Dancing With De Beauvoir: Jazz and the French

(Paperback)

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Live jazz arrived in France towards the end of the First World War. From the very start, it was received not only as a new form of music but as a fertile symbol of many other things...It was an embodiment of artistic freedom, it was modern, it was America (both as promise and threat), it was African primitivism, sexual liberation, social decadence and moral decay. This heterogenous array of intermingled and conflicting associations helped to produce one of the most potent and exciting explosions in French cultural history.' In this wonderful book, Professor Colin Netteibeck explores the influence of jazz in France. Investigating its impact on French music, cinema and literature, and on cultural icons from Ravel, Matisse, Sartre and De Beauvoir to Derrida.

Author Bio

Colin Nettelbeck is AR Chisholm Professor of French and Head of the School of Languages at the University of Melbourne. He has written many books and articles about twentieth century French literature, cinema and cultural history, including Forever French: Exile in the United States 1939-1945. His last book for MUP was A Century of Cinema: Australian and French Connections (with Jane Warren and Wallace Kirsop, 1996).