From Sade at one end of the nineteenth century to Freud at the other, via many French novelists and poets, pleasure and pain become ever more closely entwined. Whereas the inseparability of these themes has hitherto been studied from isolated perspectives, such as psychoanalysis, sadism and sado-masochism, melancholy, or post-structuralist textual jouissance, the originality of this collaborative volume lies in its exploration of how pleasure and pain function across a broader range of contexts. The essays collected here demonstrate how the complex relationship between pleasure and pain plays...

Filmmakers have drawn inspiration from the pages of Emile Zola from the earliest days of cinema. The ever-growing number of adaptations they have produced spans eras, genres, languages, and styles. In spite of the diversity of these approaches, numerous critics regard them as inferior copies of a superior textual original. But key novels by Zola resist this critical approach to adaptation. Both at the level of characterization and in terms of their own textual inheritance, they question the very possibility of origin, be it personal or textual. In the light of this questioning, the cinematic...

The French Revolution of 1789 altered the face of power and the institutions it inhabited in France, and the aftershocks of this seismic change rippled throughout the nineteenth century. With power changing hands between monarchy, empires and republics in quick succession, the nature of power, both personal and political, and institutions, both real and metaphorical, was constantly being redefined, argued over and fought for. This volume provides innovative analyses of nineteenth-century power relations in France across a series of interlinked spheres: artistic, literary, cultural, political,...

The book presents a range of theoretical and practical approaches to the teaching of the twin professions of interpreting and translating, covering a variety of language pairs. All aspects of the training process are addressed from detailed word-level processing to student concerns with their careers, and from the setting of examinations to the standardisation of marking. The articles show very clearly the strengths and needs, the potential and vision of interpreter and translator training as it exists in countries around the world. The experience of the authors, who are all actively engaged...

Arguing that we need to reconceptualize the study of adaptations, Andrew Watts and Kate Griffiths examine six canonical French novelists and the recreations of their works in a variety of media. Rather than viewing the works of Balzac, Hugo, Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant, and Verne as authentic original versions to be defended from the impurities of adapting hands, the authors demonstrate that these originals are themselves fashioned from the adapted voices of a host of earlier artists, moments, and media. Analyzing reworkings of canonical literary texts across time and media to emphasize the...