Marguerite Yourcenar's Hadrian: Writing the Life of a Roman Emperor

Marguerite Yourcenar is best known as the author of the 1951 novel M?moires d'Hadrien, her recreation of the life of the Roman emperor Hadrian. The work can be examined from the perspective of the issues raised by writing Roman imperial biography at large and the many ways in which M?moires has a claim to historical authenticity.

In Marguerite Yourcenar's Hadrian, Keith Bradley explains how M?moires d'Hadrien came to be written, gives details of Yourcenar's own biography, and describes some of the intricate historical problems that her novel's portrait of Hadrian presents. He draws on Yourcenar's correspondence, her interviews with journalists, and her literary corpus as a whole, emphasizing Yourcenar's profound knowledge of the ancient evidence on which her life of Hadrian is based and exploiting a wide range of contemporary Yourcenarian criticism.

The book pays special attention to the methods by which Yourcenar believed Hadrian's life history to be recoverable, compares examples of modern life-writing, and contrasts the procedures of conventional Roman biographers. Revealing how and why M?moires d'Hadrien is as it is, Marguerite Yourcenar's Hadrian illustrates how imaginative literary recreation is often little different from historical speculation.

Author: Keith Bradley
Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Published: 02/23/2024
Series: Phoenix Supplementary Volumes
Pages: 488
Weight: 1.87lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 1.19d
ISBN: 9781487548810