A New History of French Literature

Description

Designed for the general reader, this splendid introduction to French literature from 842 A.D.—the date of the earliest surviving document in any Romance language—to the present decade is the most compact and imaginative single-volume guide available in English to the French literary tradition. In fact, no comparable work exists in either language. It is not the customary inventory of authors and titles but rather a collection of wide-angled views of historical and cultural phenomena. It sets before us writers, public figures, criminals, saints, and monarchs, as well as religious, cultural, and social revolutions. It gives us books, paintings, public monuments, even TV shows. Written by 164 American and European specialists, the essays are introduced by date and arranged in chronological order, but here ends the book’s resemblance to the usual history of literature. Each date is followed by a headline evoking an event that indicates the chronological point of departure. Usually the event is literary—the publication of an original work, a journal, a translation, the first performance of a play, the death of an author—but some events are literary only in terms of their repercussions and resonances. Essays devoted to a genre exist alongside essays devoted to one book, institutions are presented side by side with literary movements, and large surveys appear next to detailed discussions of specific landmarks. No article is limited to the “life and works” of a single author. Proust, for example, appears through various lenses: fleetingly, in 1701, apropos of Antoine Galland’s translation of The Thousand and One Nights; in 1898, in connection with the Dreyfus Affair; in 1905, on the occasion of the law on the separation of church and state; in 1911, in relation to Gide and their different treatments of homosexuality; and at his death in 1922. Without attempting to cover every author, work, and cultural development since the Serments de Strasbourg in 842, this history succeeds in being both informative and critical about the more than 1,000 years it describes. The contributors offer us a chance to appreciate not only French culture but also the major critical positions in literary studies today. A New History of French Literature will be essential reading for all engaged in the study of French culture and for all who are interested in it. It is an authoritative, lively, and readable volume.

Get the book

Amazon.com

Search the book

eBay.com

Search the book

Other editions

• 

  A New History of French Literature

  • 1994
  • 1158 pages
  • Paperback
  • Harvard University Press

Similar books

• 

  Virginia Woolf and the Great War

  By Karen L. Levenback

  I owe special thanks to Bruce Martin and Evelyn Timberlake ( at the Library of Congress ) ; Philip Milato and Steve Crook ( at the Berg Collection ) ...

• 

  In Search of Elena Ferrante: The Novels and the Question of Authorship

  By Karen Bojar

  ... Alice: “In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens” 157 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 38 Wertenbaker, Timberlake 21 Wilson, Emily (trans.

• 

  Native American Verbal Art: Texts and Contexts

  By William M. Clements

  HENRY TIMBERLAKE'S CHEROKEE WAR SONG 1. That Timberlake's memoir contains the first English translation of the words of a Native American song seems to have ...

• 

  Playing in the Shadows: Fictions of Race and Blackness in Postwar Japanese Literature

  By William H Bridges

  “Justin Timberlake, 'The 20/20 Experience': Is There a Visual Preference for Whiteness?” Interview with Marc Lamont Hill. HuffPost Live, 27 March 2013.

• 

  Shakespeare's Edward III

  By William Shakespeare

  Thompson , E . in Pollard 1923 . Thompson , J . Shakespeare and the Classics , 1952 . Tillyard , E . Shakespeare ' s History Plays , 1944 . Timberlake , P ...

• 

  The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and Its Discontents

  By Laura Frost

  In The Problem with Pleasure, Frost draws upon a wide variety of materials, linking interwar amusements, such as the talkies, romance novels, the Parisian fragrance Chanel no. 5, and the exotic confection Turkish Delight, to the artistic ...

• 

  The Alice Books and the Contested Ground of the Natural World

  By Laura White

  Similarly, he deplored the picturestories of A. B. Frost in his Stuff and Nonsense ... When he'd eaten eighteen, He turned perfectly green, Upon which he ...

• 

  Fables of Modernity: Literature and Culture in the English Eighteenth Century

  By Laura Brown

  Renew'd by ordure's sympathetic force, As oil'd with magic juices for the course, ... William Frost (1953; reprint, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, ...

• 

  Questions of Authority: Italian and Australian Travel Narratives of the Long Nineteenth Century

  By Laura Olcelli

  D'Albertis, Luigi. New Guinea: What I Did and What I Saw. 2 vols. London: S. Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1881. First published 1880.

• 

  A Concordance to Conrad's The Arrow of Gold

  By Paul L. Gaston, Todd K. Bender

  ... i ge 3 let S deal ing ge a lings ge at t Joe a f J & at n ce at h-ced ge at hly ue to 3 sec ge is a te debit de cap it a t e u ge c e it ful ge c e i ve ...