, his search for the most appropriate and effective means by which to express a changing awareness of just what that dimension might be. Not surprisingly, in a world apparently doomed to languish in the spectral shadow of Death, there are certain constants: a yearning for some fraternity to combat man's essential solitude, a refusal to sink without effort into the vortex of the Absurd, a conviciton that life is to be lived fully and intensely. The human condition is what it is. The ways in which Malraux's characters, and of course Malraux himself, cope with this condition reveal a clear evolution, especially from the 1933 novel La condition humaine onwards. The reader follows Malraux from playful adolescence through the dichotomy of anguish and glorification in his middle years, towards the primarily interrogative utterances of the mature man. The often frivolous, sometimes sardonic, humour of youth gives way first to a painful recognition of the abyss, then to the discovery of a very tentative equilibrium in the philosophy of metamorphosis espoused by an older Malraux. André Malraux: Towards the Expression of Transcendence reveals the principal steps by which Malraux achieved that equilibrium.