Literary Studies / French Literature

Unselfing offers an account of the ways that global French writers have tried to capture experiences when the ordinary sense of the self as a source of unity, stability, and authority has been radically altered.

With a focus on the economic, social, and political impetus for producing monuments to knowledge, this volume recognizes the encyclopedic compilation as the quintessential tool of enlightenment knowledge transfer.

This book interrogates the enduring and controversial legend of Casanova, from a seducer of women to a man of science and key participant in the Enlightenment.

Why have so many diplomats been writers? Why have so many writers served as diplomats? This book provides some fascinating insights into the connections between literature and diplomacy.

With an extensive index of musical and textual editions of dozens of songs, Marian Devotion in Thirteenth-Century French Lyric brings a heretofore neglected genre to light.

Available for the first time in English, the Marquis de Sade’s Journey to Italy provides new insight into the early life and career of this famous radical libertine writer.

Victims of the Book shows how the adolescent male reader became a subject of grave social concern in late-nineteenth-century France and how a new generation of writers later reworked the novel to subvert cultural norms about masculinity.

In Telling Anxiety, Jennifer Willging examines manifestations of such anxieties in the selected narratives of four women writing in French.

Objects Observed explores the central place given to the object by a number of poets in France and in America in the twentieth century.

Challenging the prevailing images of India derived from nineteenth-century "orientalism," Versailles Meets the Taj Mahal identifies and explores the traces that exposure to India left on the cultural artifacts and mindset of France’s "Great Century."

In The Prison of Love, Emily Francomano offers the first comparative study of this sixteenth-century work as a transcultural, humanist fiction.

French Écocritique is the first book-length study of the culturally specific ways in which contemporary French literature and theory raise questions about nature and environment.

In Passing Judgement, Hélène Bilis examines how an overlooked character-type—the royal judge—remained a constant of the tragic genre throughout the 17th century.

Postcolonial Counterpoint is a critical study of Orientalism and the state of Francophone and postcolonial studies, examined through the lens of the historical and cross-cultural relations between France and North Africa.

Mind, Body, Motion, Matter investigates the relationship between the eighteenth century’s two predominant approaches to the natural world in the works of leading British and French writers such as Daniel Defoe, William Hogarth, Laurence Sterne, the third Earl of Shaftesbury and Denis Diderot.

In Cultural Hermeneutics, Mario J. Valdés offers a synthesis of the hermeneutic philosophies of Miguel de Unamuno and Paul Ricoeur.