Over the past two decades since the appearance in the West of Mikhail Bakhtin's study of Rabelais and popular culture, Rabelais's work has been a focus of debate in contemporary literary and cultural criticism. The subjects under discussion include questions of fixed authorial meaning and intention versus open and changing readings, and the competing claims of literary history as traditionally practised versus dialectical criticism, according to which criticism itself is not outside ideology and history. Jerome Schwartz's book attempts to straddle both tendencies. Schwartz reads the four...

This highly original study is concerned with the theory of knowledge. It approaches the subject in a new way by exploring the recurrent paradox which equates pure ignorance with perfect knowledge, twin ideals free from the impurities and imperfections of discourse. The author combines the techniques of literary criticism and intellectual history in order to examine the literary, philosophical, theological, and political ramifications of this anxiety about, and ambition to transcend, the limits of the text. Dr Martin begins by tracing a network of interlocking motifs and images - beginning and...

This book is a major study of the development of French poetry in the Renaissance, which examines changes in style and vision by looking both at how poetry was read in this period and how it was written. Dr Moss examines vernacular versions of fables from Ovid's Metamorphoses, published between the end of the fifteenth century and beginning of the seventeenth century, which reveal fundamental changes both in reading habits and in assumptions about literary aesthetics and the relationship of literature to truth. Through detailed analysis of mythological narratives in the Ovidian tradition...

This is the first book-length study of Flaubert's use of dialogue, an important but neglected component of his fictional texts. Professor Haig's starting point is Sartre's observation that 'Flaubert does not believe that we speak: we are spoken'. Dialogue in Flaubert does not attempt to represent an individual style but to circumscribe a larger phenomenon of language. Speech defines man both in the sense that it describes him as a set of human characteristics, and inscribes him within a system of social values. The author explores the development of Flaubert's use of dialogue in Madame...

This is a history of Jean-Paul Sartre's monthly review Les Temps Modernes, an immensely influential publication launched in 1945. The journal set out from the beginning to effect a revolutionary redefinition of psychology, sociology, political theory and anthropology, in order to assist in the socialist transformation of France and the world. Dr Davies is the first author to examine the review from a multidisciplinary viewpoint. The result is a panorama of forty years of French intellectual history, of debate and rivalry informed by and influencing the political struggles of the time - the...

This book is a challenging investigation of the idea of literary mimesis in the light of contemporary literary theory. Drawing on a range of theoretical perspectives developed in and around the work of Barthes, Kristeva, Genette and Derrida, Dr Prendergast explores approaches to the concept of mimesis and relates these to a number of narrative texts produced in the period which literary history familiarly designates as the age of realism: Balzac's Illusions Perdues and Splendeurs et Miseres des Courtisanes, Stendhal's Le Rouge et le Noir, Nerval's Sylvie and Flaubert's L'Education...

Are works of art imitations? If so, what exactly do they imitate? Should an artist remind his audience that what it is perceiving is in fact artifice, or should he try above all to persuade it to accept the illusion as reality? Questions such as these, which have dominated aesthetic theory since the Greeks, were debated with extraordinary vigour and ingenuity in eighteenth-century France. In this book Dr Hobson analyses these debates, focusing in turn on painting, the novel, drama, poetry and music. In each case she relates theory to contemporary works of art by Watteau, Chardin, Diderot,...

In this major study Rhiannon Goldthorpe takes up the challenge of Sartre's diversity in an original and provocative way. Her detailed and comprehensive exploration of the relationship between the theoretical and literary works pays due attention to their characteristic complexity. The discussion of La Nausee, Les Mouches, Huis clos, Les Mains sales and Les Sequestres e'Altona, for example, does not present these literary texts as mere 'illustrations' of Sartre's theories of consciousness, imagination and emotion, but as subtle philosophical and linguistic investigations in their own right. In...

This study, first published in 1986, is an examination of the many facets of Mallarmes relationship to the visual arts. Dr Florence proceeds by analysing Mallarmes writing on painting and literature, and its bearing on specific paintings, lithographs, and poems. These analyses reveal and define important common structures and innovatory developments, the coherence of which is masked by conventional histories of art. A new relationship is revealed between the word and the image, which has significant implications for an understanding of the self and the world in these texts. The book is...

This is a major study of the Nobel prize-winning French novelist Claude Simon. Simon is a complex figure: for all that he writes in a distinctively modern fictional tradition (exemplified by Proust, Joyce, Beckett and Robbe-Grillet), his novels contain strong elements of visual representation alongside a very different king of free-floating, anti-realist writing. This combination and tension between vivd representation of experience and the free play of language is a focus of Dr Britton's book. She exposes the limitations of literary theory in dealing with Simon's novels and reveals how...