The study of French culture has long ceased to be purely centred on literature. Undergraduate French courses now embrace all forms of cultural production and consumption, and students need to have a broad knowledge of everything from day-time TV and the latest detective novels to debates about national identity and immigration policies.



This stimulating text is an introduction to the full range of contemporary French culture. Written by a group of leading academics both within and outside France, each chapter focuses on a topic from the French cultural scene today....

By the end of the nineteenth century, Paris was widely acknowledged as the cultural capital of the world, the home of avant-garde music and art, symbolist literature and bohemian culture. Edinburgh by contrast, may still be thought of as a rather staid city of lawyers and Presbyterian ministers, academics and doctors. Whilst its great days as a centre for the European Enlightenment may have been behind it, however, late Victorian Edinburgh was becoming the location for a new set of cultural institutions, with its own avant-garde, that corresponded with a renewed Scottish national...

In this Georges Simenon classic, a Dutch clerk flees to Paris with his crooked boss's money and meets the woman behind the man.
"A certain furtive, almost shameful emotion . . . disturbed him whenever he saw a train go by, a night train especially, its blinds drawn down on the mystery of its passengers."
Kees Popinga is a respectable Dutch citizen and family man--until the day he discovers his boss has bankrupted the shipping firm he works for, and something snaps. Kees used to watch the trains go by on their way to exciting destinations. Now, on some dark impulse, he boards...