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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.

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'.

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.

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.

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 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.

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