A new history of French literature /
Denis Hollier
- First Harvard University Press paperback edition
- United States of America : Harvard University Press, c1994.
- xxv, 1158 pages : illustrations ; 26 cm.
Includes index.
Introduction -- On Writing Literary History -- Entering the Date -- The Birth of Medieval Studies -- Saints' Lives -- The Epic -- Manuscripts -- The Old Provencal Lyric -- The Romances of Antiquity -- Erec et Enide -- Fables and Parodies -- Marie de France -- The Grail -- Old French Prose Historiography -- Arthurian Romance in Prose -- The Fabliaux -- Literature and History -- The Impact of Christian Doctrine -- Genetic Hybrids -- Medieval Rhetoric -- Jean de Meun's Le roman de la rose -- Medieval Vernacular Drama -- Lyricism in the Age of Allegory -- Trials of Eros -- "I the Scholar Francois Villon" -- Farces, Morality Plays, and Soties -- The Rhetoriqueurs -- Writing without Reserve -- Humanist Models -- Life-Saving Stories -- Margaret of Navarre -- Manners and Mannerisms at Court -- Rabelais and Textual Architecture -- Literary Banquets -- Evangelism -- Emblems -- The Sonnet -- Dialogue -- The Birth of French Lexicography -- Translation as Literature -- Calvin the Writer -- The Neoplatonic Debate -- The Architecture of Poetic Sequences -- A New Intellectual Elite -- Inspiration and Poetic Glory -- Renaissance Comedy -- The Origin of French Tragedy -- Antiquities and Antiquaries -- Petrarchism with a Difference -- Books in Print -- Scientific Poetry -- Anti-Dictator -- History and Vernacular Humanism -- Poetry and Action -- From Mannerism to Baroque -- Antarctic France -- The Spectacle of Power -- Montaigne and His Readers -- Devout Humanism -- Pastoral Fiction -- The Age of the Technician -- The Academie Francaise -- Toward French Classical Tragedy -- Problems in Logic and Rhetoric -- The Subject of Modern Discourse -- The Sound of the Fury -- Cultural Life outside Paris -- The Salons and "Preciosity" -- Figures of Social and Semiotic Dissent -- Autocritical Dramaturgy -- From Roi Soleil to Louis le Grand -- Jansenist Tragedy -- Moralists -- The Comic at Its Limits -- On the Sublime, Infinity, Je Ne Sais Quoi -- Historiography in the Age of Absolutism -- The Emergence of the Novel -- The Comedie-Francaise -- Religious Controversies -- The Ancients and The Moderns -- Pedagogy -- Linguistic Absolutism -- Marginal Writing -- Racine and the French New Criticism -- Classics in the Making -- Sunset Years -- Fetes Galantes -- Others -- The Politics of Epistolary Art -- Portrait of the Philosopher as a Tramp -- Intricacies of Literary Production -- The Gender of the Memoir-Novel -- Beauty in Context -- Ordering Knowledge -- Origins -- From Natural Philosophy to Scientific Discourse -- On Cultivating One's Garden -- Clearing the Stage -- Salons -- The Novel and Gender Difference -- What Was Enlightenment? -- Writing the Political -- Reason -- Kisses, en Taille Douce -- Diderot at the Crossroads of Speech -- Utopias -- A War at the Opera -- Words and "the Thing" -- Autobiographical Acts -- Pre-Revolution (a Comedy) -- Designing Women -- Civil Rights and the Wrongs of Women -- Seventeen Eighty-nine -- Language under Revolutionary Pressure -- Pleasure, Perversion, Danger -- Twilight of the Gods -- Unfinished Work -- The Ideologists -- The Melodramatic Imagination -- Gothic Revival -- Discipline and Melancholy -- Restoration Freedom and Repression -- Women's Voices in Literature and Art -- The Lady in the Lake -- Romantic Historiography -- The Invention of the Renaissance -- Drama -- An Oedipal Crisis -- The Scandal of Realism -- Romanticism and Social Vision -- Dialogues with the Muse -- Egypt in Paris -- Fantastic Tales -- Body Bildung and Textual Liberation -- Discourses on Misery -- Publishing Novels -- Orientalism, Colonialism -- Class Struggles in France -- Literature Deterritorialized -- Bonapartism -- French Poe -- Two Trials -- Poete Maudite -- Exile from Within, Exile from WIthout -- The Dream of Stone -- Tics -- Commune Culture -- Exit and Save -- Haure Couture and Haute Culture -- Idealism -- Nature, Society, and the Discourse of Class -- Prostitution in the Novel -- Decadence -- The Music of the Future -- The Liberation of Verse -- The Phantom's Voice -- Commemoration and the Revolution -- Writing and the Dance -- Literature in the Classroom -- The Dreyfus Affair -- On Schools, Churches, and Museums -- From Exorcism to Homosexuality -- Lyrical Ideograms -- Visions of Death and Dissolution -- Bourgeois Sin -- Death and Literary Authority -- From Text to Performance -- Mise en Abyme -- "I Cannot Abide Stupidity" -- Amnesias -- "Odor di Femina" [Sic] -- Sadology -- Plenty of Nothing -- Negrophilia -- Americans in Paris -- "Terrorists Ask No Questions" -- Birthrate and Death Wish -- Staging the Plague -- The Avant-Garde Embraces Science -- Committed Painting -- Surrealism and Negritude in Martinique -- The Honor of Poets -- How Is Literature Possible? -- The Problem of Belief -- Literature and Collaboration -- Rebellion or Revolution? -- Samuel Beckett Emerges as a French Writer -- An Intellectual Woman in Postwar France -- The Nouveau Roman -- On Certain Tendencies of the French Cinema -- The Ministry of Fate -- The Theatre of the Absurd -- As Is -- The School of Independence -- The Place of Poetry, the Poetry of Place -- Francophonie and Independence -- "Actions, No! Words, Yes!" -- French Lib -- "French Feminism" -- Hubert Aquin and Quebec Literature -- Friday Night Books -- How Can One Be French? -- Chronology -- Map of Modern France -- Acknowledgments -- Contributors -- Index.
"""This splendid introduction to French literature from 842 A.D. to the present decade is the most imaginative single-volume guide to the French literary tradition available in English.
Conceived for the general reader, this volume presents French literature not as a simple inventory of authors or titles, but rather as a historical and cultural field viewed from a wide array of contemporary critical perspectives. The book consists of 164 essays by American and European scholars, and covers the history of French literature from 842 to 1989."""