Recasting French literary history in terms of the cultures and peoples that interacted within and outside of France's national boundaries, this volume offers a new way of looking at the history of a national literature, along with a truly global and contemporary understanding of language, literature, and culture.

The relationship between France's national territory and other regions of the world where French is spoken and written (most of them former colonies) has long been central to discussions of "Francophonie." Boldly expanding such discussions to the whole range of French literature,...

Debates about freedom, an ideal continually contested, were first set out in their modern version by the eighteenth-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His ideas and analyses were taken up during the philosophical enlightenment, often invoked during the French Revolution, and still resonate in contemporary discussions of freedom. This volume examines Rousseau's many approaches to the concept of freedom, in the context of his thought on literature, religion, music, theater, women, the body, and the arts. Its expert contributors cross disciplinary frontiers to develop...

Proust and the Arts brings together expert Proustians and renowned interdisciplinary scholars in a major reconsideration of the novelist's relation to the arts. Going beyond the classic question of the models used by Proust for his fictional artists, the essays collected here explore how he learned from and integrated, in highly personal ways, the work of such creators as Wagner or Carpaccio. This volume reveals the breadth of Proust's engagement with varied art forms from different eras: from "primitive" arts to sound recordings, from medieval sculpture to Art Nouveau glassmaking, from...