Between Totem and Taboo picks its way 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.
Pastiche, imitation but also a continuation of Voltaire’s most celebrated tale, Candide, seconde partie, picks up many of the original’s themes. Leibniz, Descartes and Newton are gently mocked; Pascal is accused of trying to make us hate humankind.
This is a volume in the series Textes littéraires/Exeter French Texts. If Elizabeth I of England thought to rid herself forever of Robert Devereaux, Earl of Essex, by sending him to the scaffold she was very much mistaken, since his name, intertwined with hers, has traversed four centuries.
Rohou interprets Dynamis as an orthodox tragi-comedy that reflects both the political concerns of the late 1640s and the developments in dramaturgy which had taken place over the previous decade or so. Rohou is most helpful in pointing out, in footnotes and a brief glossary, differences between Du Ryer's language and modern usage.
Rémy Cazals provides a critical edition of this little-known text accompanied by a biography of its author, who became inflamed by the passions of the Revolution, and who was guillotined in 1794.
Poet, novelist, sometime member of Mademoiselle de Montpensier’s circle and correspondent of the Mercure Galant, Cantenac was notorious in his own time but has only recently become a subject of serious study. This book contains seventeen poetic “satyres” together with various other poems.
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.
La Soeur (1645) is one of the liveliest and most successful comedies by Jean Rotrou. The introduction to this new edition assesses the originality of Rotrou’s adaptation. The notes are devoted above all to linguistic questions and to the many exotic allusions found in the text.
The essential thrust of this book is an examination of the origins and development of the satirical element of Stendal's writing in Italy, which culminates with the creation of what many critics consider to be his finest achievement, the novel La Chartreuse de Parme.