reviews & further information

Between Totem and Taboo
Black man, white woman in Francographic literature

‘Wide ranging and fascinating . . . For its breadth of knowledge, ranging across centuries and continents, this book will be indispensable to all those with an interest in this subject.’
FS LVI.3, 2002

Between Totem and Taboo picks its way judiciously through a minefield of prejudice, myth and stereotypes.  It is the first book to explore the literary representation by authors black and white, male and female, of interracial relations between France and her former territories in West Africa through the special nexus of the white woman and the black man. 

Presented as a text-based chronological exploration of the relationship from 1740 to the present day, it reveals how racism distorted such relations for a quarter of a millennium.  It will fascinate anyone seriously interested in Black studies, Women’s studies and Postcolonial studies, who will find in it not only many unknown or unconsidered texts but a new angle of approach to their research.  All quotations are in French and English.

• Ground-breaking and unique exploration of the literary representation of interracial relations

• Fascinating for anyone interested in Black studies, Women’s studies, Postcolonial studies as well as in French literary and cultural studies

• Leading scholar in the field

Market: Scholars and graduate students of Black studies, French-language literatures, postcolonial studies, gender studies, cultural studies.  Academic libraries. The informed general reader with an interest in the above subjects.

Author: Roger Little was Professor of French (1776) at Trinity College Dublin until his retirement in 1998.  His academic work has been mainly in modern French poetry and the representation of Blacks in Francographic literature.  He has edited several volumes of Textes littéraires for University of Exeter Press, including Histoire de Louis Anniaba (2000), Ourika (expanded edition, 1998),  Contes américains (1997) and Empsaël et Zoraïde (1995). 

CONTENTS

Introduction Between Totem and Taboo
Chapter 1 Eighteenth-century Enwhitenment
Chapter 2 From Taboo to Totem
Chapter 3 Traditions and Transitions
Chapter 4 Opposite Genders, Opposite Agendas
Chapter 5 The French Empire Writes Black
Chapter 6 Struggles for Independence
Chapter 7 The Freedom to Choose
Chapter 8 Liberty and Licence
Chapter 9 Full Circle
Conclusion Beyond Difference and Indifference
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index

The Café of Mirrors

Katharina Pollaczek, a young woman of Slav origin, returns to the Italian border city of her youth to fight for the custody of her young son. The narrative charts Katharina's wanderings through the beautiful but decaying streets of this once-great city which is clearly recognisable as Trieste. Casual encounters highlight the pain and difficulty of communication, and her chance arrival at the scene of the murder of a young Serbian woman forces Katharina to contemplate the tragedy of ethnic tension and the crisis of conscience which characterizes an entire generation.

This is the first translation into English of this Italian novel and the Introduction by Luisa Quartermaine includes background on the book as well as on Morandini, Trieste and the history of the region.

• A young woman fights for custody of her son
• Inner turmoil reflected in physical landscape
• Ethnic tensions and border psychology recall the conflict in Bosnia

Market: Readers of contemporary fiction. Students and teachers of Italian literature, comparative and contemporary literature, women's studies. A useful teaching text in discussions of modern and post-modern literature and on courses about women's writing.

Author: Giuliana Morandini is one of the most original and significant living Italian writers and her work has been translated into many languages. She was born in Friuli on the Austrian border and now lives in Venice and Rome.

Translator: Luisa Quartermaine is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Italian, University of Exeter and has taught Italian literature and culture in Britain for 30 years. Her translation benefits from her special interest in both the period and the setting of the book.

"As the title suggests, the book is concerned with vision and with recognition, but the overriding theme is of alienation. Katharina is alienated from her past, from her ex-husband, but also from the city and from the people she meets there. This alienation comes across even more clearly in Quartermaine's translation, with its rather old-fashioned language and its extremely close adhesion to Morandini's text, itself written in an Italian which is not intended to be realistic. Quartermaine's literality operates a Verfremdunseffekt which seems to echo the ideas of Walter Benjamin, who advocated literal, foreignizing translation as a way of stretching the boundaries of language . . . both as a piece of translation and a piece of translation publishing, The Café of Mirrors is excellently done."
Translation Ireland, September 1997

Camus: The Challenge of Dostoevsky

‘Scholarly and thoughtfully written . . . Davison’s book, which also includes a comprehensive bibliography and index, amounts to an invaluable and interesting contribution to Camus studies."
French Studies, LIV.I, 2000

"Davison's contextual approach is consistently rich and his ideas are elegantly and powerfully expressed. He engages with other major critics (notably Peter Dunwoodie) and establishes important links between texts.By quoting lavishly from the full range of the author's works, including speeches, letters and diaries (French translations of the original Russian texts are used), Davison allows the reader to follow at close hand the internal dynamics of the relationship...Davison's study...offers the most complete account yet of the Camus-Dostoevsky relationship."
Journal of European Studies Vol XXVIII 1998

"Complementing Peter Dunwoodie's recent study, Ray Davison's engaging account of Camus and Dostoevsky constitutes another invaluable contribution to Camus scholarship."
Modern and Contemporary France Volume 6(4) 1998

