This anthology collects texts and papers from the Paul de Man archive, including essays on art, translations, critical fragments, research plans, interviews, and reports on the state of comparative literature. These texts offer a fascinating insight into the work of one of the twentieth century's most important literary theorists. The volume engages with Paul de Man's institutional life, gathering together pedagogical and critical material to investigate his profound influence on the American academy and theory today. It also contains a number of substantial, previously unpublished and untranslated texts by de Man from the span of his writing career. As a new collection of primary sources this volume further stimulates the growing reappraisal of de Man's work.

A bold new history of the French Revolution from the standpoint of the peasants, workers, women and sans culottes The assault on the Bastille, the Reign of Terror, Danton mocking his executioner, Robespierre dispensing a fearful justice, and the archetypal gadfly Marat—the events and figures of the French Revolution have exercised a hold on the historical imagination for more than 200 years. It has been a template for heroic insurrection and, to more conservative minds, a cautionary tale. In the hands of Eric Hazan, author of The Invention of Paris, the revolution becomes a rational and pure struggle for emancipation. In this new history, the first significant account of the French Revolution in over twenty years, Hazan maintains that it fundamentally changed the Western world—for the better. Looking at history from the bottom up, providing an account of working people and peasants, Hazan asks, how did they see their opportunities? What were they fighting for? What was the Terror and could it be justified? And how was the revolution stopped in its tracks? The People’s History of the French Revolution is a vivid retelling of events, bringing them to life with a multitude of voices. Only in this way, by understanding the desires and demands of the lower classes, can the revolutionary bloodshed and the implacable will of a man such as Robespierre be truly understood.

Almost all of us know French literature, even if we don’t know French, because it is probably the second largest and certainly the most translated into English. And, even if we don’t read, we would have seen film and television versions (think Count of Monte-Cristo) and even a musical rendition (Les Mis). So this is a particularly interesting volume in the literature series, since it covers French literature from the earliest times to the present. It is also a particularly rich literature, espousing ever genre from poetry, to novel, to biography, to drama, and adopting every style, including realism and surrealism, and expressing the views of all classes and political stands, with recently strong feminist and gay strains. Obviously, the core dictionary section includes among its panoply of often substantial and detailed entries, hundreds of authors, dozens of significant works, the various styles mentioned above and many others, events that have impacted literature such as the Dreyfus Affair and the Algerian War, and literary prizes. The chronology manages to cover about 1,200 years of literary output. And the introduction sets it all out neatly from one historical and literary period to the next. The bibliography, broken down by period and author, directs us to further reading in both French and English.

In many ways the French Revolution--a series of revolutions, in fact, whose end has arguably not yet arrived--is modernity in action. Beginning in reform, it blossomed into wholesale attempts to remake society, uprooting the clergy and aristocracy, valorizing mass movements, and setting secular ideologies, including nationalism, in motion. Unusually manifold and complicated, the revolution affords many teaching opportunities and challenges. This volume helps instructors seeking to connect developments today--terrorism, propaganda, extremism--with the events that began in 1789, contextualizing for students a world that seems always unmoored and in crisis. The volume supports the teaching of the revolution's ongoing project across geographic areas (from Haiti, Latin America, and New Orleans to Spain, Germany, and Greece), governing ideologies (human rights, secularism, liberty), and literatures (from well-known to newly rediscovered texts). Interdisciplinary, intercultural, and insurgent, the volume has an energy that reflects its subject.

The French Revolution, politics and the modern nation -- French and the civilizing mission -- Paris and magnetic appeal -- France stirs up the melting pot -- France hurtles into the future.

The French Revolution was one of the greatest events in world history, filled with remarkable characters and dramatic events. From its beginning in 1789 to the Reign of Terror in 1793–94, and through the ups and downs of the Directory era that followed, the Revolution showed humanity at its optimistic best and its violent worst; it transformed the lives of all who experienced it. The French Revolution: Faith, Desire, and Politics offers a fresh treatment of this perennially popular and hugely significant topic, introducing a bold interpretation of the Revolution that highlights the key role that religion and sexuality played in determining the shape of the Revolution. These were issues that occupied the minds and helped shape the actions of women and men; from the pornographic pamphlets about queen Marie-Antoinette to the puritanical morality of revolutionary leader Maximilien Robespierre, from the revolutionary catechisms that children learned and to the anathemas hurled on the Revolution from clandestine priests in the countryside. The people who lived through the French Revolution were surrounded by messages about gender, sex, religion and faith, concerns which did not exist outside of the events of the Revolution. This book is an essential resource for students of the French Revolution, History of Catholicism and Women and Gender.