Through the study of Charles Testut's Le Vieux Salomon, a nineteenth-century southern Francophone antislavery novel, this book encourages a reassessment of the southern experience and of the canon of southern literature. Abel argues that Testut's distinctiveness lies in his French intellectual heritage and in his awareness of the rich historical and cultural links between the ethnic legacies of Louisiana and the French Caribbean. Le Vieux Salomon is marked by a sense of place through the author's identification with two regions colonized by the French and which are symbolically represented in...

Stephanie Corinna Bille, a Swiss short-story writer, playwright, poet, and novelist and winner of the 1975 French Prix Concourt, is often considered the major contemporary Franco-Swiss woman writer. As a writer, Bille excelled at rendering the woman's experience. She stands out as an elegant writer, a compassionate observer of early twentieth-century Catholic rural life, and a precise painter of the beauty of the natural environment. In over thirty volumes of creative writing, she favored short narrative forms from five lines to eighty pages, exploiting her dreams and fantasies in the wake of...