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Political & Protest Poetry, French Letters, French Poetry
Laure : The Collected Writings by Jeanine Herman, E. Laure — book cover

Laure : The Collected Writings

by Jeanine Herman, E. Laure
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Overview

Laure (1903—1938) was a revolutionary poet, masochist Catholic rich girl, and world traveler. Toward the end of her life she became the lover of French writer Georges Bataille. Her writings and her real life story were remarkable in their violence and intensity, and her relationships with Bataille and Michel Leiris clearly influenced their works.

This complete collection of writings published for the first time in English includes “Story of a Little Girl,” about the Catholic priest who sexually molested her sister; “The Sacred,” a collection of poems and fragments on mysticism and eroticism; notes on her association with contr-attaque and acéphale, and her involvement with the Spanish civil war and the early years of the Soviet Union; a compendium of correspondence with her beloved sister-in-law and tortured love letters to Bataille; and an essay by Bataille about Laure’s death of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-five.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Born in Paris in 1903 to an affluent, conservative Catholic family, Colette Laure Lucienne Peignot rebelled against her bourgeois background. Using the moniker Laure, she recreated herself, adopting a decadent lifestyle, radical politics and an anguished voice for her poetry, prose and essays. Published in English for the first time, these are the collected works of a marginal figure associated with better-known writers and political dissidents of the Parisian avant-garde between the wars. Laure worked for and financed the leftist journal La Critique sociale, which published some of Georges Bataille's most important essays as well as those of other surrealists and Marxists. At 31, she began an intense affair with Bataille, dying in his home four years later of tuberculosis. Laure destroyed much of her writing that, had it survived, might have made this collection a more coherent, cohesive whole. As it is, the book would have benefited from more historical background and explanatory material to aid the general reader. The interest here lies more in how Laure's letters, poems, political essays and journal entries capture the essence of an era and reveal a tortured, self-conscious artist who never had a chance to mature. (Aug.)

Book Details

Published
August 3, 1994
Publisher
City Lights Books
Pages
314
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780872862937

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