Both W. G. Sebald (1944-2001) and the Austrian author Christoph Ransmayr (1954-) were born too late to know directly the violence of the Second World War and the Holocaust, but these traumatic events are a persistent presence in their work. In a series of close readings of key prose texts, Dora Osborne examines the different ways in which the traces of a traumatic past mark their narratives. By focusing on the authors' use of visual and topographical tropes, she shows how blind spots and inhospitable places configure signs of past violence, but, ultimately, resist our understanding. Whilst...

The coming together of linguistics and sociology in the 1960's, most notably via the work of William Labov, marked a revolution in the study of language and provided a paradigm for the understanding of variation and change. Labovian quantitative methods have been employed successfully in North America, the UK, Scandinavia and New Zealand, but have had surprisingly little resonance in France, a country which poses many challenges to orthodox sociolinguistic thinking. Why, for example, does a nation with unexceptional scores on income distribution and social mobility show an exceptionally high...

During the French Revolution, traditional literary forms such as the sentimental novel and the moral tale dominate literary production. At first glance, it might seem that these texts are unaffected by the upheavals in France; in fact they reveal not only a surprising engagement with politics but also an internalised emotional response to the turbulence of the period.

In this innovative and wide-ranging study, Katherine Astbury uses trauma theory as a way of exploring the apparent contradiction between the proliferation of non-political literary texts and the events of the Revolution....

More often than not, monographs on the reception of an author are either detailed, chronologically organised accounts of the reputation of that author, or studies in literary influence. This study adopts neither of those approaches and deals with the reception of Fedor Dostoevskii in Britain from a double perspective.
The detailed analysis of primary sources such as reviews, essays and monographs on Dostoevskii is associated here with a critical investigation of the dynamics of the reception process. On the one hand, the available sources are examined with the intention of exposing their...

One of the primary social changes ushered in by the French Revolution was the legalization of divorce in 1792. Diluted by the Civil Code and suppressed by the Restoration, divorce was only fully established in France by the Loi Naquet of 1884. French Divorce Fiction from the Revolution to the First World War tracks the part played by novels in this conflict between the secular rights of individual citizens and the sanctity of the traditional family. Inspired by the sociologists Zygmunt Bauman and Anthony Giddens, White's account culminates in the first sustained analysis of the role of...

Malcolm Bowie (1943-2007) was described by A.S. Byatt as 'one of our best living critics. He writes beautifully, subtly and lucidly about very difficult subjects.' Bowie was Marshal Foch Professor of French at Oxford (1992-2002) and Master of Christ's College, Cambridge (2002-2006). He received numerous honours, was invited to speak all over the world, and in 2001 won the international Truman Capote Prize for Literary Criticism for his Proust Among the Stars. The essays and reviews in these volumes have never before been brought together. Ranging across literature, art, music, and...

Malcolm Bowie (1943-2007) was described by A.S. Byatt as 'one of our best living critics. He writes beautifully, subtly and lucidly about very difficult subjects.' Bowie was Marshal Foch Professor of French at Oxford (1992-2002) and Master of Christ's College, Cambridge (2002-2006). He received numerous honours, was invited to speak all over the world, and in 2001 won the international Truman Capote Prize for Literary Criticism for his Proust Among the Stars. The essays and reviews in these volumes have never before been brought together. Ranging across literature, art, music, and...

Against a backdrop of dizzying urbanization, French utopian thinkers of the nineteenth century set out to explore the transformative possibilities of the modern metropolis. Linking literary analyses with diverse strands of cultural and intellectual history, this study considers how the utopian vision of the city in turn came to impinge on prose writing by poets: in Saint-Simonian literature, and in texts by ThEophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud. At points steeped in the hyperbolic rhetoric of utopian projects, these texts nonetheless wear away at the internal coherence of...

Eighteenth-century French cultural life was often characterised by quarrels, and the arrival of Viennese composer Christoph Willibald Gluck in Paris in 1774 was no exception, sparking a five-year pamphlet and press controversy which featured a rival Neapolitan composer, NiccolO Piccinni. However, as this study shows, the Gluck-Piccinni controversy was about far more than which composer was better suited to lead French operatic reform. A consideration of cultural politics in 1770s Paris shows that a range of issues were at stake: court versus urban taste as the proper judge of music, whether...

French realist texts are driven by representations of the body and depend on corporeality to generate narrative intrigue. But anxieties around bodily representation undermine realist claims of objectivity and transparency. Aspects of bodily reality which threaten les bonnes moeurs -- gender confusion, sexual appetite, disability, torture, murder, child abuse and disease -- rarely occupy the foreground and are instead spurned or only partially alluded to by writers and critics.
This wide-ranging study uses the notion of the taboo as a powerful means of interpreting representations of the...