Parody marks the troubadour lyric from the outset, informing composition, performance and reception. This ground-breaking study moves away from courtliness, the focus of most previous studies, and places troubadour parodic practice in the context of the social and spiritual debates of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Occitania. LEglu analyses the complex relationship between troubadour verse and the Aquitainian para-liturgical Latin corpus. She charts the development of a chain of texts linked by a common formal model derived from this Latin sequence and traces patterns of rewriting, ranging...

The celebrated French critic and thinker Charles de Saint-Evremond (1614-1703) spent much of his life in exile in London, where he wrote most of his major works. The letters in the present collection, long thought to have been lost, were rescued from obscurity by Denys Potts, and are published here for the first time. Written to Madame de Gouville, whose friendship he happily rediscovered in his declining years, and to the AbbE de Hautefeuille, secretary to the Duchesse de Bouillon, the two series of interwoven letters form a single narrative which, for sheer spontaneity and verve, is matched...

Nineteenth-century France spawned numerous 'fous littEraires', one of the most fascinating being Jean-Pierre Brisset (1837-1919). An individualist par excellence, he dismantled the existing French tongue, reshaping it to suit his own grandiose purpose, which was that of explaining the development of human beings from frogs and of their language from croaks. Continuous and ubiquitous punning was a unique feature of his writing. In this study, Walter Redfern examines such themes as the nature of literary madness, the phenomenon of deadpan humour, the role of analogy, and the place of...

The French dramatist Jean Racine (1639-1699) had a lifelong, productive relationship with Ancient Greek literature: two of his best-known plays, PhEdre and IphigEnie, were inspired by the tragedies of Euripides. The annotated Greek texts Racine left in his library provide evidence of his private reading of the literature that lay behind the inspiration. In this scholarly study of Racine's annotations of Euripides' tragedies, Phillippo examines the creative processes linking these two writers. She concentrates on the extensive and largely unexplored evidence supplied by non-verbal aspects of...

EugEne Sue (1804-57), like his contemporary Alexandre Dumas pEre, was one of the most successful writers of his time. Les MystEres de Paris, the novel for which he is most remembered, became a publishing sensation. In its serial form, it took the public by storm -- readers fought for copies of the next instalment -- and in book form its print-run reached an unprecedented 60,000. Christopher Prendergast's study engages with the problematic of emerging forms of popular literature on the basis of a specific hypothesis: that Les MystEres de Paris, written and published in serial form, was,...

Alter Ego is the first monograph in English on the critical writings of Michel Leiris (1901-90). A groundbreaking autobiographer and pioneering ethnographer, Leiris also produced important criticism on art, opera, jazz and literature, which acts as a key commentary on twentieth-century intellectual movements and demonstrates vividly the constant refashioning and reformulation of contemporary ideas and aesthetics. Hand defines and situates Leiris s core themes, analyses his criticism in each of the art areas examined, and delineates the model that emerges of a contrapuntal and heterogeneous...

Slander and satire were contentious practices in early seventeenth-century France. Seeking to wound, ridicule, destroy or reform, they occupied either side of a dangerous border zone between legitimate and illegitimate criticism. In the first monograph on the subject, Emily Butterworth explores the literary and historical contexts that enabled language to become poisoned and words to wound. The legal background, the many seventeenth-century treatises on slander, early modern linguistic theory, and the satirical, moral, and polemical works of FranCois BEroalde de Verville, Marie de Gournay and...

Storytelling is a universal human activity and oral narration -- particularly modern 'conversational' narration such as anecdotes or personal stories -- has long been fertile ground for linguists working on tense usage across a variety of languages. This book introduces 'performed' oral storytelling into the debate, using data from traditional and contemporary storytellers in French to explore the narrative tenses attested, the discourse-pragmatic effects of tense switching, the structures deployed at points of temporal sequence, as well as broader questions concerning the nature of oral...

In Selfless Cinema, Sarah Cooper maps out the power relations of making and viewing documentaries in ethical terms. The ethics of filmmaking are often examined on largely legalistic terms, dominated by issues of consent, responsibility, and participants' or film-makers' rights, but Cooper approaches four representative French film-makers - Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, Raymond Depardon, and Agnes Varda - in a far less juridical way, drawing on the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. She argues that, in spite of Levinas' iconoclastic, anti-ocular thinking, his concept of visage is richly...

HElEne Cixous (1937-), distinguished not least as a playwright herself, told Le Monde in 1977 that she no longer went to the theatre: it presented women only as reflections of men, used for their visual effect. The theatre she wanted would stress the auditory, giving voice to ways of being that had previously been silenced. She was by no means alone in this. Cixous's plays, along with those of Nathalie Sarraute (1900-99), Marguerite Duras (1914-96), and NoElle Renaude (1949-), among others, have proved potent in drawing participants into a dynamic 'space of the voice'. If, as psychoanalysis...