China has long been an object of fascination for the French, who celebrated their annEe de la Chine in 2004. Symptomatic of that fascination are the movements into China made by groups as diverse as the Jesuits, who arrived in L'Empire du Milieu in the late seventeenth century, and the Tel Quel intellectuals, whose will to political pilgrimage took them to the People's Republic in 1974. Symptomatic, too, are the narrative and visual representations of China offered by such as Pierre Loti, Victor Segalen, Paul Claudel, Michel Leiris, Simone de Beauvoir, AndrE Malraux, Henri Cartier-Bresson,...

These thirteenth-century French comic texts, L'Escommeniement au lecheor and Le Pardon de foutre, are two of the earliest satires on the Church's power to 'loosen and bind', symbolised by St Peter's keys. In L'Escommeniement, excommunications are relentlessly fired out against various social groups accused of activities ranging from the illegal and the immoral to the nonsensical and obscene. In Le Pardon, a cardinal freshly arrived from Rome proffers absolutions and indulgences to a number of groups whose graphically alleged sexual incontinence would appear to merit anything but pardon. These...

Texts about paintings, painters and sculptors are obvious test cases for issues of representation. A significant corpus of artist stories is scattered through HonorE de Balzac's ComEdie humaine which, from Marx to LukAcs to Roland Barthes's enormously influential S/Z (1970), has been a key literary work for critical debates around French realism. In a series of close readings, Diana Knight explores Barthes's 'model of painting' -- the metaphorical code of painting and sculpture that underpins realist discourse -- in the context of Balzac's fictional representations of the relation between...

In the course of the nineteenth century France built up a colonial empire second only to Britain's. The literary tradition in which it dealt with its colonial 'Other' is frequently understood in terms of Edward Said's description of Orientalism as both a Western projection and a 'will to govern' over the Orient. There is, however, a body of works that eludes such a simple categorisation, offering glimpses of colonial resistance, of a critique of imperialist hegemony, or of a blurring of the boundaries between the Self and the Other. Some of the ways in which the imperialist enterprise is...

When the famous Royal Professor of Philosophy and Eloquence Petrus Ramus (1515-1572) gave a lecture, one of his most promising pupils stood by, ready to tug on his coat if he made a mistake. That pupil was Ramus s future biographer, the much less famous Nicolas de Nancel (1539-1610), who recounted this anecdote in his Vita Rami (1599). Nancel s insertion of himself into his life of Ramus is typical of early modern biographies of men of letters. As biographer, the humanist man of letters situated himself within the same cultural field as his subject, thereby accrediting himself as a fellow man...

Five months before her death of tuberculosis in 1884, Marie Bashkirtseff, an aspiring artist and a would-be mondaine, composed a preface to her personal diary. In it, she brazenly declared that in the event of her early death her diary was to be published. Three years later, a truncated version of the diary appeared. Translated into English, championed by BarrEs and Gladstone, taken up by young diarists from France to the US, the diary created a major sensation, remaining standard reading for young women in both the anglophone and francophone worlds until the 1930s.
The first full-length...

The Roman de la Rose explicitly offers an 'art of love', while also repeatedly asserting that the experience of love is impossible to put into words. An examination of the intertextual density of the Rose, with its citations and adaptations of a range of Latin authors, shows that the discourse of bodily desire, pleasure, and trauma emerges indirectly from the juxtaposition and conflation of sources. Huot's new book focuses on Guillaume de Lorris's use of the Ovidian corpus, and on Jean de Meun's dazzling orchestration of allusions to a wider range of Latin writers: principally Ovid, Boethius,...

It is widely held that the large-scale translation of international news from English will lead to changes in French syntax. This book puts this assumption to test using fieldwork carried out in an international news agency and a corpus of translated news agency dispatches.

Throughout her career, Colette experimented with genre for the purposes of telling stories of her life. The books that resulted, known collectively as her 'livres-souvenirs', are far from being autobiographies in the customary sense. By addressing the need to reconsider the generic issues surrounding autobiographical story-telling, Anne Freadman's study brings the richness of 'the genre question' to the fore, shedding a fresh light on this much-loved body of work. From the vignettes of La Maison de Claudine to the note-books of L'Etoile vesper and Le Fanal bleu, from stories of losing to...

The Guadeloupean writer and critic Maryse CondE has for the last twenty-five years divided her time between her native Guadeloupe and the United States. If the author's work has attracted much critical attention in the United States, it is the fictional works that have been the focus of this attention with these predominantly read in the light of political themes such as identity and resistance. In these intelligent and sensitive readings, Eva Sansavior argues in favour of adopting a broader thematic and generic approach to the author's work. Sansavior accounts for the multiple and oblique...