The World of Jean Cocteau

Beyond the expected images of arms holding candlesticks or Greek queens dressed as socialites, James Jackson focuses on Cocteau's ambiguous position towards his own creation, projecting his interior world as an odd object of spectacle while also casting on the world around him a gaze that brings out its strangeness. Jackson skillfully seizes Cocteau at the height of his art, perched in a delicate balance on the liminal space between the familiar and the uncanny. --Dr Marie Kawthar Daouda , University of Oxford, Oriel College W.H. Auden once remarked that the complete oeuvre of Jean Cocteau could fill a warehouse. Over the course of his life, Cocteau produced an impressive range of works, ranging from poems, plays, films, and novels to drawings, sculptures, stained-glass windows, and interior design. His mind was brimful of imagination and wonder, drawing on tropes, themes, and iconography from Greek myth and tragedy to medieval folklore, children's fairy tales, and the experimental movements of the Interwar Years, while always channelling into his work an idiosyncratic desire to express the beauty of poetic experience. The World of Jean Cocteau: Beautiful, Elusive, Uninhabitable argues, with reference to a comprehensive body of his work and anecdotes of his life, that the world of this great polymath sits on the precipice of something otherworldly. His work and life perpetually elude us, and his individuality points to a desire to strive for something greater, and to inhabit a realm found somewhere between the known and unknown, material and spiritual, finite and infinite. James Jackson is the author of The Poetic Idioms of Jean Cocteau's Art: Paths to Immortality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024).He earned his PhD from the University of Southampton, UK in 2022. His scholarly interests include French culture, cinema, and literature; European history, culture, literature and cinema; intellectual history; historical memory; comparative studies, and the interdisciplinary nature of the humanities/liberal arts.