Gautier's poetry merits an attentive reading which respects his own essential criterion of poeticity, namely, textuality. This is a poetry which puts on display its literariness, that is, its existence as cultural artifact. In so doing, however, it also puts on display the absence of and its resistance to whatever personal or real signified it would evoke or name. Its beauty and self-indulgent pleasure reveal their hollowness and inadequacy. Its chiseled, polished surface renders its borders or limits and its play unsatisfyingly and teasingly perceptible. Its very superficiality allows, invites and seduces the reader to go entre les lignes and perceive the mystery, not of what has been symbolically buried/unburied, concealed/revealed, but of the truly absent, the abîmes superficiels. Chapter 1, focusing on texts from the Poésies of 1830, studies the intextual repetition of Gautier's poetry, the citations, imitations and transpositions which make evident the poetry's displacement of the significant and the personal into aesthetic simulacra. Chapter 2 deals with the poems of Gautier's second collection, Albertus, and analyzes the use of allegory and of humor as further markers of textual substitution. The inherent lifelessness and illusoriness of the textual artifact is revealed in the poems of La Comédie de la Mort, the collection examined in chapter 3. Chapter 4 analyzes the so-called descriptive, referential poetry of España, and finds that the monde extérieur of Gautier's poetry functions to express an absence of self and is itself always shown to be other than the Other. The dimunition of the poetic effected in Emaux et Camées is the subject of chapter 5, and chapter 6 deals with the contextuality, the fetishism, and the eroticism revealed in a miscellany of poems - in particular the libertine poems - which do not figure in Gautier's five major collections. By short-circuiting significations and transforming them into seductive appearances, Gautier reveals himself to be the acknowledged maître of both Baudelaire and Mallarmé.

This dictionary contains around 130,000 English terms with their French translations, making it one of the most comprehensive books of its kind. It offers a wide vocabulary from all areas as well as numerous idioms. The terms are translated from English to French. If you need translations from French to English, then the companion volume The Great Dictionary French - English is recommended.

In the aftermath of the French Revolution, "freedom” came to have a host of meanings. This volume examines these contested visions of freedom both inside and outside of revolutionary situations in the nineteenth century, as each author explores and interprets the development of nineteenth-century political culture in a particular national context. The common focus is the struggle in various countries to define, advance, or delimit freedom after the French Revolution. The introductory chapter evokes the problematic relationships between reform and revolution and introduces themes that appear in subsequent chapters, though each chapter is a free-standing interpretive essay. Among the issues addressed are the growth of the public sphere and associational movements; battles over constitutionalism, parliamentary institutions, and the franchise; the role of the state in inhibiting or expanding citizenship and the rule of law; the resort to violence by parties of order or parties of change; and the intrusion of new social questions or ethnic conflicts into the political arena.