Available for the first time in paperback, the Journals of Andr Gide are remarkable literary works in their own right--they are unfailingly honest, endlessly fascinating, and a feast for the mind, enhanced by a new introduction by the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Richard Howard.

Presents the author's journals that testify a disciplined intelligence in a constantly maturing thought. This book offers details of his personal life and spiritual conflicts, accounts of his travels, and comments on the political and social events of the day, from the Dreyfus case to the German occupation.

‘I’ve never kept a journal’, Roland Barthes declared in 1979, ‘ – or, rather, I’ve never known if I should keep one’. The form itself, he continued, was inferior and ‘unnecessary’, a ‘minor mania of writing’. Barthes died months making this statement, and the years since then have revealed that he had actually been concealing a fondness for diary-writing. The publication in 1985 of Incidents brought to light an intimate journal entitled ‘Soirées de Paris’, while 2009 saw the appearance of two much longer diaries kept by Barthes following the death of his mother in 1977 and during a trip to China in 1974, respectively. Further journals lie in the archive, unpublished and largely unseen; it is not clear if these will ever enter the public domain. This collection, which brings together some of the most prominent scholars in the field, considers the present implications of Roland Barthes’ journals. How do these diaries invite us to reconsider aspects of Barthes’ work which have become familiar through his reception as one of the twentieth century’s most influential literary and cultural critics? What do they allow us to see for the first time? What is their relation to the works whose appearance Barthes authorised during his lifetime? Where and how do they fit in his oeuvre? How do they relate to each other across moment and mood? Why might they call for deliberations? This book was originally published as a special issue of Textual Practice.

The Mirror in the Text is concerned with the literary and artistic device of mise en abyme, the use of an element within a work which mirrors the work as a whole—like the 'play within a play' in Hamlet. In this classic study, Lucien Dällenbach provides the first systematic analysis of this device and its literary and artistic applications from Van Eyck and Velasquez to Gide, Beckett and the French nouveau roman. Alongside this wealth of examples, Dällenbach constructs his theoretical argument with elegance and clarity, assuming no previous knowledge of arcane and specialized theory, but guiding the reader helpfully through the maze of literary criticism. The result is a new conceptual field, a new grammar of the mise en abyme, and an examination of its function within the work of art and literature. The highly original study has been acclaimed as one of the most important works of contemporary literary theory. It will be of interest to all students of English and European literature, as well as to students of the visual arts.