Anais Nin

With all the recent attention on Anais Nin's controversial and sensational life, her real achievements as a literary artist are often overlooked. This collection of essays, with a comprehensive introduction by Suzanne Nalbantian, probes Nin's literary crafts in its psychological and stylistic dimensions. The various critics such as Catherine Broderick, Anna Balakian, and Harriet Zinnes examine her artistry and identify the literary techniques that make her unique as a modernist writer in her fiction as well as in her poetic vision. Others like Philip Jason, Sharon Spencer, Suzette Henke, Valerie Harms, and Edmund Miller observe the transfer of her psychoanalytical positions to narrative. This collection of essays includes two previously unpublished letters from her brother Joaquin Nin-Culmell to her husband Ian Hugo, an analysis by Benjamin Franklin V of her reception connected with the jackets for A Spy in the House of Love, and fresh commentary on her reception in Japan.

First sentence: Questions of sincerity and authenticity, what have come to be known as the 'truth claim', are constantly brought into the discussion of autobiography, and with Anais Nin the truth factor becomes an issue as the reader moves from diary to fiction, searching for truths in a writer who herself was ambivalent about the notion of absolute truths.

Year

1997

Language

English

Publisher

Palgrave Macmillan

Editions

2

Pages

301

ISBN

9780312165246

Data source: Wikidata