"Through detailed and lucid analysis of Camus's texts, Davison traces the impact that the Russian works had on Camus's intellectual development and highlights his attempts at forging a counter-discourse. . . Readers will welcome the clarity of analysis and exposition of complex ideas in the 'world of ideas and politics' and the flexible chronology which shows Camus engaging with Dostoevsky at different stages as novelist/philosopher of the absurd, as Christian humanist and, finally, as prophet of twentieth-century political nihilism and totalitarianism. Even more welcome, perhaps, is his ability to uncover something of the complex dynamism, the excitement and the frustration in that relation. . . Camus himself claimed that one cannot understand twentieth-century French literature without reference to Dostoevsky, and in tracing the way Camus wrestled with him intellectually, Davison has, perhaps, put in place the final piece of a jigsaw which has exercised critics for fifty years."
Times Literary Supplement, 10 April 1998

This is the first full-length study in English of Camus's life-long fascination with the works of the Russian writer Feodor Dostoevsky. The purpose of the book is to demonstrate the ways in which Dostoevsky's thought and fiction served to stimulate and crystallize Camus's own thinking. Davison lucidly identifies the lines of divergence and counter-arguments which Camus produced as answers to the challenge of Dostoevsky's Christian/Tzarist vision of life.

The traditional methods of comparative literary criticism are jettisoned in favour of the more exciting claim that Camus's literary and philosophical texts can be read as precise and detailed replies to some of Dostoevsky's central beliefs about immortality, religion and politics. The study ranges freely over the entirety of the works of both major writers.

• First full-length study in English of one of the great dialogues of European literature and thought
• Ranges freely over the works of both writers, including Camus's celebrated posthumous novel Le Premier Homme
• Will appeal to both the specialist and the informed general reader

Market: Scholars and students of French studies, literary theory and European interdisciplinary studies. Academic libraries. The general reader with an interest in European philosophy and literature.

Author: Ray Davison is Lecturer in French, University of Exeter. His published work includes an edition of Albert Camus's L'Etranger and Simone de Beauvoir's Une Mort très douce.

Countering the Culture
The Novels of Christiane Rochefort

Hutton’s book is a good starting point for the reader new to Rochefort’s fiction, and it should go some way towards promoting further study of this important author and confirming her rightful place in French literary history.
French Studies 54, vol no 2, 2000

The Novels of Christiane Rochefort looks at each novel in turn and applies close attention to the narrative sophistication and political subversion of the books. Certain contemporary themes run through her work: the status of children, language as instrument of oppression and subversion, homosexuality, incest, child abuse. Each chapter of this book provides in-depth cultural and socio-political background material, and delivers a study that will be of great interest and value to students across a wide range of literary and cultural disciplines.

• First full-length ground-breaking study

• Mass-market following - over 4 million of her books sold in French alone

• One of the novels is a set text in schools and universities

Author: Margaret-Anne Hutton is Lecturer in French at the University of Nottingham.

CONTENTS

Elles

"This exciting new collection, the first of its kind to introduce a powerful selection of contemporary French poetry by women to an anglophone audience, is much more than an anthology. Martin Sorrell presents the question of gender and universality in poetry in a dialogue of féminine/féministe voices, both well-known poets such as Chedid, Hyvrard and Yourcenar and their company of lesser-known sisters. His sensitive introduction and translations, which above all seek to respect and do justice to the tongue of each woman poet, take full account of the question, 'Could and should a man translate and publish a selection he had made of women's poems?'(page 6, his emphasis). Sorrell's response is the very unencapsulating mode of both his selection, the way in which he sets his translation alongside the original poem in the context of her viewpoint on herself and poet and on poetry, and the listening quality of his translation Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron's afterword pinpoints the diversity of these poets, but their common voice, the touch of women's tongues, is sure and tender. But so, too, as this book clearly demonstrates, may be the voice of the translator à la Sorrell(e). This book, then, sets new and high standard for poetry anthologies and translations of poetry."
Forum for Modern Language Studies, 1997

"(The) strategy of identifying a strong semantic line and building the translation round it is inevitably selective but here it produces English texts that work as poems in their own right. It is the bilingual reader, however, who has most to gain: moving back and forth between versions, one begins to understand the choices (semantic, tonal, rhythmic) made by the translator, which in turn illuminate and enrich one's reading of the original. At its best, as here, this type of translation is as analytical as any literary commentary."
Modern Language Review

ELLES is the first bilingual anthology of its kind. It introduces English-speaking readers to some of the best French poetry written by women over the last twenty years. Martin Sorrell has chosen a selection of work from seventeen distinctive and diverse poets, and provided lively facing-page verse translations, poems in their own right, alongside the originals.

Martin Sorrell's Introduction situates the poets in their context and discusses the issues which confronted him as compiler and translator, not least as a man responding to creative work written by women. Each poet introduces herself with an essay on her conception of poetry and her own position as a writer. These biographical pieces are published in French and in an English translation. There is also a selected bibliography for each poet.

The Afterword, by Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron is also published in French and in an English translation.

The poets represented in ELLES are Marie-Claire Bancquart, Christiane Baroche, Geneviève Bon, Claude de Burine, Andrée Chedid, Louise Herlin, Jeanne Hyvrard, Leslie Kaplan, Josée Lapeyrère, Jo-Ann Léon, Anne Portugal, Gisèle Prassinos, Jacqueline Risset, Amina Saïd, Sylvia Baron Supervielle, Marguerite Yourcenar, Céline Zins.

