Nathalie Sarraute, initially hailed as a leading theorist and exemplar of the nouveau roman, is now regarded as a major French novelist in her own right. Ann Jefferson offers a new perspective on Sarraute's entire oeuvre--her fiction, her outstanding autobiography Enfance and her influential critical writings--by focusing on the crucial issue of difference that emerges as one of her central preoccupations. Jefferson explores Sarraute's fundamental ambivalence to differences of various kinds, including questions of gender and genre.
Nathalie Sarraute, initially hailed as a leading theorist and exemplar of the nouveau roman, is now regarded as a major French novelist in her own rig...
Michael Finn examines the vogue for nervous afflictions in France in the late nineteenth century, and compares Proust's anxieties about writing In Search of Lost Time to the concerns of earlier writers suffering from nervous conditions, including Flaubert, Baudelaire, Nerval and the Goncourt brothers. Once Proust cast off his fear of being a nervous weakling, he was able to make fun of the supposed purity of the novel form. The author shows how hysteria becomes a key to Proustian narrative, and discusses how together with Proust's use of pastiche, narrative pranks and games, it unlocks a...
Michael Finn examines the vogue for nervous afflictions in France in the late nineteenth century, and compares Proust's anxieties about writing In Sea...
This new study of the nineteenth-century French realist novel focuses on the fundamental incompatibility between the narrative and the descriptive modes of discourse. It shows how major novelists including Balzac, Flaubert and Zola, like some of their twentieth-century successors, grappled with their belief or fear that their stories lied in their representation of time and history, or that their descriptions forgot the reality of their socio-historical world, highlighting their use of irony and allegory in the struggle against the deceitfulness of their own texts.
This new study of the nineteenth-century French realist novel focuses on the fundamental incompatibility between the narrative and the descriptive mod...
A study of the place and nature of the ideal of politeness in seventeenth and eighteenth-century writing in France, Britain and Russia. This ideal covered not just polite manners, but all the "civilized" norms of society and culture, as opposed to elements considered childish, irrational, savage or vulgar. Professor France shows how interpenetration and compromise between polite and rude, tame and wild, are central features of classical writings, arguing that polite society needed and desired its opposite.
A study of the place and nature of the ideal of politeness in seventeenth and eighteenth-century writing in France, Britain and Russia. This ideal cov...
The medieval troubadours of the South of France profoundly influenced European literature for many centuries. This book is the first full-length study of the first-person subject position adopted by many of them in its relation to language and society. Using modern theoretical approaches, Sarah Kay discusses to what extent this first person is a "self" or "character," and how far it is self-determining. Kay draws on a wide range of troubadour texts, providing many close readings and translating all medieval quotations into English. Her book will be of interest both to scholars of medieval...
The medieval troubadours of the South of France profoundly influenced European literature for many centuries. This book is the first full-length study...
This book studies the importance of typographic shapes in French Renaissance literature in the context of psychoanalysis and of the history of printed writing. Focusing on the poetry of Clement Marot, Rabelais's Gargantua, Ronsard's sonnets and the Essais of Montaigne, it argues that printed characters can either supplement or betray what they appear to articulate. They often reveal compositional patterns that do not appear to be under authorial control, and open political and subjective dimensions through the interaction of verbal and visual materials. This unconscious, proto-Freudian...
This book studies the importance of typographic shapes in French Renaissance literature in the context of psychoanalysis and of the history of printed...
This book analyzes the relationship between an emergent modern subjectivity in seventeenth-century French literature, particularly in dramatic works, and the contemporaneous evolution of the absolutist state. It shows how major writers of the Classical period (Corneille, Racine, Moliere, Lafayette) elaborate a new subject in and through their representations of the family, and argues that the family serves as the mediating locus of a patriarchal ideology of sexual and political containment. Professor Greenberg argues that this reflects the conflicting social, political and economic forces...
This book analyzes the relationship between an emergent modern subjectivity in seventeenth-century French literature, particularly in dramatic works, ...