This production history of The Mother provides substantial new insights into Bertolt Brecht's theatre and drama, his impact on political theatre, and the relationship between text, performance, and politico-cultural context. As the only play which Brecht staged in the Weimar Republic, during his exile, and in the GDR, The Mother offers a unique opportunity to compare his theatrical practice in contrasting settings and at different points in his career. Through detailed analysis of original archival evidence, Bradley shows how Brecht became far more sensitive to his spectators' political views...

In early humanist France two debating traditions converge: one literary and vernacular, one intellectual and conducted mainly via Latin epistles. Debate and Dialogue demonstrates how the two fuse in the vernacular verse debates of Alain Chartier, secretary and notary at the court of Charles VI, and later, Charles VII. In spite of considerable contemporary praise for Chartier, his work has remained largely neglected by modern critics. This study shows how Chartier participates in a movement that invests a vernacular poetic with moral and political significance, inspiring such social...

Tristan Corbiere is often viewed as the archetypal poete maudit, a misunderstood rebel and bohemian prankster. This is a study of the poet's innovative use of language. It uses the critical tool of irony to analyze his idiosyncratic verse, showing how he contributed to the general revolution in poetic language that marked the 1870s in France. Corbiere's poetry pushed the ironic element in Baudelaire to its limit and exerted an important influence on Laforgue, Pound, and Eliot. It played a key role in the ironic tradition of Symbolism which is often overshadowed by the "pure" poetry of...

Nathalie Sarraute is one of the most prominent French writers of the twentieth century. This study explores the evolution of Sarraute's prose writings from intense concern with shaping the response of their readers, to the more recent withdrawal of the authorial voice into self-sufficient internal dialogue. Emer O'Beirne considers the growing disillusionment with the reader reflected in Sarraute's work.

Proust is read as a writer of maxims and metaphors, of short and long sentences, as at once an aesthete and a scientific thinker. His A la recherche du temps perdu is a hybrid, a novel-essay, an epistemological debate that crosses the boundaries between two cultures, art and science. Science and Structure explores the epistemological alertness and anxiety of Proust's masterpiece and in so doing illuminates the interrelations between "modernist" art and science.

This book offers a study of the whole of Duras's written oeuvre, covering journalism and lesser-known works as well as more famous texts. It brings out the constant presence of ethical questions in and around the experiences of passion and excess with which her work is always concerned, and subjects Duras's texts to an unprecedented level of close reading, carrying her beyond the terms of her usual reception.

This book explores the poetics of literary defences of women written by men in late-medieval and early-modern France. It fills an important lacuna in studies of this polemic in imaginative literature by bridging the gap between Christine de Pizan and a later generation of women writers and male, Neo-Platonist writers who have recently all received due critical attention. Whereas male-authored defences composed between 1440 and 1538 have previously been dismissed as "insincere" or "mere intellectual games," Swift formulates reading strategies to overcome such critical stumbling blocks and...

This book examines the relationship between representations of the body and narrative strategies in the work of three contemporary women writers from the former Eastern Bloc countries: Herta Muller, an ethnic German from Romania; Libu%se Monikova, who emigrated from Czechoslovakia to West Germany and chose to write in German; and Kerstin Hensel, from the GDR.
Marven shows how the content and form of their works are interlinked, and how these challenge the hegemonic discourses within repressive socialist regimes. The introduction contextualizes the writers' socially, culturally, and...

Proust's works are peculiarly rich in figures of speech drawn from Christian and biblical, and classical and mythological sources. This study explores the functions and effects of these interweaving cycles of imagery--cycles which are vital to key thematic areas of A la recherche du temps perdu. Proust's Gods also opens up a wider, diachronic perspective, analyzing the increasing sophistication of Proust's style from his earliest writings onwards, and re-evaluating the role of the largely-ignored correspondence in his stylistic development.

On a Knife-Edge represents the first book-length study in English solely devoted to the work of Joao Cabral de Melo Neto (1920-1999), one of Brazil's foremost poets of the twentieth century and a unique voice within Brazilian Modernism. It concentrates on the poet's later works, from A escola das facas (1980) to Andando Sevilha (1990), providing a comprehensive overview of a body of work which has so far attracted limited critical attention. Sara Brandellero reviews traditional readings of Cabral as a poet of clarity and precision, and demonstrates how ambiguity in language, imagery, and even...