Preliminary Material /Buford Norman and James Day -- France's First Revolution: Hamlet and the "Unresolved Man" of 1589 /George Hoffmann -- On Civility: The Model of Sparta in Montaigne's "Defence de Seneque et de Plutarque" /Sue W. Farquhar -- Of Cannibals, Credo, and Custom: Jean de Léry's Calvinist View of Civilization in Histoire d'un voyage faict en la terre du Bresil (1578) /Scott D. Juall -- Bien m'en avés rendu le conte: Redeeming economies in Yvain /Marcella Munson -- La Civilisation du goût: Savoir et saveur à la table de Louis XIV: (ou, Gastéréa et l'histoire de la cuisine française au dix-septième siècle) /Béa Aaronson -- Un idéal de la culture française entre humanisme et classicisme: "civiliser la doctrine" /Emmanuel Bury -- De la société de salon à la société de cour: l'ambivalence du processus de civilisation /Sophie Rollin -- Les traces ineffaçables de la civilisation dans Paul et Virginie /Murielle Perrier -- Work, Machines, and Vapors in Late Eighteenth-Century France /Laura Balladur -- La représentation des populations noires dans l'œuvre de Paul Morand: enjeux idéologiques et politiques /Nicolas Di Méo -- Roman et société dans la France contemporaine /Denise Brahimi -- L'image de la France dans le dialogue de Gaulle-Sirius: Suprématie politique et leadership humaniste /Liliane Ayad Toss -- Civilité: une certaine modalité du vivre-ensemble /Hélène Merlin-Kajman.

What happens when the study of French is no longer coterminous with the study of France? French Civilization and Its Discontents explores the ways in which considerations of difference, especially colonialism, postcolonialism, and race, have shaped French culture and French studies in the modern era. Rejecting traditional assimilationist notions of French national identity, contributors to this groundbreaking volume demonstrate how literature, history, and other aspects of what is considered French civilization have been shaped by global processes of creolization and differentiation. This book ably demonstrates the necessity of studying France and the Francophone world together, and of recognizing not only the presence of France in the Francophone world but also the central place occupied by the Francophone world in world literature and history.

"The depth and range of this book are astonishing, as it describes the cultural conditions out of which French literature has emerged as a vital component of Western civilization from the Middle Ages to the present day. Informative and immensely readable, it makes a compelling and humane case for the continued study of literature in a changing world." —Colin Davis, Royal Holloway, University of London "Written with great panache, this book locates French literature in the wider culture of the Western world. Finch shows how, from Marie de France to MC Solar, literature in France has always intertwined with politics, history, geography, money, sex, language, gender, class and race. Women writers and the new Francophone literatures receive welcome recognition. A remarkable achievement." —Michael Sheringham, Oxford University "Alison Finch's superbly written book brings the cultural dimension of French literature fully into focus. While revealing how the agenda of literary study has changed, she demonstrates that we can engage with the great canonical texts of French literature in new and exciting ways. The book is to be commended for its clarity, its shrewd analyses and its sheer readability." —Tim Unwin, Bristol University This book is the first to offer a cultural history of French literature from its very beginnings, analysing the relationship between French literature and France's evolving power structures from the Middle Ages through to the present day. It shows the political connections between the elite literature of France and other aspects of its culture, from racism, misogyny, tolerance and liberal reform to song, street performance, advertizing and cinema. The nation's literature contributed to these and was shaped by them. The book highlights the continuities and the unique fault-lines in the society that, over a millennium, has produced 'French culture'. It looks at France's early and continuing struggle for a national identity through both its language and its literature, and it shows that this struggle co-exists with openness to other cultures and a bawdy or subtle rebelliousness against the Church and other forms of authority. En route it takes in cuisine, gardens and the French tradition in mathematics. The survey provides an accessible approach to key issues in the history of French culture as well as a wide context for specialists.

French Cultural Studies for the Twenty-First Century brings together current scholarship on a diverse range of topics—from French postcards and Third Republic menus to Haitian literary magazines and representation of race in vaudeville theater—in order to provide methodological insight into the current practice of French cultural studies. The essays in the volume show how scholars of French studies can effectively analyze what we term “non-traditional sources” in their historical and geographical contexts. In doing so, the volume offers a compelling vision of the field today and maps out potential paradigms for future research. This bookbuilds upon previous scholarship that defined the stakes of using an interdisciplinary approach to analyze cultural objects from France and Francophone regions and aims to evaluate the current state of this complex and constantly evolving field and its current methodological practices.

Hip-Hop en Français charts the emergence and development of hip-hop culture in France, French Caribbean, Québec, and Senegal from its origins until today. With essays by renowned hip-hop scholars and a foreword by Marcyliena Morgan, executive director of the Harvard University Hiphop Archive and Research Institute, this edited volume addresses topics such as the history of rap music; hip-hop dance; the art of graffiti; hip-hop artists and their interactions with media arts, social media, literature, race, political and ideological landscapes; and hip-hop based education (HHBE). The contributors approach topics from a variety of different disciplines including African and African-American studies, anthropology, Caribbean studies, cultural studies, dance studies, education, ethnology, French and Francophone studies, history, linguistics, media studies, music and ethnomusicology, and sociology. As one of the most comprehensive books dedicated to hip-hop culture in France and the Francophone World written in the English language, this book is an essential resource for scholars and students of African, Caribbean, French, and French-Canadian popular culture as well as anthropology and ethnomusicology.

The writer Gabriel Audisio once called the Mediterranean a “liquid continent.” Taking up the challenge issued by Audisio’s phrase, Edwige Tamalet Talbayev insists that we understand the region on both sides of the Mediterranean through a “transcontinental” heuristic. Rather than merely read the Maghreb in the context of its European colonizers from across the Mediterranean, Talbayev compellingly argues for a transmaritime deployment of the Maghreb across the multiple Mediterranean sites to which it has been materially and culturally bound for millennia. The Transcontinental Maghreb reveals these Mediterranean imaginaries to intersect with Maghrebi claims to an inclusive, democratic national ideal yet to be realized. Through a sustained reflection on allegory and critical melancholia, the book shows how the Mediterranean decenters postcolonial nation-building projects and mediates the nomadic subject’s reinsertion into a national collective respectful of heterogeneity. In engaging the space of the sea, the hybridity it produces, and the way it has shaped such historical dynamics as globalization, imperialism, decolonization, and nationalism, the book rethinks the very nature of postcolonial histories and identities along its shores.

Volume 39 of FLS French Literature Series features ten articles on the topic of the environment in French and Francophone Literature and Film. Contributors engage with the work of such authors, filmakers and cartoonists as Michel Serres, Luc Ferry, Patrice Nganang, Marie Darrieussecq, Yann-Arthus Bertrand and Plantu, and such topics as human zoos, eco-colonialism, queer theory, and the environmental catastrophes of WWI and, globally, of human civilization as recorded in the recent eco-documentary, HOME. Wide-ranging, provocative and topical these articles both broaden and deepen the efficacy of ecocriticism as a tool for enriching our understanding of the field beyond the English and American “nature writing” at the theory’s core.