front cover of War, Judgment, and Memory in the Basque Borderlands, 1914-1945
War, Judgment, and Memory in the Basque Borderlands, 1914-1945
Sandra Ott
University of Nevada Press, 2008
During the first half of the twentieth century, the French Basque province of Xiberoa was a place of refuge, conflict, and foreign occupation. With the liberation of France in 1944, many Xiberoans faced new conflicts arising from legal and civic judgments made during Vichy and German occupation. War, Judgment, and Memory in the Basque Borderlands traces the roots of their divided memories of the era to local and official interpretations of judgment, behavior, and justice during those troubled times.
 
In order to understand how the Great War affected the Xiberoan Basques’ perceptions of themselves, Ott contrasts the experiences of people in four different communities located within a fifteen-mile radius. The author also examines how the disruption during the interwar years affected intracommunity relations during the Occupation, the Liberation, and its aftermath. This narrative reveals the diverse ways in which Basques responded to civil war, world war, and displacement, and to one another.
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Watchfiends and Rack Screams
Artaud’s Last Unpublished Work
Antonin Artaud
Diaphanes, 2024
Antonin Artaud’s last large-scale work, published in its complete form in English for the first time.

Drawings on texts and letters dating from 1946, some of them written while he was still confined at the Rodez psychiatric hospital, Artaud devoted the months of November 1946 to February 1947 to completing his book through a long series of vocal improvisations titled Interjections, dictated at his pavilion on the edge of Paris. He cursed the assassins he believed were on their way there to steal his semen, to make his brain go “up in smoke as under the action of one of those machines created to suck up filth from the floor,” and finally to erase him. The publisher who had commissioned the book, Louis Broder, was horrified at reading its incandescent, fiercely obscene, and anti-religious manuscript and refused to publish it. Ambitious and experimental in scale, fragmentary and ferocious in intent, it was not published until 1978, in an edition prepared by Artaud’s close friend Paule Thévenin. Artaud commented that it was an “impossible” book, and that “nobody has ever read it from end to end, not even its own author.”

Clayton Eshleman, together with his translation collaborators such as David Rattray, began work soon after 1978 on an English-language edition, with extracts appearing especially in Eshleman’s poetry magazine, Sulfur. But they, too, were unable to take forward the publication of the book. This volume presents it in its complete form in English for the first time.
 
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Waves Across the South
A New History of Revolution and Empire
Sujit Sivasundaram
University of Chicago Press, 2020
This is a story of tides and coastlines, winds and waves, islands and beaches. It is also a retelling of indigenous creativity, agency, and resistance in the face of unprecedented globalization and violence. Waves Across the South shifts the narrative of the Age of Revolutions and the origins of the British Empire; it foregrounds a vast southern zone that ranges from the Arabian Sea and southwest Indian Ocean across to the Bay of Bengal, and onward to the South Pacific and the Tasman Sea. As the empires of the Dutch, French, and especially the British reached across these regions, they faced a surge of revolutionary sentiment. Long-standing venerable Eurasian empires, established patterns of trade and commerce, and indigenous practice also served as a context for this transformative era. In addition to bringing long-ignored people and events to the fore, Sujit Sivasundaram opens the door to new and necessary conversations about environmental history, the consequences of historical violence, the legacies of empire, the extraction of resources, and the indigenous futures that Western imperialism cut short. The result is nothing less than a bold new way of understanding our global past, one that also helps us think afresh about our shared future.
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The Waxing of the Middle Ages
Revisiting Late Medieval France
Charles-Louis Morand-Métivier
University of Delaware Press, 2023
Johan Huizinga’s much-loved and much-contested Autumn of the Middle Ages, first published in 1919, encouraged an image of the Late French Middle Ages as a flamboyant but empty period of decline and nostalgia. Many studies, particularly literary studies, have challenged Huizinga’s perceptions of individual works or genres. Still, the vision of the Late French and Burgundian Middle Ages as a sad transitional phase between the High Middle Ages and the Renaissance persists. Yet, a series of exceptionally significant cultural developments mark the period.

