This book of linked essays contains the first critical study of Baudelaire's development as a poet, from his youth onwards.

Gillian Jondorf challenges the traditional critical approaches to French Renaissance theater, reevaluating its literary merit and originality. She shows how playwrights of the sixteenth century actually achieved an originality by introducing classical themes, breaking with the medieval tradition of religious and morality plays. Whereas many critics have considered writers of French Renaissance drama as mere forerunners of the more famous seventeenth-century writers such as Moliere or Racine, Jondorf argues that these plays should be seen as competent and skillfully-composed in their own...

In this reading of Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris Margery Evans proposes that Baudelaire's text serves to question the conventions of prose forms such as the novel and the moral fable. She shows how the text probes the fundamental tension between individuality and conformity, powerfully symbolized by the giant metropolis. Dr. Evans explores the interconnections among the prose poems that make up Le Spleen de Paris and their intertextual relations with other, mostly prose, works, and argues that this anomalous, hybrid work raises far-reaching questions of relevance to narratology and to...

This book reassesses the love poetry of Maurice Sc ve from a phenomenological viewpoint.

According to Rousseau, the best possible relationship between unequals is one of "benificence." This book addresses the problem implicit in his writings of whether it is indeed possible for a just and generous relationship to exist between non-equals. Judith Still draws together issues in Rousseau's work that are often treated in isolation: the state, just relations between individuals, sexual politics and the constructing of a feminine identity. Using techniques of reading drawn from literary theory, she argues that for Rousseau, it is sexual difference that disturbs the practice of...

In this interdisciplinary study of sentimental discourse of the late eighteenth century, David J. Denby sheds new light on Enlightenment thought and sensibility. He situates sentimental subliterature in its social and political context, analyzing how its formal structures are reflected in contemporary theories and texts concerning society, morality, politics, and history. Denby argues that sentimentalism is central to the culture of late-eighteenth-century France. Texts discussed include works by Rousseau and de Stael.

Hughes explores how cultural centers require the peripheral, the outlawed, and the deviant in order to define and bolster themselves. He analyzes the hierarchies of cultural value that inform the work of six modern French writers: the exoticist Pierre Loti; Paul Gauguin, whose Noa Noa enacts European fantasies about Polynesia; Proust, who analyzes such exemplary figures of exclusion and inclusion as the homosexual and the xenophobe; Montherlant; Camus, who pleads an alienating detachment from the cultures of both metropolitan France and Algeria; and Jean Genet.

This is the first full-length study in English of Michel Leiris's work.

Between 1690 and 1715, well over one hundred literary fairy tales appeared in France, two-thirds of them written by women. The first part of this book situates the rise of this genre within the literary and historical context of late-seventeenth-century France, and the second part examines the representation of sexuality, masculinity and femininity within selected groups of tales. The book proposes a new model for the application of feminist and gender theory to the literary fairy tale, from whatever national tradition.

The Family in Crisis in Late Nineteenth-Century French Fiction examines how novels represent the problems of family life at a key moment in modern social history. Nicholas White provides close readings of texts by popular novelists such as Zola and Maupassant as well as by hitherto neglected figures including Huysmans, Bourget and Armand Charpentier. His analysis, informed by a wider cultural perspective, shows how tales of adultery, illegitimacy, incest and divorce exemplify and interrogate the crisis in "family values" of late nineteenth-century France.