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The most recently acknowledged - and the most private - of the masters of modernity, Paul Valery is perhaps the most radical and wide-ranging. This 1999 volume of essays by internationally recognised scholars offered the first comprehensive account of Valery's work in English or French.

This is a new account of the prose fiction of Samuel Beckett from Murphy (1938) to Worstward Ho (1983). Drawing on contemporary literary theory, the book rejects the idea that Beckett is an author committed to expressing a particular view of the world.

In this major study Rhiannon Goldthorpe takes up the challenge of Sartre's diversity in an original and provocative way. In addition, by reference to recently published fragments from Sartre's earlier work, Goldthorpe calls into question existing views of Sartre's intellectual development and provides a new history of the crucial Sartrean concept of 'commitment'.

This book is a major study of the development of French poetry in the Renaissance, which examines changes in style and vision by looking both at how poetry was read in this period and how it was written.

This book poses the question: what happens when reading enters the realist process?

This highly original study is concerned with the theory of knowledge. It approaches the subject in a new way by exploring the recurrent paradox which equates pure ignorance with perfect knowledge, twin ideals free from the impurities and imperfections of discourse.

This major new study takes issue both with the traditional critical view that Flaubert's central characters are weak and with the approach adopted by a number of contemporary critics who claim that character is deliberately undermined in the interests of non-representational writing.

This study, first published in 1986, examines the many facets of Mallarmes relationship to the visual arts.

This book analyses the use of the crucial concept of 'taste' in the works of five major seventeenth-century French authors, Mere, Saint Evremond, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyere and Boileau. It combines close readings of important texts with a thoroughgoing political analysis of seventeenth-century French society in terms of class and gender.

This 1986 study of Manon Lescaut draws on various debates in psychoanalysis, feminism and literary criticism. It aims to analyse the narrator's presentation of this story of a young man's passion for a femme fatale and to suggest ways in which feminist criticism can help explain how the text operates.

This is the first book-length study of Flaubert's use of dialogue, an important but neglected component of his fictional texts. Professor Haig's starting point is Sartre's observation that 'Flaubert does not believe that we speak: we are spoken'.

This is a major study of the Nobel prize-winning French novelist Claude Simon. Simon is a complex figure: for all that he writes in a distinctively modern fictional tradition (exemplified by Proust, Joyce, Beckett and Robbe-Grillet), his novels contain strong elements of visual representation alongside a very different king of free-floating, anti-realist writing.

This book is an intensive study of what was by far the most productive year in Baudelaire's literary career. It combines biographical investigation with detailed textual analysis in order to locate the sources of the extraordinary 'explosion' (Baudelaires' own word) of poetic creativity that he experienced during that year.

Since the appearance of Bakhtin's famous study of Rabelais and popular culture, Rabelais's writings have been a major focus of debate in literary and cultural criticism. Jerome Schwartz draws on both sides of the historical/formalist debate in this new reading of the four authentic books of Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel.

An important new critical analysis of Derrida's theory of writing, based upon close readings of key texts.

David Bellos's introduction sets Spitzer's method of textual and stylistic interpretation in its historical context and sketches out the career of this supremely knowledgeable reader for whom knowledge was less important than understanding.

Drawing on a range of theoretical perspectives developed in and around the work of Barthes, Kristeva, Genette and Derrida, Dr Prendergast explores approaches to the concept of mimesis and relates these to a number of narrative texts produced in the period which literary history familiarly designates as the age of realism.

An important study of the book which invented European Romanticism, Stael's De l'Allemagne.

This book of linked essays contains the first critical study of Baudelaire's development as a poet, from his youth onwards. It also includes studies of the development of Baudelaire's aesthetic, detailed commentaries on a number of his finest poems, and accounts of three intriguing and crucial 'encounters' with notable contemporaries.

This book demonstrates instead the writers' use of irony and allegory in struggling against the deceitfulness of their own texts.

The Seductions of Psychoanalysis explores the most seductive of all recent psychoanalytic traditions, that inspired by Jacques Lacan, whose radical questioning of previously accepted psychoanalytic effects has been continued implicitly by Michel Foucault and explicitly by Jacques Derrida.

This book offers a new analysis of Surrealist collage, both as a technique of cutting and pasting ready made material, and as a subversive and creative strategy. Illustrating many of the collages under discussion, it offers close readings of individual collages and proposes a radical reassessment of Surrealism.

This innovative analysis of the role of imagination as a central concept in both literary and art criticism studies works by Rimbaud, Mallarme, Kandinsky, and Mondrian.

This study challenges the view that all courtly literature promoted the social status of women. Unlike previous books which focused on knights, it starts from the perspective of the woman reader/listener. Using reader-response theory, feminist criticism and recent historical studies, it suggests that romances taught gender roles, often inviting readers to criticise and resist them.

The medieval troubadours of the south of France profoundly influenced European literature for many centuries. This book is a full-length study of the first-person position adopted by many of them in its relation to language and society. Using theoretical approaches, Sarah Kay discusses to what extent this first person is a 'self' or 'character', and how far it is self-determining.

The Family in Crisis in Late Nineteenth-Century French Fiction, first published in 1999, focuses on a key moment in the construction of the modern view of the family in France. Nicholas White's analysis of novels by Zola, Maupassant, Hennique, Bourget and Armand Charpentier is fashioned by perspectives on a wide cultural field, including legal, popular and academic discourses on the family and its discontents. His account encourages a close rereading of canonical as well as overlooked texts from fin de siecle France. What emerges between the death of Flaubert in 1880 and the publication of Bourget's Un divorce in 1904 is a series of Naturalist and post-Naturalist representations of transgressive behaviour in which tales of adultery, illegitimacy, consanguinity, incest and divorce serve to exemplify and to offer a range of nuances on the Third Republic's crisis in what might now be termed 'family values'.

Michele Longino examines the ways in which Mediterranean exoticism inflects the themes represented in French classical drama. Longino explores plays by Corneille, Moliere and Racine, and offers a consideration of the role the staging of the near Orient played in shaping a sense of French colonial identity.

The tragedies produced in France in the sixteenth century by writers such as Garnier, La Taille, and Jodelle are increasingly accessible in good modern editions. Their subject matter included Bible stories and recent history, as well as Greek legend and Roman history. Until now, scholars have tended to regard them as a staging post on the road to Corneille and Racine.

Janell Watson shows how the sudden prominence given to curiosities and collecting in nineteenth-century literature signals a massive change in attitudes to the world of goods, which in turn made a great impact on literary texts. Her study makes an important contribution to the literary history of material culture.

Dr Scott argues that only by attending to the precise locations of words in line or stanza, and to the specific value of syllables, or by understanding the often conflicting demands of rhythm and metre, can the reader of poetry acquire a real grasp of the intimate life of words in verse with all their fluctuations of meaning, mood and tone.