"...et que mon livre porte à la foule future“Anna de Noailles – Belle Époque Author and Agent of Modernism

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Famed during her lifetime as a successful writer, literary politician, as well as a patron of the arts and of fledgling authors, Anna de Noailles (1876-1933) was one of the most highly regarded literary figures of the Parisian Belle Époque. Given that the author of Greek and Romanian ancestry has until now garnered very little scholarly attention, this project represents a pioneering and systematic investigation of Anna de Noailles’ outstanding accomplishment as Belle Époque author, as well as her role as a key player in literary modernism. This project will seek to establish how Anna de Noailles carved out a prominent niche for herself as an author, critic and patron in a male-dominated literary field, and played a pivotal role in the evolution of literary modernism. Noailles’ importance in this regard can be attributed to both her ability to reframe - in an idiosyncratic fashion - philosophy, aesthetics, subject matter and motifs from a female perspective, as well as her vital contributions to the Parisian literary scene as a salonnière, critic and patron of fledgling authors. These factors in tandem with her social commitment helped secure Noailles’ place as a prominent mover and shaker in the Parisian literary scene during a period of major upheaval. This project will investigate, among other things, novels, prose pieces and auto-fictions that have largely escaped critical attention, in which Noailles’ idiosyncratic position figure prominently. Often cast as an exotic oriental on account of her origins – a role she would self-consciously orchestrate when it suited her purposes, as illustrated in numerous portraits of her by avant-garde artists of the period – this exoticism has nonetheless led literary critics to unjustly conflate Noailles’ identity and oeuvre with stereotypical notions of boundless sensuality, irrationality, moral laxity and threatening femininity. Against this backdrop, this project will illuminate Noailles‘ experience of exile as the daughter of immigrants from a cultural region often subject to the depredations of Orientalism, and how this heritage gives rise to conflicts of identity and legitimation in establishing Noailles’ status as a French writer.