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Geoffrey Wall

Geoffrey Wall is a literary biographer, a translator, a freelance travel-writer and an editor of The Cambridge Quarterly. His biography of Flaubert, published by Faber in 2001, was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize and for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. It has subsequently been published in American, Spanish and French editions. Geoffrey Wall's translations of Flaubert, published by Penguin, include Madame Bovary (1992), Selected Letters (1995), The Dictionary of Received Ideas (1997), Sentimental Education (2004) and Three Tales (2005). He has edited a wide-ranging collection of Sartre's non-fiction, entitled Modern Times (Penguin 2001). His translation of Pierre Macherey's Theory of Literary Production was reissued as a Routledge Classic in 2006. Geoffrey Wall's current project is a biography of George Sand, the major woman writer of French Romanticism. He also has a strong interest in oral history and has recently set up the York Oral History Project.


“Quality and consistency of conjecture are one good measure of the ambition and the inwardness of any literary biography. The biographer is master of the archive, but also and equally master of the subjunctive mood, of un-certainty, of non-factuality.”
Geoffrey Wall
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“Irony cleans away all those secret stains. Irony is the path that leads safely back to official realities.”
Geoffrey Wall
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