French Literature Reviews - 2026
V. Reid, André Gide and Curiosity
Writers: Biography, Letters and Memoirs
Victoria Reid, André Gide and Curiosity
Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, coll. "Faux Titre" no. 340, 2009, 322 p.
- ISBN: 978-90-420-2726-8 Paper
- ISBN: 978-90-420-2727-5 E-Book
- € 64 / US$ 99
Publisher's description:
This comprehensive exploration of curiosity in the fiction and life-writing of André Gide (1869–1951) is an important modernist contribution to the field of curiosity in literature and cultural studies more broadly. Curiosity was a credo for Gide. By observing the world and then manifesting these observations in writing, he stimulates the curiosity of readers, conceived as virtual conduits of a curiosity once his own. Using a thematic structure of sexual, scientific and writerly curiosity, this volume identifies processes of curiosity in the life-writing (including travel-writing) that illuminate processes in the fiction, and vice versa. Theories of fetishism, gender and sexuality are applied to Gide's corpus to illustrate his championing of a masculine curiosity of enlightenment and adventure over a feminised ‘curiosité-défaillance' of disobedience and harm, and to explore objects eliciting his incuriosity. Gide's creativity is nourished by his curiosity, as close readings of his work informed by Melanie Klein's psychoanalytic writing on epistemophilia reveal. Curiosity is a rewarding, non-reductionist perspective from which the exceptional variety of Gide's subject matter, style and genre can be more coherently understood. Research draws principally on the six Pléiade volumes of Gide's oeuvre, published 1996–2009.
Victoria Reid has a BA in French and German from Worcester College, Oxford (2000), an MSc in EU Policy-Making from London School of Economics (2001) and a PhD in French Studies from the University of Reading (2005). She is currently Lecturer in French at the University of Glasgow.
Table of Contents:
Contents
Abbreviations
Introduction: Curiosity and a Canary
Sexual Curiosity
Scientific Curiosity
Writerly Curiosity
Conclusion: The Kaleidoscope and the Library
Appendix
Bibliography
Index
The concept of curiosity has long held a position in literary history and modernist studies, serving as a driving force for narrative exploration and psychological motivation. Within the broader tradition of twentieth-century French literature, writers frequently interrogated boundaries between observation, knowledge acquisition, and creative output. Victoria Reid examines these intellectual currents through the specific lens of André Gide in André Gide and Curiosity, aligning with scholarly investigations into how authors construct meaning and engage their readership through acts of sustained attention and inquiry.
Victoria Reid addresses these themes by organizing her analysis around thematic categories of sexual, scientific, and writerly curiosity, drawing upon Gidean texts and psychoanalytic perspectives. The study utilizes a range of critical frameworks to illuminate the relationship between life-writing, travel-writing, and fiction within the author corpus. Readers interested in twentieth-century French literature and modernism may find it relevant to their exploration of how thematic structures shed light on narrative variety.