Readership: Academics and students from advanced school level through to post-graduate in areas of women's studies, literature, poetry and translation studies, French literature, French language. The general reader interested in poetry and women's studies.

MARTIN SORRELL is Senior Lecturer in French, University of Exeter. JACQUELINE CHENIEUX-GENDRON is Director of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, and a leading specialist in modern French literature.

The Exeter English-Russian Dictionary of Cultural Terms

"This is a genuine curiosity and a labour of love."
Rusistika 2000

The Exeter English-Russian Dictionary of Cultural Terms is a unique and up-to-date work of reference whose aim is to provide English speakers who possess at least some knowledge of Russian with the Russian equivalents of foreign and cultural terms in widespread use. The book provides the Russian for some 7,000 foreign and cultural words, terms and phrases which form part of English vocabulary and to which English speakers of Russian might need to refer. Potential users include students, academics and translators as well as anyone who would like to hold their own in cultured conversation.

The references are wide-ranging and embrace the social and natural sciences as well as the humanities. Examples of words and phrases: The Arabian Nights, Labours of Hercules, Sturm und Drang, Rockefeller Centre, The Nuremberg Trials, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Oedipus Rex, The Black Forest, Hamlet, The Seven Wonders of the World, Titian, Joan of Arc, Nibelungenlied.

• Nothing similar in such a form

• Covers some 7000 words, terms and phrases

• Wide-ranging subject matter

Author: Roger Cockrell is a Senior Lecturer in Russian at the University of Exeter. He has published widely on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian literature.

François Mauriac:Psycholectures/Psychoreadings

François Mauriac is one of France's most read and consistently studied modern writers. For more than a decade Mauriac's work has been increasingly subjected to analyses drawing their inspiration in one way or another from psychology. Most of the essays in this collection are written from a psychobiographical or psychocritical viewpoint, drawing on the work of Freud, Marthe Robert, Klein, Lacan and Mauron. In some cases they investigate recurrent themes, motifs or preoccupations in Mauriac's work as a whole, in others they focus their attention on individual texts. Brought together they indicate the richness of this kind of approach as well as of the material at which it is directed.

The essays are presented in the language of original composition (English or French) with a complete set of summaries in the alternate language in an appendix.

Readership: Undergraduate and postgraduate students of French literature; teachers, researchers.

JOHN FLOWER is Professor of French University of Kent at Canterbury. He has published extensively on twentieth century French literature and is an acknowledged authority on François Mauriac. He is one of the four Vice-Presidents of the Société internationale des études mauriaciennes and on the editorial board of the Nouveaux Cahiers François Mauriac (Grasset).

CONTENTS

1. La Mére, personnage clé dans les romans de Mauriac (J. E. Flower)
2. La Paternité dans Le Noeud de vipéres et La Pharisienne de Mauriac (J. E. Flower)
3. Sens et signification du théme du Double dans les premiers romans de François Mauriac (Olivier Maison)
4. Sisters and Brother-sister Relationships in the Novels of François Mauriac (J. E. Flower)
5. Une Lecture du Sang d'Atys (Marc Quaghebeur)
6. Oedipal and Pre-Oedipal Elements in Thérèse Desqueyroux (William Kidd)
7. Thérèse Desqueyroux (Marc Quaghebeur)
8. Towards a Psychobiographical Study of Mauriac: the Case of Genitrix (J. E. Flower)
9. Mauriac's Revolutionary Phantasm: the textual unconscious in Genitrix (William Kidd)
10. Ce qui était perdu et la 'passion étrangère' (J. E. Flower)
11. Un Adolescent d'autrefois ou le roman d'Atys (Olivier Maison et J. E. Flower)
12. Drôles d'oiseaux (Le Mal de François Mauriac) (M-J. Bataille)
13. Censure et autocensure dans L'Agneau et dans Le Sagouin de Mauriac (Michel Malicet)
14. Lunettes freudiennes (Paul Croc)
15. Mauriac, Freud: l'absence d'une conjonction de coordination (M-C. Praicheux)
16. Le Noeud gordien: Mauriac et la psychanalyse (M-J. Bataille)
Résumés/Abstracts

A Further Range
Studies in Modern Spanish Literature from Galdós to Unamuno

Maurice Hemingway was associated with Hispanic scholarship of the highest quality and this book exemplifies the appreciation of Hemingway's work by his colleagues and academic friends in the UK, Spain, France, USA and Canada. Hispanists involved with modern Spanish literature will find the book crucial to their investigations.

• Original contributions from an outstanding range of international scholars
• Includes extensive discussion of the writer Emilia Pardo Bazán
• Celebrates the work of the distinguished scholar Maurice Hemingway

"A banquet for the mind awaits readers of this slim but handsome volume of fourteen essays."
Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Vol. LXXVIII, No. 3, 2001

"This well-presented, clearly annotated and indexed volume contains fourteen articles on late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century prose including contributions on Galdós, Padre Coloma, Unamuno, Insúa and Pardo Bazán . . .  What is impressive about this diverse collection is the way in which it does succeed in holding together . . .  The collection bears testimony to the interdependence at the heart of academic practice and the intertextuality integral to it . . .  [and] is a valuable contribution to the study of modern Spanish literature."
Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Vol. LXXVIII, No. 2, April 2001

Editor: Anthony H. Clarke is Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Hispanic Studies, University of Birmingham.

