Dr Scott argues that only by attending to the precise locations of words in line or stanza, and to the specific value of syllables, or by understanding the often conflicting demands of rhythm and metre, can the reader of poetry acquire a real grasp of the intimate life of words in verse with all their fluctuations of meaning, mood and tone. The analyses through which the book pursues its argument address two principal concerns: the way in which syllabic position projects words and colours their complicated and challenged by the relationship of rhythm to metre.

In this reading of Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris Margery Evans proposes that Baudelaire's text serves to question the conventions of prose forms such as the novel and the moral fable. She shows how the text probes the fundamental tension between individuality and conformity, powerfully symbolized by the giant metropolis. Dr. Evans explores the interconnections among the prose poems that make up Le Spleen de Paris and their intertextual relations with other, mostly prose, works, and argues that this anomalous, hybrid work raises far-reaching questions of relevance to narratology and to...

According to Rousseau, the best possible relationship between unequals is one of "benificence." This book addresses the problem implicit in his writings of whether it is indeed possible for a just and generous relationship to exist between non-equals. Judith Still draws together issues in Rousseau's work that are often treated in isolation: the state, just relations between individuals, sexual politics and the constructing of a feminine identity. Using techniques of reading drawn from literary theory, she argues that for Rousseau, it is sexual difference that disturbs the practice of...

This book opens crucial new perspectives on the vexing question of chronology in Flaubert's work. Claire Addison argues that Flaubert's manipulation of dates is deliberate, and that what have previously been dismissed as inadvertent errors are in fact evidence of the strong presence of Flaubert's personal mythology in his work, creating links among his family life, events in historical Europe, and events in the life of his literary characters. Her reading sheds new light on the subtle and complex interplay between the life and work of the author.

It was through Stael's bestseller, De l'Allemagne, that the term "Romanticism," coined in Germany, reached Europe and America. Around this term, Stael built a new and universal agenda: her manifesto offered Napoleon's Europe an alternative to everything he stood for. In this ground-breaking work, John Claiborne Isbell reasserts Stael's place in history and analyzes her vast agenda, which covers every Classical and Romantic divide in art, philosophy, religion and society from 1789 to 1815. This investigation sheds new light on the two different revolutions that created modern Europe, as seen...

Michael Finn examines the vogue for nervous afflictions in France in the late nineteenth century, and compares Proust's anxieties about writing In Search of Lost Time to the concerns of earlier writers suffering from nervous conditions, including Flaubert, Baudelaire, Nerval and the Goncourt brothers. Once Proust cast off his fear of being a nervous weakling, he was able to make fun of the supposed purity of the novel form. The author shows how hysteria becomes a key to Proustian narrative, and discusses how together with Proust's use of pastiche, narrative pranks and games, it unlocks a...

Floyd Gray explores how the treatment of controversial subjects in French Renaissance writing was affected by rhetorical conventions and the commercial requirements of an expanding publishing industry. Focusing on a wide range of discourses on gender issues--misogynist, feminist, autobiographical, homosexual and medical--Gray reveals the extent to which these marginalized texts reflect literary concerns rather than social reality. His new readings of Rabelais, Montaigne, Louise Labe and others, challenge the inherent anachronism of criticism that fails to take account of the cultural context...

Gillian Jondorf challenges the traditional critical approaches to French Renaissance theater, reevaluating its literary merit and originality. She shows how playwrights of the sixteenth century actually achieved an originality by introducing classical themes, breaking with the medieval tradition of religious and morality plays. Whereas many critics have considered writers of French Renaissance drama as mere forerunners of the more famous seventeenth-century writers such as Moliere or Racine, Jondorf argues that these plays should be seen as competent and skillfully-composed in their own...

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...

This is the first wide-ranging theoretical study to investigate how sexuality underlies literary production in the French Renaissance. It examines the relationship between psychoanalytic theory and French Renaissance literature, and explores the issues of gender, the body, and repression through detailed readings of key literary texts.