ABOUT BOOK

"In July 1905, in Paris, a young ~Anglo-French woman called Marie Wheeler became the bride of a Swiss ~émigré, Johannes Schad. Immediately after the wedding, Marie and ~Johannes moved to London. And there they lived for nineteen years. In ~1924, however, something happened to change their lives, and Marie, in ~many respects, simply disappeared. ~Paris Bride is an exploration of ~the lost life of Marie Schad, of whom little is known beyond a few legal ~ papers, a number of letters, some photographs, the diaries of a friend, ~ and her obituary. With so little else known of Marie’s life, this book ~seeks to read her back into existence by drawing on a host of ~contemporaneous texts — largely modernist texts, by Virginia Woolf, ~Franz Kafka, the Paris Surrealists, Stéphane Mallarmé, Oscar Wilde, ~Katherine Mansfield, and Walter Benjamin. All of the selected authors ~are connected with Marie through some coincidence of time, place, or ~theme. ~In an attempt to do justice to Marie’s in-visibility, or to her un-life, Paris Bride ~ takes as its guide Wilde’s declaration that “the true function of ~criticism is to see the object as in itself it really is not.” In other ~words, this book seeks to evade the positivist or realist assumptions of ~ conventional literary criticism, and instead pursue a post-critical ~method with its sources and texts. Paris Bride is not confined ~to academic discourse but instead draws on a range of literary genres ~and devices that are more in sympathy with the non-realist character of ~modernism itself — devices such as fragmentation, flânerie, textual ~collage, stream of consciousness, imagism, perspectivism, dream-text, ~the absurd, etc. Ultimately, Paris Bride is a modernistic experiment in life-writing."