CONTENTS AND CONTRIBUTORS 

Foreword, Anthony H. Clarke
Introduction, Richard Hitchcock (University of Exeter)
The Turn of the Novel in Spain: From Realism to Modernism in Spanish Fiction, Alex Longhurst (University of Exeter)
Looking for Scapegoats: Pardo Bazán and the War of 1898, David Henn (University College London)
Ciclo Adán y Eva: La autobiografia de don Benicio Neira en versión de Emilia Pardo Bazán, Rodolfo Cardona (Boston University)
Emilia Pardo Bazán: los preludios de una Insolación (entre junio de 1887 y marzo de 1889), José Manuel González Herrán (Universidad de Santiago de Compostela)
Genre and Uncertainty in La dama joven, Julia Biggane (University of Aberdeen)
Galicia in English Books on Spain in the lifetime of Emilia Pardo Bazán, Richard Hitchcock (University of Exeter)
P.A. and P.B. (Peñas arriba and Pardo Bazán), Anthony H. Clarke
Unas cartas de Emilia Pardo Bazán a Benito Pérez Galdós, Nelly Clémessy (Université de Nice)
Religion in Galdós's Miau, Eric Southworth (University of Oxford)
Los personajes sécundarios de Nazarin, Peter Bly (Queen's University, Kingston, Canada)
The 'history' of José María Fajardo in the fourth series of Galdós's Episodios Nacionales, Eamonn J. Rodgers (University of Strathclyde)
La recepción de Pequeñeces del Padre Luis Coloma, Jean-François Botrel (Université de Haute Bretagne, Rennes)
Sentimental Battles: an Introduction to the Works of Alberto Insúa, Frank McQuade (formerly University of Leeds)
Boundaries and Black Holes: the Physics of Personality and Representation in Unamuno, Alison Sinclair (University of Cambridge)

Hardora Arnardottir: Writer on architecture and design, AJK magazine, Rejkyavik

Enrica Capussotti: Researcher, European University Institute, Florence; Marie Curie Fellow, Institute of Romance Studies, University of London

Pippo Ciorra: Professor, School of Architecture of Ascoli Piceno, University of Camerino

Nicholas Dines: Research Fellow, Italian Studies, University College London

Mary Lou Lobsinger: Assistant Professor, Faculty of Architecture, University of Toronto

Abele Longo: Senior Lecturer in Italian, Middlesex University

Laura Maritano: Social Anthropology, University of Sussex

Claudia Nocentini: Senior Lecturer, Italian Studies, University of Edinburgh

Sergio Pace: Associate Professor, Department of Architecture and Planning, Polytechnic of Turin

Gianfranco Petrillo: Social historian, Feltrinelli Foundation, Milan

Giuliana Pieri: Lecturer, Italian Studies, Royal Holloway, London

  Sandra Ponzanesi: Assistant Professor, University of Utrecht and Research Fellow of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research

Medieval and Renaissance Spanish Literature

A collection of articles and the influential inaugural lecture by the late Professor of Spanish at Exeter, edited as a tribute by colleagues in America, Europe and his own Department in Exeter. The subjects range from sentimental romance, narrative religious verse and cancionero love lyric to the problem of the bestseller in Golden Age literature. Some of the articles are difficult to obtain or were badly translated when previously published. Professor Deyermond provides a detailed review of Keith Whinnom's contribution to Spanish literary scholarship and a revised bibliography.

Meetings with Mallarmé

"Michael Temple is to be congratulated on an interesting project."
Journal of European Studies, March 1999

From Paul Valéry to Julia Kristeva, the work of Stéphane Mallarmé has had a lasting impact on twentieth-century French culture. His texts have served as emblem and inspiration for successive generations of cultural theorists and practitioners.

In Meetings with Mallarmé, top scholars from the UK and USA have been specially commissioned to explore the significance of Mallarmé's influence on some of the major players in French psychoanalysis, music, poetry, philosophy and literary theory. By re-staging these textual encounters, the book demonstrates how the ghostly presence of Stéphane Mallarmé profoundly informed the projects of such key figures as Valéry, Lacan, Sartre, Derrida, Boulez, de Man, Bonnefoy, Kristeva, Blanchot and the Oulipo group. All quotations are translated.

• Reassessment in context of centenary of Mallarmé's death
• Includes discussion of Lacan, Derrida, Sartre, Boulez, de Man, Bonnefoy, Valéry, Kristeva, Blanchot and the Oulipo group
• Strong list of contributors, including Bowie, Bennington, Holland, ffrench

Market: General reader interested in 20th-century French studies, intellectual history, cultural studies, philosophy, psychoanalysis, critical theory, music, poetry and poetics. Scholars and students of French Studies, especially in the areas of 20th-century literature, thought and music. Academic libraries.

Editors: Michael Temple is a lecturer in French at Birkbeck College, London. His previous book, The Name of the Poet: Onomastics and Anonymity in the Works of Stéphane Mallarmé, was published by University of Exeter Press in 1995.

