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Literary Criticism Ancient & Classical

Marguerite Yourcenar's Hadrian

Writing the Life of a Roman Emperor

by (author) Keith Bradley

Publisher
University of Toronto Press
Initial publish date
Jan 2024
Category
Ancient & Classical, Rome, Historiography, Historical, French
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781487548896
    Publish Date
    Jan 2024
    List Price
    $130.00
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9781487548810
    Publish Date
    Feb 2024
    List Price
    $130.00

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Description

Marguerite Yourcenar is best known as the author of the 1951 novel Mémoires d’Hadrien, her recreation of the life of the Roman emperor Hadrian. The work can be examined from the perspective of the issues raised by writing Roman imperial biography at large and the many ways in which Mémoires has a claim to historical authenticity.

 

In Marguerite Yourcenar’s Hadrian, Keith Bradley explains how Mémoires d’Hadrien came to be written, gives details of Yourcenar’s own biography, and describes some of the intricate historical problems that her novel’s portrait of Hadrian presents. He draws on Yourcenar’s correspondence, her interviews with journalists, and her literary corpus as a whole, emphasizing Yourcenar’s profound knowledge of the ancient evidence on which her life of Hadrian is based and exploiting a wide range of contemporary Yourcenarian criticism.

 

The book pays special attention to the methods by which Yourcenar believed Hadrian’s life history to be recoverable, compares examples of modern life-writing, and contrasts the procedures of conventional Roman biographers. Revealing how and why Mémoires d’Hadrien is as it is, Marguerite Yourcenar’s Hadrian illustrates how imaginative literary recreation is often little different from historical speculation.

About the author

Keith Bradley is the Eli J. and Helen Shaheen Professor of Classics Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame and an adjunct professor in the Department of Greek and Roman Studies at the University of Victoria. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Keith Bradley's profile page