Adorable Clio: The Prose Poetry of Jean Giraudoux: Writing Against Realism

Abstract

This paper considers the particularities of Jean Giraudoux’s war writings Adorable Clio in the context of French Literature of the Great War. We focus on Giraudoux’s career previous to the conflict and on his prose poetic style in the recollection to study his refusal of realistic novel techniques despite the fact they were mainly used by other contemporary soldiers-writers who wanted to testify. Thanks to previous research on Giraudoux’s war writings and descriptions of his war experience, we proceed to a close reading of the text to highlight that, far from his reputation of superficiality, Giraudoux does not write only for art’s sake but to express ambivalent feelings and impressions on his war experience.