CONTENTS

Introduction, Michael Temple
Paul Valéry, Rachel Killick, Senior Lecturer in French, University of Leeds
Jean-Paul Sartre, Charles D. Minahen, Professor of French, Department of French and Italian, Ohio State University
Maurice Blanchot, Mike Holland, Lecturer in French, University of Oxford
Jacques Lacan, Malcolm Bowie, Professor of French, University of Oxford
Paul de Man, Rei Terada, Lecturer in the Department of English Language and Literature, University of Michigan
Yves Bonnefoy, Clive Scott, Professor of French, University of East Anglia
Pierre Boulez, Kate Van Orden, Research Fellow, Columbia University
Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Bennington, Professor of French, University of Sussex
Julia Kristeva, Patrick French, Lecturer in the Department of French, University College London
Oulipo, Burhan Tufail, Researcher, King's College, London.

The Name of the Poet

"Much of the pleasure in this book lies in Temple's convivial imitation of Mallarmé's theoretical teasing . . ."
Modern Language Review

An examination of the use of names and the art of naming in the works of Stéphane Mallarmé. Maintaining an independent critical, and self-critical, approach, the author elaborates a 'theory of the name' from within the Mallarmean text, rather than through the application of an external theory. The work provides the reader with new ways of thinking about Mallarmé's 'development' and about poetry's attempt to break out of an embattled position in the last decades of the nineteenth century.

Readership: Scholars and postgraduate students of French Literature and of Poetics, of notions of authorship and of language and linguistics.

Author: MICHAEL TEMPLE is a lecturer in French at Birkbeck College, London.

A New Life of Dante

"The author provides considerably more historical and biographical material than what we find in other introductory volumes . . . and he uses this material (taken from contemporary documents, early chronicles, and modern historical studies) to discuss the major events in Dante’s life. Especially welcome—for scholars and teachers as well as for students—are the frequent digressions glossing such pertinent topics as Provençal and early Italian lyric poetry, medieval philosophy, the rise of the Franciscans and Dominican orders, thirteenth-century Italian politics, and the papacy of Boniface VIII . . . Bemrose does a fine job using Dante’s letters (Latin epistles) and contemporary events to illuminate one another, and he adeptly draws out the historical and biographical significance of Dante’s most underexamined works . . . this book fulfils an important need for students and their teachers by placing in historical context Dante’s works and what we know or can surmise of his life."
Speculum, Apr 2002

"A lively, accessible and readable . . . account of Dante’s life and works, well suited to a non-specialist reader or a student just embarking on Dante Studies."
Reading Medieval Studies, Vol. 27, 2001

The aim is to make an account of Dante's life accessible to students and to the curious and intelligent but non-specialist reader. All quotations are fully translated.

• Excellent introductory student text
• Aimed at the general non-specialist reader
• All quotations fully translated

Comparable Books: The only biography available in English is a 1954 American translation of Michele Barbi's Vita (1933). The most authoritative modern biography is only available in Italian, Vita di Dante, Giorgio Petrocchi (Laterza, 1983).

Author: Stephen Bemrose is Lecturer in Italian at the University of Exeter.

"The writings are summarized in a clear and readable way and are accompanied by often lively elucidatory comments. This is especially true of the works which express Dante’s thought: the summary of the De vulgari eloquentia is particularly lucid and readable . . . [the reader] will be able to turn to Dante’s works with an enhanced understanding of the period in which they were written and of the poet who wrote them."
Italian Studies, Vol. LVI, 2001

Poetics of the Pretext
Reading Lautréamont

"Roland-François Lack...proves himself to be not only a fine sleuth, learned and thorough, but also a clever exegete and theorist."
New Zealand Journal of French Studies Volume 20, Number 1 1999

Poetics of the Pretext is an original study of the French poet Lautréamont (1846-1870), who was rediscovered by the Surrealists in the 1920s and promoted to the vanguard of theoretical debate by the 'Telquelists' of the 1960s, but whose work has remained largely ignored or misinterpreted beyond a small circle of enthusiasts.

Poetics of the Pretext analyses closely the texts, pretexts and intertexts of this innovative poet, bringing Les Chants de Maldoror and Poésies to the foreground of contemporary critical debates around poetics, genre, intertextuality and influence. This book will make a major contribution to our understanding not only of the work of Lautréamont but also to the function of originality, imitation and plagiarism in the nineteenth century.

• Includes detailed discussion of Lautréamont's plagiarisms, several of which are exposed and analysed here for the first time
• Innovative combination of literary history and intertextual theory
• A major contribution to contemporary literary theory

Market: Scholars and students of Lautréamont; French literary history and poetics; contemporary literary theory. Academic libraries.

Author: Roland-François Lack is Lecturer in French at University College London.

Short French Fiction
Essays on the Short Story in France in the Twentieth Century

Each chapter has been written by specialists in their particular field; their interpretations are backed by the experience of teaching and writing about these authors. They invite the reader to go beyond the immediate context or circumstances of what is related in the story under scrutiny and illustrate some of the many ways in which short stories may be narrated. In some cases stories are revisited and subjected to new interpretations; in others those perhaps less well known are revealed as being no less rewarding. The book offers stimulating reading for those already familiar with some of the works under discussion as well as for those coming to them afresh.

• Original contributions by acknowledged experts in their own field

• Discusses Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir, Duras, Tournier, Yourcenar

• Offers a useful introduction to French short fiction

Editor: J.E. Flower is Professor of French at the University of Kent. He has published widely in the fields of modern French culture and literature and is General Editor of the Journal of European Studies.

