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R. H. Gapper Book Prize awarded to Roger Pearson
Roger Pearson presents Mallarmé as a poet of the everyday, and gives a compelling and subtle account of how he moves between private spaces of the quotidian and the kind of public, literary communion that the poet so desired. Pearson’s approach is purposefully challenging: he seeks to break with too insistent a vision of Mallarmé as the artisan of the blank page. Rather, he argues, Mallarmé sought linguistic and textual mastery of a kind that leads to a characteristic tension between chaos and order. By means of a series of vivid discussions of the verse poems, the prose poems and the poet’s criticism, Pearson shows that Mallarmé’s writing derives its urgency and honesty from its efforts to confer on the contingency of circumstance a therapeutic semblance of formal and semantic pattern. Roger Pearson is Professor of French in the University of Oxford and Fellow and Tutor in French in the Queen’s College, Oxford. He is the author of an earlier study of Mallarmé, as well as books on Stendhal and Voltaire. His most recent work is Voltaire Almighty: A Life in Pursuit of Freedom (Bloomsbury). The
award, which is for the best book published in 2004 by a scholar
working in Britain or Ireland in French studies, was made by the
Editors of the journal French Studies, Professor Michael Freeman
and Professor Patrick O’Donovan, together with Mr Richard
Gapper, representing the R. H. Gapper Charitable Trust. The R. H.
Gapper Book Prize will be presented to Professor Pearson at the
next Society for French Studies annual conference, which takes place
in the University of St Andrews, 3 to 5 July 2006.
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