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Although Anais Nin found in her diaries a profound mode of
self-creation and confession, she could not reveal this intimate
record of her own experiences during her lifetime. Instead, she
turned to fiction, where her stories and novels became artistic
"distillations" of her secret diaries. "A Spy in the House of
Love," whose heroine Sabina is deeply divided between her drive for
artistic and sexual expression and social restrictions and
self-created inhibitions, echoes Nin's personal struggle with sex,
love, and emotional fragmentation. Written when Nin's own life was
taut with conflicting loyalties, her protagonist Sabina repeatedly
asks herself, can one idulge one's sensual restlessness, the
fantasies, the relentless need for adventure without devastating
consequences?
Anais Nin, the diarist, novelist, and provocateur, occupied a
singular space in twentieth-century culture, not only as a literary
figure and voice of female sexual liberation but as a celebrity and
symbol of shifting social mores in postwar America. Before Madonna
and her many imitators, there was Nin; yet, until now, there has
been no major study of Nin as a celebrity figure. In Writing an
Icon, Anita Jarczok reveals how Nin carefully crafted her literary
and public personae, which she rewrote and restyled to suit her
needs and desires. When the first volume of her diary was published
in 1966, Nin became a celebrity, notorious beyond the artistic and
literary circles in which she previously had operated. Jarczok
examines the ways in which the American media appropriated and
deconstructed Nin and analyzes the influence of Nin's guiding hand
in their construction of her public persona. The key to
understanding Nin's celebrity in its shifting forms, Jarczok
contends, is the Diary itself, the principal vehicle through which
her image has been mediated. Combining the perspectives of
narrative and cultural studies, Jarczok traces the trajectory of
Nin's celebrity, the reception of her writings. The result is an
innovative investigation of the dynamic relationships of Nin's
writing, identity, public image, and consumer culture.
"Some voyages have their inception in the blueprint of a dream,
some in the urgency of contradicting a dream. Lillian's recurrent
dream of a ship that could not reach the water, that sailed
laboriously, pushed by her with great effort, through city streets,
had determined her course toward the sea, as if she would give this
ship, once and for all, its proper sea bed.... With her first
swallow of air she inhaled a drug of forgetfulness well known to
adventurers." Seduction of the Minotaur is the fifth and final
volume of Anais Nin's continuous novel known as Cities of the
Interior. First published by Swallow Press in 1961, the story
follows the travels of the protagonist Lillian through the tropics
to a Mexican city loosely based on Acapulco, which Nin herself
visited in 1947 and described in the fifth volume of her Diary. As
Lillian seeks the warmth and sensuality of this lush and intriguing
city, she travels inward as well, learning that to free herself she
must free the "monster" that has been confined in a labyrinth of
her subconscious. This new Swallow Press edition includes an
introduction by Anita Jarczok, author of Inventing Anais Nin:
Celebrity Authorship and the Creation of an Icon. Swallow Press
publishes all five volumes that make up Cities of the Interior:
Ladders to Fire, Children of the Albatross, The Four-Chambered
Heart, A Spy in the House of Love, and Seduction of the Minotaur.
Anais Nin, the diarist, novelist, and provocateur, occupied a
singular space in twentieth-century culture, not only as a literary
figure and voice of female sexual liberation but as a celebrity and
symbol of shifting social mores in postwar America. Before Madonna
and her many imitators, there was Nin; yet, until now, there has
been no major study of Nin as a celebrity figure. In Writing an
Icon, Anita Jarczok reveals how Nin carefully crafted her literary
and public personae, which she rewrote and restyled to suit her
needs and desires. When the first volume of her diary was published
in 1966, Nin became a celebrity, notorious beyond the artistic and
literary circles in which she previously had operated. Jarczok
examines the ways in which the American media appropriated and
deconstructed Nin and analyzes the influence of Nin's guiding hand
in their construction of her public persona. The key to
understanding Nin's celebrity in its shifting forms, Jarczok
contends, is the Diary itself, the principal vehicle through which
her image has been mediated. Combining the perspectives of
narrative and cultural studies, Jarczok traces the trajectory of
Nin's celebrity, the reception of her writings. The result is an
innovative investigation of the dynamic relationships of Nin's
writing, identity, public image, and consumer culture.
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