CONTENTS AND CONTRIBUTORS

Sick Heroes
French Society and Literature in the Romantic Age 1750-1850

Sick Heroes examines the cultural practices that created those remarkably offensive, though strangely appealing, romantic heroes that appeared in European and especially in French literature in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Romanticism has long been considered a literary movement, but Pasco broadens its scope and suggests that it was a cultural reality born of widespread social factors and sustained by a mass market for novels, poems and plays that popularized attitudes and behaviour.

"This attractively-written and thoroughly researched and documented study redefines Romanticism as primarily a cultural phenomenon and paints a sweeping portrait of the French people's collective mentality during the period extending from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, a time-frame which encompasses the most profound social, political, and aesthetic changes.This is a remarkably rich, infromative, and in many ways innovative examination of a crucial period in French literary and cultural history."
French Review March 1999

"Pasco does not preach, does not try to make literary works into the heroes or accessory villains of a political struggle in which he feels invested. Instead, they are symptoms of a sociopathology that one could readily corroborate with examples of abused and neglected children in the fictions of Hugo or Dickens. Pasco offers an impressive, harmonious blend of "hard scholarship" (investigation of original sources) and imaginative synthesis. One can anticipate that this study, like his important overview that opens Allusion (Toronto UP, 1994), will become widely influential."
Nineteenth Century French Studies Vol. 27, No 1 and 2

"Meticulously documented, written in a clear and witty manner, Sick Heroes is ambitious in the scope of literature it examines and audacious in its application of modern studies in the behavioural sciences to fiction. It is a valuable addition to the criticism of the Romantic novel because of the fresh insights it brings to well-known works and for the wealth of information it provides on lesser-known literature. Its most significant contribution to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French studies, however, is the coherent and convincing psychological portrait it paints of an age so obviously afflicated with many of the problems of the twentieth century. Pasco succeeds admirably in accounting for the appeal of his unusual heroes and heroines, characters who expressed a popular mentality to a much greater degree than historians and literary scholars have previously recognized."
Philosophy and Literature, April 1998

"A penetrating rethinking of the heroes and heroines of French romantic literature which carefully situates their plight within the broader contexts of social and cultural change in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries."
Richard D.E. Burton, Professor of French and Francophone Studies, University of Sussex

• New insights into the romantic spirit and Romanticism
• Makes use of new research materials and new methodology
• Will appeal to the general reader with an interest in literature, history and French culture

Market: Scholars and students of Romanticism and pre- and post-Revolutionary literature and society. Students of cultural and gender studies. Academic libraries. The general reader interested in Romanticism.

Author: Allan H. Pasco is Hall Distinguished Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature, University of Kansas. He is the author of a number of books, including Allusion: A Literary Graft (Toronto, 1994) and has contributed many articles to the major journals.

Stendhal's Italy
Themes of political and religious satire

". . . The work as a whole becomes a kind of Resistance text containing - to pursue the author's comparison - a contrebande message for its contemporary reader, an exhortation to consider the impact of political and spiritual repression not just in Italy but in Europe generally. The links with earlier works, through which Stendhal's view of Italy has already been traced with considerable firmness and cogency, are constantly kept in play and the satirical content of La Chartreuse is thereby restated and reinforced." Journal of European Studies

Readership: Scholars, undergraduate and postgraduate students of French literature. Also of interest to literary historians and the general reader.

A.E. GREAVES is a lecturer in the School of Education, University of Exeter.

Symbolism, Decadence and the fin de siècle: French and European Perspectives

"The joy of the book is its delightful range of subjects and their inevitable interrelations . . . This is a very important book, and one that should certainly not be left to French Studies alone. It goes a long way towards making sense of a period of literary production that has suffered either from relentless simplification or from meaningless vaguening. The caricature of French Symbolism and Decadence, a product of the English ‘Nineties, the Wilde- and Moore-filtered naughtiness and aestheticism, corresponds little to the riven, multifarious and highly differentiated cultural field McGuinness’s book reveals to us. His finely written introduction provides ample background and context and offers some illuminating judgements, and the book itself is handsome and beautifully produced. In short, its substance and its methodologies are various and interdisciplinary, and its scope is consequently of vital importance to anyone interested in cultural modernity."
PN Review, Vol. 142, 2001

"This impressive collection of fifteen essays offers a richly suggestive exploration of the multiple manifestations of Symbolism and Decadence and sheds new light on exchanges between the French avant-garde and their European neighbours. The studies are not limited to the purely literary, but take in a wide range of cultural manifestations which includes the dance, theatre, painting, music and film . . . The volume succeeds in providing a thoughtful, wide-ranging overview of this complex period and will appeal especially to all who are interested in aesthetic cross-currents. Not the least attractive feature is its choice of telling illustrations."
Modern Language Review, Vol. 97:2, 2002

"Subtitled 'French and European Perspectives', this volume is written essentially by British scholars. Nine of the fifteen focus on France, while the other six explore the various ripples which spread from Paris to Brussels, Vienna, Berlin, Madrid, Rome and beyond. To widen the perspectives in this way is no mere nod towards today’s increasingly integrated Europe, but a strong recognition that literary movements have often moved without passports and beyond language frontiers . . . This is an ambitious and impressive collection, with substantial endnotes and a five-page index."
New Zealand Journal of French Studies, Vol. 23, No. 1

"A valuable reference work on a number of aspects of the period—a collection of useful essays"
Modern and Contemporary France, Vol. 10, No. 2, 2002

Part Two explores the relations between France and several cultures in which the debt to France was amply and originally repaid-ranging from the Anglo-Celtic "Rhymers' Club" to the Italian "Crepusculari". The essays consistently point beyond the late nineteenth-century and into the twentieth, as they explore the multiple beginnings-as well as the false starts-that characterize the period. All foreign language quotations are translated.