The Waxing of the Middle Ages sets out to provide a rich, complex, and diverse study of these developments and to reassert that late medieval France is crucial in its own right. The collection argues for an approach that views the late medieval period not as an afterthought, or a blind spot, but as a period that is key in understanding the fluidity of time, traditions, culture, and history. Each essay explores some “cultural form,” to borrow Huizinga’s expression, to expose the false divide that has dominated modern scholarship. 
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"We Met in Paris"
Grace Frick and Her Life with Marguerite Yourcenar
Joan E. Howard
University of Missouri Press, 2020
Grace Frick introduced English-language readers all over the world to the distinguished French author Marguerite Yourcenar with her award-winning translation of Yourcenar’s novel Memoirs of Hadrian in 1954. European biographies of Yourcenar have often disparaged Frick and her relationship with Yourcenar, however. This work shows Frick as a person of substance in her own right, and paints a portrait of both women that is at once intimate and scrupulously documented. It contains a great deal of new information that will disrupt long-held beliefs about Yourcenar and may even shock some of her scholars and fans.
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We Only Know Men
The Rescue of Jews in France during the Holocaust
Patrick Henry
Catholic University of America Press, 2007
Patrick Henry, working with more than one thousand unpublished autobiographical pages written by key rescuers and with documents, letters, and interviews never before available, reconsiders the Holocaust rescue of Jews on the plateau of Vivarais-Lignon between the years 1939 and 1944
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We'll Always Have Paris
American Tourists in France since 1930
Harvey Levenstein
University of Chicago Press, 2004
For much of the twentieth century, Americans had a love/hate relationship with France. While many admired its beauty, culture, refinement, and famed joie de vivre, others thought of it as a dilapidated country populated by foul-smelling, mean-spirited anti-Americans driven by a keen desire to part tourists from their money. We'll Always Have Paris explores how both images came to flourish in the United States, often in the minds of the same people.

Harvey Levenstein takes us back to the 1930s, when, despite the Great Depression, France continued to be the stomping ground of the social elite of the eastern seaboard. After World War II, wealthy and famous Americans returned to the country in droves, helping to revive its old image as a wellspring of sophisticated and sybaritic pleasures. At the same time, though, thanks in large part to Communist and Gaullist campaigns against U.S. power, a growing sensitivity to French anti-Americanism began to color tourists' experiences there, strengthening the negative images of the French that were already embedded in American culture. But as the century drew on, the traditional positive images were revived, as many Americans again developed an appreciation for France's cuisine, art, and urban and rustic charms.

Levenstein, in his colorful, anecdotal style, digs into personal correspondence, journalism, and popular culture to shape a story of one nation's relationship to another, giving vivid play to Americans' changing response to such things as France's reputation for sexual freedom, haute cuisine, high fashion, and racial tolerance. He puts this tumultuous coupling of France and the United States in historical perspective, arguing that while some in Congress say we may no longer have french fries, others, like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, know they will always have Paris, and France, to enjoy and remember.
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What Adolescents Ought to Know
Sexual Health Texts in Early Twentieth-Century America
Jennifer Burek Pierce
University of Massachusetts Press, 2011
In 1901, Dr. Alfred Fournier committed an act both simple and revolutionary: he wrote ForOur Sons, When They Turn 18, a sexual and reproductive health treatise based on his clinical work at a leading Paris hospital. If this booklet aided adolescent understanding of health, it also encouraged reformers around the world to publish. By 1913, countless works on venereal disease prevention were available to adolescents.

During this period, authors wrestled with how to make still-developing scientific information available to a reader also in the process of maturing. What would convince a young person to avoid acting on desire? What norms should be employed in these arguments, when social and legal precedents warned against committing ideas about sex to print? How, in other words, could information about sex be made both decent and compelling? Health reformers struggled with these challenges as doctors' ability to diagnose diseases such as syphilis outpaced the production of medicines that could restore health. In this context, information represented the best and truest prophylactic. When publications were successful, from the perspective of information dissemination, they were translated and distributed worldwide.

What Adolescents Ought to Know
explores the evolution of these printed materials—from a single tract, written by a medical researcher and given free to anyone, to a thriving commercial enterprise. It tells the story of how sex education moved from private conversation to purchased text in early twentieth-century America.
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What Nostalgia Was
War, Empire, and the Time of a Deadly Emotion
Thomas Dodman
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Nostalgia today is seen as essentially benign, a wistful longing for the past. This wasn't always the case, however: from the late seventeenth century through the end of the nineteenth, nostalgia denoted a form of homesickness so extreme that it could sometimes be deadly.
 
