This volume explores the characteristics of the art and literature of the Second Empire in France; it examines the attitudes and positioning of artists and writers of the period in relation to a regime of dubious legitimacy, and the ways in which that regime exploited to its advantage the artistic capital available to it.

The Lettre sur la comedie de l'Imposteur is the only work of any length which does full justice to comedy in the 17th century as a serious dramatic form. It is an important document in its own right and because it is inseparable from the historical context of Moliere's Le Tartuffe ou l'Imposteur and the circumstances which influenced its development.

Between 1831 and 1866, Theophile Gautier published two dozen tales which can be designated contes fantastiques or contes merveilleux. These works are examined in chronological sequence, in French, in order to follow the development of Gautier as a writer of fantastic stories. The analysis concentrates in particular on problems of genesis and intertextuality, and highlights the thematic continuity of this aspect of Gautier's work.

Saramago's labyrinths focuses on both the form and the content of Saramago's writing, paying particular attention to Ensaio sobre a Cegueira (Blindness) and Todos os Nomes (All the Names). This is the first book-length study to relate the very structure of Saramago's texts to the ideas that he continued to return to throughout his writing career. In addition to her close textual analysis of Blindness and All the Names, Atkin makes clear connections between these novels and Saramago's other literary work, identifying the ways in which Saramago causes the reader to return to and consider the...

This book gives a picture of a year's activities at the Theatre des Varietes. It includes an account of the financial side of the Theatre and impressions of the principal actors and actresses, as well as a month-by-month overview of what was actually performed.

An innovative, interdisciplinary, incisive scholarly study remapping and redefining domains and dynamics of modernism, EccentriCities: Writing in the margins of modernism critically considers how geo-historically distant and disparate urban sites, concentrating Russian and Luso-Brazilian cultural dialogue and definition, give rise to peculiarly parallel anachronistic and alternative fictional forms. While comparatively reframing these literary traditions through an extensive survey of Russian and Brazilian literature, cartography, urban design and development, foregrounding innovative close...

Early in the twentieth century, Russia was experiencing a decadent period of cultural degeneration just as science was developing ways to identify medical conditions which supposedly reflected the health of the entire nation. Leonid Andreev, the leading literary figure of his time, stepped into the breach of this scientific discourse with literary works about degenerates. The spirited social debates on mental illness, morality and sexual deviance which resulted from these works became part of the ongoing battle over the definition and depiction of the irrational, complicated by Andreev's own...