• Distinguished list of contributors
• Interdisciplinary and cross-cultural: dance, cinema, theatre, poetry, prose, painting, social and political science, history, medicine
• Useful for researchers and accessible to students

Author: Patrick McGuinness is Fellow and Tutor in French, St. Anne's College, Oxford and Lecturer in French, University of Oxford. His books include T.E. Hulme: Selected Writings (Carcanet, 1998), Petit Glossaire des auteurs décadents et symbolistes (Exeter, 1998), Maurice Maeterlinck and the Making of Modern Theatre (Oxford, 2000).

CONTENTS AND CONTRIBUTORS

Introduction
Patrick McGuinness

PART ONE

1 - Mallarmé and the 'siècle finissant'
Peter Dayan, Reader in French, University of Edinburgh
2 - Disinterested Narcissus: The Play of Politics in Decadent Form
Jennifer Birkett, Professor of French, University of Birmingham
3 - Experiment in Women's Writing in the fin de siècle
Alison Finch, Reader in French, University of Oxford
4 - The Poetry of Symbolism and Decadence
Clive Scott, Professor of French, University of East Anglia
5 - The Kinaesthetics of Chance: Mallarmé's Un Coup de dés and avant-garde Choreography
Dee Reynolds, Professor of French, University of Manchester
6 - Villiers, Verne, Lumière: The Business of Immortality
Ian Christie, Professor of Film Studies, Birkbeck College, London
7 - Text and Image, Allegory and Symbol in Gustave Moreau's 'Jupiter et Sémélé'
Peter Cooke, Lecturer in French, University of Manchester
8 - Between Medicine and Hermeticism: 'the' Unconscious in the fin de siècle
Jeremy Stubbs, Lecturer in French, University of Manchester

PART TWO

9 - Primitivism, Celticism and Morbidity in the Atlantic fin de siècle
Scott Ashley, Former Lecturer in History, University of Birmingham
10 - Belgian Symbolism and the Question of Belgian Identity
Patrick Laude, Professor of French, Georgetown University, Washington, DC
11 - Temporary Aesthetes: Decadence and Symbolism in Germany and Austria
Robert Vilain, Lecturer in German, Royal Holloway, University of London
12 - The War of the Wor(l)ds: Symbolist Decadent Literature and Discourses of Power in Finisecular Spain
Richard Cardwell, Professor of Hispanic Studies, University of Nottingham
13 - French Symbolism and Italian Poetry, 1880-1920
Shirley Vinall, Senior Lecturer in Italian, University of Reading
14 - From Mallarmé to Pound: the 'Franco-Anglo-American' Axis
Patrick McGuinness

Theatres of War
French Committed Theatre from the Second World War to the Cold War

"Weaving together theatrical, social and political history in a readable and informative way, Theatres of War is a useful guide to a neglected area of postwar French theatre history."
Speech and Drama Volume 48, Number 2 Autumn 1999

"Not only is this study a timely re-appraisal of French committed theatre at a crucial point in France's history (1942-54) from various political stances, it opens up the question of the didactic or realist nature of littérature engagée more widely. . . a thought-provoking and searching challenge to new and old devotees of French committed theatre and twentieth-century theatre more widely."
Forum for Modern Language Studies Volume 35, Number 4 1999

"Freeman's introduction succinctly places these dramas into their political and theatrical contexts and his concluding chapter offers a neat survey of the common characteristics shared by the plays of this genre, but it is primarily as a source book that his study will serve a purpose. The bulk of the study is documentation, rather than analysis, and as such it will be a useful addition to relevant reading lists. Its appearance will be of interest to scholars and students not only of Modern French Theatre, but of political theatre in general, and of the popular manifestation of political concerns, not to mention to those with specific interests in the dramatic worlds of Sartre and Camus . . . Each play is contextualised in terms of the particular event it was documenting or written in response to, or the political climate it sought to exploit, and each has a chapter dedicated to it that might easily be read in isolation from the rest of the book."
Studies in Theatre Production Issue 18, December 1998

Theatres of War is the first full-length study to be devoted to the 'Committed' theatre that flourished in modern France from 1944 to the mid-1950s. During this crucial decade, authors such as Sartre, de Beauvoir and Camus, along with other lesser-known dramatists, responded to the issues of their time by contributing a number of tense controversial plays to a distinctive genre of realist theatre. These plays dealt with the ideological, political and moral issues arising from the Second World War, the Cold War and a series of disastrous colonial wars.

Theatres of War combines historical contextualisation, pointing up the political and moral debate of the theatre of the period, with detailed analysis of specific plays, making it a useful student text. All quotations are in French with English translations immediately following.

