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French Literature

Exotic Subversions in Nineteenth-Century French Fiction
by Jennifer Yee
In the course of the nineteenth century France built up a colonial empire second only to Britains. The literary tradition in which it dealt with its colonial 'Other' is frequently understood in terms of Edward Said's description of Orientalism as both a Western projection and a 'will to govern' over the Orient. There is, however, a body of works that eludes such a simple categorisation, offering glimpses of colonial resistance, of a critique of ...
Hardback. Price GB £40.00

Balzac and the Model of Painting
by Diana Knight
Texts about paintings, painters and sculptors are obvious test cases for issues of representation. A significant corpus of artist stories is scattered through Honoré de Balzac's Comédie humaine which, from Marx to Lukács to Roland Barthes's enormously influential S/Z (1970), has been a key literary work for critical debates around French realism. In a series of close readings, Diana Knight explores Barthes's 'model of painting' the ...
Hardback. 'Reprint under consideration' - in practice this may mean that the book goes out of print, but orders will be recorded. Price GB £40.00

Biography in Early Modern France, 1540-1630: Forms and Functions
by Katherine MacDonald
When the famous Royal Professor of Philosophy and Eloquence Petrus Ramus (1515-1572) gave a lecture, one of his most promising pupils stood by, ready to tug on his coat if he made a mistake. That pupil was Ramus's future biographer, the much less famous Nicolas de Nancel (1539-1610), who recounted this anecdote in his Vita Rami (1599). Nancel's insertion of himself into his life of Ramus is typical of early modern biographies of men of letters. ...
Hardback. Price GB £40.00

Consuming Autobiographies: Reading and Writing the Self in Post-War France
by Claire Boyle
Since 1975, French literary writing has been marked by an autobiographical turn which has seen authors increasingly often tap into the vein of what the French term écriture de soi. This coincides, paradoxically, with the 'death of autobiography', as these authors self-consciously distance themselves and their writings from conventional autobiography, founding a 'nouvelle autobiographie' where the very possibility of autobiographical ...
Hardback. Price GB £45.00

Regressive Fictions: Graffigny, Rousseau, Bernardin
by Robin Howells
In a cultural shift around the mid-point of the French eighteenth century, the mode of wit is increasingly displaced by bourgeois pathos. Social sophistication and sexual experience are rejected in favour of a retreat into ideal imagination. Instead of the novel of worldliness, we encounter fictions of better worlds: original, natural, familial, innocent and harmonious, protected against reality and time. The regressive shift is traced in this ...
Hardback. Price GB £45.00

Sublime Worlds: Early Modern French Literature
by Emma Gilby
Some of the language we come across, in reading other peoples' works or listening to others speak, moves us profoundly. It requires a response from us; it occupies and involves us. Writers, always readers and listeners as well, are fascinated by this phenomenon, which became the subject of the classical treatise On the Sublime, traditionally attributed to Longinus. Emma Gilby looks at this compelling and complex text in relation to the ...
Hardback. Price GB £45.00

The Livres-Souvenirs of Colette: Genre and the Telling of Time
by Anne Freadman
Throughout her career, Colette experimented with genre for the purposes of telling stories of her life. The books that resulted, known collectively as her "livres-souvenirs," are far from being autobiographies in the customary sense. By addressing the need to reconsider the generic issues surrounding autobiographical story-telling, Anne Freadman's study brings the richness of "the genre question" to the fore, shedding a fresh light on this ...
Hardback. Not yet published - advance orders taken. Price GB £40.00

Proust, the One, and the Many: Identity and Difference in A la recherche du temps perdu
by Erika Fülöp
One of the many aspects that make Marcel Prousts A la recherche du temps perdu such a complex and subtle work is its engagement with metaphysical questions. The disparate nature of the narrators experiences, hypotheses, and statements has generated a number of conflicting interpretations, based on parallels with the thought of one or another philosopher from Plato to Leibniz, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bergson, or Deleuze. Through the ...
Hardback. Not yet published - advance orders taken. Price GB £45.00

The Picture as Spectre in Diderot, Proust, and Deleuze
by Thomas Baldwin
The possibility of ekphrasis, the verbal representation of visual imagery, is fundamental to all writing about art, be it art criticism, theory or a passage in a novel. But there is no consensus concerning how such representation works. Some take it for granted that writing about art can result in a precise match between words and visual images. For others, ekphrasis amounts to a kind of virtuoso rivalry, in which the writer aims to outdo the ...
Hardback. Price GB £45.00

Victor Hugo, Jean-Paul Sartre, and the Liability of Liberty
by Bradley Stephens
The arch-Romantic Victor Hugo (1802-85) and the Existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80) are widely perceived to have little in common beyond their canonical status. However, responding to Sartre's often overlooked fascination with Hugo, Bradley Stephens cuts through generic divisions to argue that significant parallels between the two writers have been neglected. Stephens argues that both Hugo and Sartre engage with human beings in ...
Hardback. Price GB £45.00