"Scott's subtle and adventurous analysis breaks new ground in textual understanding, while his translations radically challenge established orthodoxies. As he crosses back and forth between French and English poetry, he has illuminating encounters with a wide range of poets, from Labe and Shakespeare to Auden and Jaccottet. The embodiment of gender in the sonnet; the performance of the dramatic voice; the inflexions of the self in the voice of lyric verse; the 'landscaping' of nature in the line of verse; the interventions of the translator in the peculiar lives of the prose poem and free verse; the tasks of the translator and the comparatist in a new age - these are some of the issues addressed by Clive Scott in a sequence of essays as absorbing as they are original. ""Channel Crossings"" is the recipient of the R. H. Gapper Prize for 2004. The Prize, which is judged by the Society for French Studies, recognises the best publication of its year by any French studies scholar working in the United Kingdom or Ireland. The citation noted: In his book, Clive Scott gives a subtle and adventurous account of how processes of cultural exchange have played an active and enduring role in the development of the language of poetry in French and English over a period of several centuries...Clive Scott's book was one of a number of very impressive works published in 2002. The judges' choice was made in the light of the book's originality and its likely impact on wider critical debate on the language of poetry and on questions of method and approach in comparative literature."

Treasury of poems and prose extracts by Max Jacob, Saint-John Perse, Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, Jean Cocteau, five more. Excellent English translations on facing pages.

The French novel’s “return to the story” in the last decades of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first is has been widely acknowledged in literary scholarship. But is this assessment accurate? With French Fiction in the Twenty-First Century, Simon Kemp looks at the work of five contemporary writers—Annie Ernaux, Pascal Quignard, Marie Darrieussecq, Jean Echenoz, and Patrick Modiano—in the context of the current French literary scene, and examines how far they pursue the innovations of their predecessors and just how far they have turned their backs on the era of experiment.

This book takes a fresh look at the relations between literature and biography by tracing the history of their connections through three hundred years of French literature. The starting point for this history is the eighteenth century when the term 'biography' first entered the French language and when the word 'literature' began to acquire its modern sense of writing marked by an aesthetic character. Arguing that the idea of literature is inherently open to revision and contestation, Ann Jefferson examines the way in which biographically-orientated texts have been engaged in questioning and revising definitions of literature. At the same time, she tracks the evolving forms of biographical writing in French culture, and proposes a reappraisal of biography in terms not only of its forms, but also of its functions. Although Ann Jefferson's book has powerful theoretical implications for both biography and the literary, it is first and foremost a history, offering a comprehensive new account of the development of French literature through this dual focus on the question of literature and on the relations between literature and biography. It offers original readings of major authors and texts in the light of these concerns, beginning with Rousseau and ending with 'life-writing' contemporary authors such as Pierre Michon and Jacques Roubaud. Other authors discussed include Mme de Stäel, Victor Hugo, Sainte-Beuve, Barbey d'Aurevilly, Baudelaire, Nerval, Mallarmé, Schwob, Proust, Gide, Leiris, Sartre, Genet, Barthes, and Roger Laporte.

For all its recent popularity among poets and critics, prose poetry continues to raise more questions than it answers. How have prose poems been identified as such, and why have similar works been excluded from the genre? What happens when we read a work as a prose poem? How have prose genres such as the novel affected prose poetry and modern poetry in general? In Invisible Fences Steven Monte places prose poetry in historical and theoretical perspective by comparing its development in the French and American literary traditions. In spite of its apparent formal freedom, prose poetry is constrained by specific historical circumstances and is constantly engaged in border disputes with neighboring prose and poetic genres. Monte illuminates these constraints through an examination of works that have influenced the development of the prose poem as well as through a discussion of genre theory and detailed readings of poems ranging from Charles Baudelaire's "La Solitude" to John Ashbery's "The System." Monte explores the ways in which literary-historical narratives affect interpretation: why, for example, prose poetry tends to be seen as a revolutionary genre and how this perspective influences readings of individual works. The American poets he discusses include Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and Ashbery; the French poets range from Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stephane Mallarmä to Max Jacob. In exploring prose poetry as a genre, Invisible Fences offers new perspectives not only on modern poetry, but also on genre itself, challenging current theories of genre with a test case that asks for yet eludes definition.

Anne Duden's reputation as one of the most innovative writers of her generation, established in 1982 with the experimental stories in Übergang, was confirmed in 1985 by Das Judasschaf, a novel interweaving an individual's anguish with the cultural trauma of the German past. In her acclaimed poem cycles Steinschlag (1993) and Hingegend (1999) Duden pushes the limits of language in densely metaphoric evocations of landscapes and places of political and personal remembrance, mixing lament for ruined nature with grotesque comedy, mystic vision with horror. Duden is a distinguished practitioner of short forms. Her essays display the same intense engagement with the visual arts as informs her narrative texts. Her deep interest in music is echoed in the musicality of short prose poems. This volume presents for the first time a comprehensive collection of approaches to Duden's fiction, poetry and essays by international scholars. Topics include: the ethics and aesthetics of Duden's engagement with German history; her constructions of female subjectivity; her criticism of western dualistic thinking with its devaluation of the body and exploitation of nature; her position within a modernist tradition with roots in the Romantic Age; the visual arts and poetic influences such as Hölderlin and Celan; the dilemmas of translating Duden's highly individual style. Three essays on Steinschlag constitute the first systematic reading of this difficult, much praised cycle.

In the first major study of representations of World War II in French crime fiction, Margaret-Anne Hutton draws on a corpus of over a hundred and fifty texts spanning more than sixty years. Included are well-known writers (male and female) such as Aubert, Simenon, Boileau-Narcejak, Vargas, Daeninckx, and Jonquet, as well as a broad range of lesser-known authors. Hutton's introduction situates her study within the larger framework of literary representations of World War II, setting the stage for her discussions of genre; the problem of defining crimes and criminals in the context of the war; the epistemological issues that arise in the relationship between World War II historiography and the crime novel; and the temporal textures linking past crimes to the present. Filling a gap in the fields of crime fiction and fictional representations of the War, Hutton's book calls into question the way both crime fiction and the French theatre of World War II have been conceptualized and codified.