• First comprehensive study of the subject
• Includes the best-known dramatists in the genre, plus several completely unknown to theatre specialists in the English-speaking world
• Fresh perspectives on recent history

Market: Students of Drama, French Studies, courses on WWII and the Cold War. Academic libraries. Specialists in modern theatre. Drama critics. The general reader with an interest in modern theatre and recent European history.

Author: Ted Freeman is Senior Lecturer in French, University of Bristol. He is editor of the French Texts series for Bristol Classical Press.

CONTENTS

The following plays are given detailed treatment in Theatres of War:
Toulon (Jean-Richard Bloch)
Les Nuits de la colère (Salacrou)
Morts sans sépulture, Les Mains sales (Sartre)
Les Bouches inutiles (Simone de Beauvoir)
Montserrat (Emmanuel Roblès)
Les Justes (Camus)
Rome n'est plus dans Rome (Gabriel Marcel)
La Maison de la nuit (Thierry Maulnier)
Le colonel Foster plaidera coupable (Roger Vailland)
La Peur (Georges Soria)

The book also refers to many other plays of the period.

Translating Baudelaire

Translating Baudelaire considers two neglected questions: What form should the criticism of translation take, if the critic is to do justice to the translator's 'project'? How can a translator persuade readers to respond to a translation as a text with its own creative dynamic and expressive ambitions?

• Includes a magnificent English version of the long poem "Le Voyage"
• No other translations of Baudelaire develop this style of contextualisation
• Essential reading on translation studies courses
• Author is a leading authority on French poetics

Author: Clive Scott is Professor of European Literature, University of East Anglia and Fellow of the British Academy. His most recent books include The Poetics of French Verse: Studies in Reading (Clarendon Press, 1998) and The Spoken Image: Photography and Language (Reaktion Books, 1999).

CONTENTS

Introduction
Chapter One: A Defence of Foreignizing Translation
Chapter Two: Translating Rhythm
Chapter Three: The Dead Language of Translation
Chapter Four: Translating and Co-authoring
Chapter Five: Translation and Transformation
Chapter Six: 'Shot' and 'Reverse Shot' Translation
Chapter Seven: The Route through Prose
Chapter Eight: The Criticisms of Translation
Chapter Nine: Translation and Intercutting
Conclusion
Appendix I: 'Translations' of translations of 'La Cloche fêlée'
Appendix II: Texts of Verlaine's 'Nevermore', Elliot's 'Nevermore' and Baudelaire's 'Le Balcon'
Appendix III: Text of Baudelaire's 'Assommons les pauvres!'
Appendix IV: Text of Baudelaire's 'Le Voyage'
Bibliography
Index

Exeter French Texts
Textes Littéraires

Editor: Roger Little was Professor of French (1776) at Trinity College Dublin until his retirement in 1998. His academic work has been mainly in modern French poetry and the representation of Blacks in Francographic literature. He has edited several volumes of Textes littéraires, including Ourika (expanded edition, 1998), Contes américains (1997) and Empsaël et Zoraïde (1995). His forthcoming books include Between Totem and Taboo: Black Man, White Woman in Francographic Literature (University of Exeter Press, 2001).

"Les Mains jointes" et autres poemes (1905-1923)

First published in 1909, Les Mains jointes was the collection of poetry that launched the long career of Nobel Prize-winning author François Mauriac (1885–1970). This edition will make available a significant text that has been out of print for several decades.

The book, edited by an acknowledged Mauriac specialist, will include an Introduction covering the composition and critical reception of the poems; an assessment of Mauriac’s later dismissal of his early verse; and an examination of Mauriac’s evolution as a poet.  This will be followed by the text of the poems, including variants and critical notes.  Paul Cooke makes use for the first time of Mauriac’s cahiers de jeunesse.

This is a volume in the series Exeter Textes littéraires, published under the general editorship of David Cowling of University of Exeter.  Exeter Textes littéraires is dedicated to making available editions of little known or neglected French literary texts.  Editions are normally in French to ensure the widest readership, and are underpinned by the highest editorial standards. 

• The first published book by a world-famous author is being republished after being out of print for many years

• The first critical edition of any of Mauriac’s verse

• Additional poems being made available for the first time ever in book form

• Some poems previously unknown  to scholars, including Mauriac's very first published work

Market:  Mauriac specialists and those who work more broadly on 20^th-century French poetry.  Academic libraries in the UK, Europe and North America. 

Editor:  Paul Cooke is Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Exeter,  where he teaches and researches mainly in the area of nineteenth- and twentieth-century French literature.  He is the author/editor of Mauriac: The Poetry of a Novelist (forthcoming); Mauriac et le mythe du poète: une lecture du ‘Mystère Frontenac’ (1999); (Un)Faithful Texts? Religion in French and Francophone Literature from the 1780s to the 1980s (with Jane Lee, 2000).

Author:  François Mauriac (1885-1970) is best known for his novels, many of which have been translated into English: Thérèse Desqueyroux, Le Nœud de vipères, Le Mystère Frontenac among them.  His novels are still widely read by students and others; his poetry is less well known outside France, although it is now the subject of a revival of interest

"The work will certainly interest dix-septiémistes, not least for its sophisticated views on the relationship between art and nature and on the representation of perspective."  
Modern Language Review, 97.2, 2002

Editor: Robert Aulotte is Emeritus Professor of French Literature at the University of Paris-Sorbonne.