This book examines the ways in which Pascal posed and solved intellectual problems in his immense and varied output. Hugh Davidson shows how three of the classical "liberal arts"-- rhetoric, dialectic and geometry--pervade Pascal's method as liberating and guiding influences in his search for truth, both in his attacks on and in his defenses of tradition. Professor Davidson throws new light on both the diversity and the unity of Pascal's thought, and places it in the context of other seventeenth-century innovations in the use of traditional disciplines.

This is the first book to apply the principles of schizoanalysis to literary history and cultural studies. By resituating psychoanalysis in its socio-economic and cultural context, this framework provides a new and illuminating approach to Baudelaire's poetry and art criticism. Professor Holland demonstrates the impact of military authoritarianism and the capitalist market (as well as Baudelaire's much-discussed family circumstances) on the psychology and poetics of the writer, who abandoned his romantic idealism in favor of a modernist cynicism that has characterized modern culture ever...

This is the most complete critical survey to date of women's literature in nineteenth-century France. Alison Finch's wide-ranging analysis of some sixty writers from Madame de Stael to Rachilde brings out the contribution of major figures such as George Sand as well as focusing on many other important but neglected writers. Her study opens up new perspectives on the interchange between male and female authors and illustrates the struggles of France's most brilliant women against an oppressive society. The book provides extensive reference features including bibliographical guides to texts and...

In this interdisciplinary study of sentimental discourse of the late eighteenth century, David J. Denby sheds new light on Enlightenment thought and sensibility. He situates sentimental subliterature in its social and political context, analyzing how its formal structures are reflected in contemporary theories and texts concerning society, morality, politics, and history. Denby argues that sentimentalism is central to the culture of late-eighteenth-century France. Texts discussed include works by Rousseau and de Stael.

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...

The most recently acknowledged--and the most private--of the masters of modernity, Paul Valery is perhaps the most radical and wide-ranging. He navigates freely within the mental galaxies known to scientists, poets, literary theorists, musicians, philosophers, historians and social anthropologists, always concerned with exploring the potential and limits of the human mind. This volume of essays by internationally recognized scholars offers the first comprehensive account in English or French of Valery's work. It brings into focus the deeper coherence that animates what Valery called his...

The Family in Crisis in Late Nineteenth-Century French Fiction examines how novels represent the problems of family life at a key moment in modern social history. Nicholas White provides close readings of texts by popular novelists such as Zola and Maupassant as well as by hitherto neglected figures including Huysmans, Bourget and Armand Charpentier. His analysis, informed by a wider cultural perspective, shows how tales of adultery, illegitimacy, incest and divorce exemplify and interrogate the crisis in "family values" of late nineteenth-century France.

This book offers a comprehensive description of how writers, in particular poets in nineteenth-century France, became increasingly aware of the visual element in writing from the point of view both of content and of the formal organisation of the words in the text. This interest encouraged writers such as Baudelaire, Mallarme and Rimbaud to recreate in language some of the vivid, sensual impact of the graphic or painterly image. This was to be achieved by organising texts according to aesthetic criteria so that as far as possible the form of the text as visually perceived would be closely...

This major new study takes issue both with the traditional critical view that Flaubert's central characters are weak and with the approach adopted by a number of contemporary critics who claim that character is deliberately undermined in the interests of non-representational writing. Rather, Dr Knight explores the relationship between the contents of Flaubert's stories and his practice as a writer, thereby reinstating the functional value of character in his work. She shows that essential aspects of Flaubert's aesthetic - the opaqueness of language, stupidity, fascination and reverie as the...

This is a new account of the prose fiction of Samuel Beckett from Murphy (1938) to Worstward Ho (1983). Drawing on contemporary literary theory, the book rejects the idea that Beckett is an author committed to expressing a particular view of the world. Instead, Beckett's fiction writing is examined in terms of its struggle with the perplexities and uncertainties of difference and identity. Beckett's literary bilingualism, his experiments with literary form, his treatment of sexuality and the body are seen as part of an exploration of the process by which the differences and distinctions which...