Arising from the activities of the Centre for Seventeenth-Century French Theatre, this volume proposes a selection of eighteen essays by internationally renowned scholars aimed at all those who value and work with the theatre of seventeenth-century France, whether in teaching, research or performance. Frequently seeking out the interfaces of these areas, the essays cover historiography (including that of opera), the theory and practice of textual editing, visualizing - in terms of both theatre architecture and the significance of playtext illustration - , approaches to study and research...

La representation de la vie psychique dans les recits factuels et fictionnels de l'epoque classique rassemble des etudes de specialistes de l'histoire (au sens large, incluant les Memoires ou l'autobiographie) et de la fiction narrative des XVIIe et XVIIIe siecles. Cet ouvrage traite une question theorique rarement appliquee a la premiere modernite l'entree dans l'interiorite des personnages, ce que Dorrit Cohn a appele la transparence interieure, est-elle reservee a la seule fiction ? Permet-elle d'etablir une ligne de partage claire entre recit factuel et recit de fiction a une...

Simultanement sujet et objet de multiples debats et controverses, Jean-Jacques Rousseau n'a jamais cesse de produire et de susciter des differends, qu'ils soient personnels ou philosophiques. Auteur proprement en conflit avec son siecle, le Citoyen de Geneve intervient dans l'arene publique en prenant partie dans d'importants debats ideologiques: ces querelles qui ont structure le champ litteraire et politique sont l'objet de ce livre. On y analyse le role et la force de la polemique dans les oeuvres de Rousseau. Prenant Les Confessions a rebours, cette etude met au jour un autre...

Tout semble opposer le theatre au recit de soi. Le premier se rattache aux arts du spectacle, tandis que le second releve de l'intime. Genre litteraire emblematique du XVIIIe siecle, le roman-memoires invite a depasser cette opposition. S'il place l'experience vecue au coeur de son ecriture, il s'approprie egalement le langage de la scene comique ou tragique au profit d'une fiction de l'interiorite. Ce livre montre ce que le roman-memoires doit au theatre, en etudiant comment son ecriture s'elabore a partir de differents emprunts et procedes caracteristiques de la scene. En s'inventant au...

Le rapport au texte biblique est de toute evidence une voie d'entree privilegiee pour qui veut etudier les representations du religieux au XVIIIe siecle. A un moment ou une mefiance bien plus ancienne vis-a-vis de L'Ancien Testament s'etend pareillement au Nouveau percu lui aussi comme fabrique et donc, pour une part au moins, comme imposture, le cas Rousseau montre exemplairement comment la Bible, pour etre de moins en moins apprehendee comme une Verite Revelee, reste toujours un intertexte litteraire de toute premiere grandeur et sans doute meme plus influent que jamais. La...

This collection of essays aims to measure the minimum scope for interpretation, with reference to texts produced under absolute constraints: those governing the trials of the Spanish Inquisition, as well as trials for witchcraft and libertinage, in polemical writings during the French wars of religion, or in the words of common law convicts in Italy and England. Written by ten specialists in Early Modern literature and edited by Anne Duprat, these studies examine the violence inflicted on certain texts via the act of interpretation, and the means of resistance used in response. The...

Priya Wadhera's Original Copies in Georges Perec and Andy Warhol is the first book to explore striking similarities between the works of these celebrated figures of the twentieth century. Copies abound in Perec's oeuvre, where pastiches, paintings, and intertexts dialogue with the history of copying in the past and present, in literature and in art. Both here and in Warhol's works, the source of the copies is difficult to pinpoint, shrouded in a fog linked to death. This remarkable parallel provides insight into their widely-admired works and a postmodern aesthetic where the original...

Gustave Flaubert, Samuel Beckett and Marie NDiaye can be considered as visionaries of a peculiarly radical form of failure, their protagonists and texts alike sliding inexorably into unmanageable states of paradox, incompletion and disintegration. What are the implications of these authors experiments in splitting and negativity, experiments which seem to indulge the most cynical aspects of nihilism, whilst at the same time grappling with the very foundations of politicized and psychic truth? In this unusual edited volume of comparative analyses, Andrew Asibong and Aude Campmas bring together...

Mademoiselle de Montpensier: Writings, Châteaux, and Female Self-Construction in Early Modern France examines questions of self-construction in the works of Anne-Marie-Louise d’Orléans, Duchesse de Montpensier (1627-1693), the wealthiest unmarried woman in Europe at the time, a pro-women advocate, author of memoirs, letters and novels, and the commissioner of four châteaux and other buildings throughout France, including Saint-Fargeau, Champigny-sur-Veude, Eu, and Choisy-le-roi. An NEH-funded project, this study explores the interplay between writing and the symbolic import of châteaux...

Geneviève Straus: a Parisian Life is the first biography in English of Geneviève Straus (1849-1926), a Parisian salon hostess and political activist. Joyce Block Lazarus explores myths surrounding Straus and offers an account of her life and accomplishments. Making use of historical materials, including previously unpublished letters, Lazarus shows that Straus was a female intellectual during an era when women were non-citizens. Scholars have well documented the Dreyfus Affair (1894-1906), but have overlooked archival documents which spotlight Straus’s role as a political activist in...