Abstract

Les Mains jointes (1909) was the collection of poetry that launched the long career of Nobel Prize-winning author François Mauriac (1885-1970). This critical edition provides the first ever overview of the volume’s complex textual history (spanning four decades). Drawing on Mauriac’s unpublished cahiers de jeunesse, Paul Cooke challenges the author’s claim that the majority of the poems in the collection were written while he was still at school. A selection of additional poems published between 1905 and 1923 (some of which have remained hidden for nearly a century) allows the reader to situate Les Mains jointes in relation to Mauriac’s wider verse output. In his Introduction, Cooke both explores the genesis and history of Les Mains jointes and offers some analysis of Mauriac’s style as a poet.

François Mauriac (1885-1970) is best known for his novels, many of which have been translated into English: Thérèse Desqueyroux, Le Noeud de vipères, Le Mystè Frontenac among them. His novels are still widely read by students and others; his poetry is less well known outside France, although it is now the subject of a revival of interest. Paul Cooke is Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Exeter, where he teaches and researched mainly in the area of nineteenth- and twentieth-century French literature. He is the author/editor of Mauriac: the Poetry of a Novelist (forthcoming); Mauriac et le mythe du poète: une lecture du ‘Mystère Frontenac’ (1999); (Un)Faithful Texts? Religion in French and Francophone Literature from the 1780s to the 1980s (with Jane Lee, 2000).