Reading the French Enlightenment offers an ambitious reinterpretation of a crucial aspect of eighteenth-century thought, the rationalizing and classifying impulse or "systematic spirit." Julie Candler Hayes surveys the past fifty years of philosophical reflection on the Enlightenment, and takes issue both with traditional liberal and with contemporary critical accounts, arguing instead for a new understanding of "systematic reason" as complex, paradoxical, and ultimately liberating. Through close analysis of philosophical, scientific, and literary texts, she emphasizes the urgency of...

A feminist analysis that combines a psychoanalytic perspective on catastrophic birth with the politics of reproduction in the emergent democracy of nineteenth-century France, this book focuses on three major thinkers--Rousseau, Constant and Stendhal--and includes a broad reading of the nineteenth-century novel within the frame of pathological generation. In the collision of the nascent ideology of motherhood with modes of discourse that invade and colonize the maternal body, Professor Mossman identifies a considerable burden of the cultural anxiety expressed in the nineteenth-century French...

This book offers crucial perspectives on the vexed question of chronology in Flaubert's work.

This study of Baudelaire's writings applies the principles of socioanalysis to literary history and cultural studies.

The medieval troubadours of the South of France profoundly influenced European literature for many centuries. This book is the first full-length study of the first-person subject position adopted by many of them in its relation to language and society. Using modern theoretical approaches, Sarah Kay discusses to what extent this first person is a "self" or "character," and how far it is self-determining. Kay draws on a wide range of troubadour texts, providing many close readings and translating all medieval quotations into English. Her book will be of interest both to scholars of medieval...

An important study of the book which invented European Romanticism, Sta l's De l'Allemagne.

This study focuses on Denis Diderot, whose experimentation with presenting critical knowledge exemplifies the Enlightenment's struggle to produce a rationalist critique of all prior knowledge.

This book studies the importance of typographic shapes in French Renaissance literature in the context of psychoanalysis and of the history of printed writing. Focusing on the poetry of Clement Marot, Rabelais's Gargantua, Ronsard's sonnets and the Essais of Montaigne, it argues that printed characters can either supplement or betray what they appear to articulate. They often reveal compositional patterns that do not appear to be under authorial control, and open political and subjective dimensions through the interaction of verbal and visual materials. This unconscious, proto-Freudian...

This book analyzes the relationship between an emergent modern subjectivity in seventeenth-century French literature, particularly in dramatic works, and the contemporaneous evolution of the absolutist state. It shows how major writers of the Classical period (Corneille, Racine, Moliere, Lafayette) elaborate a new subject in and through their representations of the family, and argues that the family serves as the mediating locus of a patriarchal ideology of sexual and political containment. Professor Greenberg argues that this reflects the conflicting social, political and economic forces...

This major collection of essays on the Marquis de Sade encompasses a wide range of critical approaches to his oeuvre, now made available to English-language readers for the first time. It focuses on several contemporary areas of interest: the explicitly libidinal components of Sade's work and the effects they engender, the textual and narrative apparatus that supports these operations, the ethical and political concerns that arise from them, and the problematic issues surrounding the conceptual closure of representation. Sade is placed at the center of current debates in literary and...