Designed for the general reader, this splendid introduction to French literature from 842 A.D.—the date of the earliest surviving document in any Romance language—to the present decade is the most compact and imaginative single-volume guide available in English to the French literary tradition. In fact, no comparable work exists in either language. It is not the customary inventory of authors and titles but rather a collection of wide-angled views of historical and cultural phenomena. It sets before us writers, public figures, criminals, saints, and monarchs, as well as religious, cultural, and social revolutions. It gives us books, paintings, public monuments, even TV shows. Written by 164 American and European specialists, the essays are introduced by date and arranged in chronological order, but here ends the book’s resemblance to the usual history of literature. Each date is followed by a headline evoking an event that indicates the chronological point of departure. Usually the event is literary—the publication of an original work, a journal, a translation, the first performance of a play, the death of an author—but some events are literary only in terms of their repercussions and resonances. Essays devoted to a genre exist alongside essays devoted to one book, institutions are presented side by side with literary movements, and large surveys appear next to detailed discussions of specific landmarks. No article is limited to the “life and works” of a single author. Proust, for example, appears through various lenses: fleetingly, in 1701, apropos of Antoine Galland’s translation of The Thousand and One Nights; in 1898, in connection with the Dreyfus Affair; in 1905, on the occasion of the law on the separation of church and state; in 1911, in relation to Gide and their different treatments of homosexuality; and at his death in 1922. Without attempting to cover every author, work, and cultural development since the Serments de Strasbourg in 842, this history succeeds in being both informative and critical about the more than 1,000 years it describes. The contributors offer us a chance to appreciate not only French culture but also the major critical positions in literary studies today. A New History of French Literature will be essential reading for all engaged in the study of French culture and for all who are interested in it. It is an authoritative, lively, and readable volume.

"Drawing on Habermas and Freud as well as historians of the family, Daniels takes up the case of three women novelists each writing at a key moment in the parallel development of the novel genre and the modern family. She demonstrates that these writers - confronted with ever more reified exclusion from public life, and relegated to narrowly defined domestic roles - intervened in and subverted the process in their novels. Daniels shows that women writers used the novel first to imagine different social rules that might define alternative kinship systems (Graffigny), and later to find - and create - loopholes within a firmly entrenched system of official and unofficial law (Charriere and Sand)." "Spanning a crucial period in the emergence of modernity, this interdisciplinary study addresses problems in French literary and social history, gender studies, and the history of mentalites."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Isabelle de Charrière (Belle van Zuylen) has been known primarily as a novelist who experimented with narrative techniques to express her concern about the oppression of women in her society. Most scholarship has focused on only a small part of her work, her pre-revolutionary novels. This is one of the first synthetic studies of Charrière's entire oeuvre, and it turns its attention to Charrière's overlooked contribution as an intellectual in the eighteenth-century debate over education. In addition, Letzter analyzes the rhetorical and discursive strategies Charrière employed to insert herself in this debate; a debate from which she was excluded because she was a woman and she was not French. Letzter's model for this analysis is the rhetorical figure of tacking, a nautical term used by Charrière herself in order to describe her tactics for intellectual engagement within the gendered environment the gendered environment of revolutionary debate. Letzter demonstrates Charrière's contribution as an important intellectual of the Revolution and of the post-revolutionary period, whose significance resided in her ability to express her ambivalence toward the theories and ideologies that ceaselessly imposed themselves on women.

This book brings together leading international authorities - physicians, historians, social scientists, and others - who explore the many complex interpretive and ideological dimensions of historical writing about psychiatry. The book includes chapters on the history of the asylum, Freud, anti-psychiatry in the United States and abroad, feminist interpretations of psychiatry's past, and historical accounts of Nazism and psychotherapy, as well as discussions of many individual historical figures and movements. It represents the first attempt to study comprehensively the multiple mythologies that have grown up around the history of madness and the origin, functions, and validity of these myths in our psychological century.