The French Writers' War, 1940-1953 - 9780822351788

The French Writers' War, 1940-1953Author(s): Gisle Sapiro, Vanessa Doriott Anderson, Dorrit Cohn\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: Duke University Press, United States\nImprint: Duke University Press\nISBN-13: 9780822351788, 978-0822351788\nSynopsis\nThe French Writers' War, [tel], is a remarkably thorough account of French writers and literary institutions from the beginning of the German Occupation through France's passage of amnesty laws in the early 1950s. To understand how the Occupation affected French literary production as a whole, Gisle Sapiro uses Pierre Bourdieu's notion of the \""literary field.\"" Sapiro surveyed the career trajectories and literary and political positions of 185 writers. She found that writers' stances in relation to the Vichy regime are best explained in terms of institutional and structural factors, rather than ideology. Examining four major French literary institutions, from the conservative French Academy to the Comit national des crivains, a group formed.