What Nostalgia Was unearths that history. Thomas Dodman begins his story in Basel, where a nineteen-year-old medical student invented the new diagnosis, modeled on prevailing notions of melancholy. From there, Dodman traces its spread through the European republic of letters and into Napoleon's armies, as French soldiers far from home were diagnosed and treated for the disease. Nostalgia then gradually transformed from a medical term to a more expansive cultural concept, one that encompassed Romantic notions of the aesthetic pleasure of suffering. But the decisive shift toward its contemporary meaning occurred in the colonies, where Frenchmen worried about racial and cultural mixing came to view moderate homesickness as salutary. An afterword reflects on how the history of nostalgia can help us understand the transformations of the modern world, rounding out a surprising, fascinating tour through the history of a durable idea.
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What Soldiers Do
Sex and the American GI in World War II France
Mary Louise Roberts
University of Chicago Press, 2013
How do you convince men to charge across heavily mined beaches into deadly machine-gun fire? Do you appeal to their bonds with their fellow soldiers, their patriotism, their desire to end tyranny and mass murder? Certainly—but if you’re the US Army in 1944, you also try another tack: you dangle the lure of beautiful French women, waiting just on the other side of the wire, ready to reward their liberators in oh so many ways.

That’s not the picture of the Greatest Generation that we’ve been given, but it’s the one Mary Louise Roberts paints to devastating effect in What Soldiers Do. Drawing on an incredible range of sources, including news reports, propaganda and training materials, official planning documents, wartime diaries, and memoirs, Roberts tells the fascinating and troubling story of how the US military command systematically spread—and then exploited—the myth of French women as sexually experienced and available. The resulting chaos—ranging from flagrant public sex with prostitutes to outright rape and rampant venereal disease—horrified the war-weary and demoralized French population. The sexual predation, and the blithe response of the American military leadership, also caused serious friction between the two nations just as they were attempting to settle questions of long-term control over the liberated territories and the restoration of French sovereignty. 

While never denying the achievement of D-Day, or the bravery of the soldiers who took part, What Soldiers Do reminds us that history is always more useful—and more interesting—when it is most honest, and when it goes beyond the burnished beauty of nostalgia to grapple with the real lives and real mistakes of the people who lived it.
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When France Fell
The Vichy Crisis and the Fate of the Anglo-American Alliance
Michael S. Neiberg
Harvard University Press, 2021

Winner of the Society for Military History’s Distinguished Book Award

Shocked by the fall of France in 1940, panicked US leaders rushed to back the Vichy government—a fateful decision that nearly destroyed the Anglo–American alliance.

According to US Secretary of War Henry Stimson, the “most shocking single event” of World War II was not the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but rather the fall of France in spring 1940. Michael Neiberg offers a dramatic history of the American response—a policy marked by panic and moral ineptitude, which placed the United States in league with fascism and nearly ruined the alliance with Britain.

The successful Nazi invasion of France destabilized American planners’ strategic assumptions. At home, the result was huge increases in defense spending, the advent of peacetime military conscription, and domestic spying to weed out potential fifth columnists. Abroad, the United States decided to work with Vichy France despite its pro-Nazi tendencies. The US–Vichy partnership, intended to buy time and temper the flames of war in Europe, severely strained Anglo–American relations. American leaders naively believed that they could woo men like Philippe Pétain, preventing France from becoming a formal German ally. The British, however, understood that Vichy was subservient to Nazi Germany and instead supported resistance figures such as Charles de Gaulle. After the war, the choice to back Vichy tainted US–French relations for decades.

Our collective memory of World War II as a period of American strength overlooks the desperation and faulty decision making that drove US policy from 1940 to 1943. Tracing the key diplomatic and strategic moves of these formative years, When France Fell gives us a more nuanced and complete understanding of the war and of the global position the United States would occupy afterward.

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When France Fell
The Vichy Crisis and the Fate of the Anglo-American Alliance
Michael S. Neiberg
Harvard University Press

Winner of the Society for Military History’s Distinguished Book Award

“Deeply researched and forcefully written . . . deftly explains the confused politics and diplomacy that bedeviled the war against the Nazis.”—Wall Street Journal

“Neiberg is one of the very best historians on wartime France, and his approach to the fall of France and its consequences is truly original and perceptive as well as superbly written.”—Antony Beevor, author of The Second World War

“An utterly gripping account, the best to date, of relations within the turbulent triumvirate of France, Britain, and America in the Second World War.”—Andrew Roberts, author of Churchill: Walking with Destiny

The “most shocking single event” of World War II, according to US Secretary of War Henry Stimson, was not the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor but the fall of France in the spring of 1940. The Nazi invasion of France destabilized Washington’s strategic assumptions, resulting in hasty and desperate decision-making. Michael Neiberg offers a dramatic history of America’s bewildering response—policies that placed the United States in league with fascism and nearly ruined its alliance with Britain.

FDR and his advisors naively believed they could woo Vichy France’s decorated wartime leader, Marshal Philippe Pétain, and prevent the country from becoming a formal German ally. The British, convinced that the Vichy government was fully subservient to Nazi Germany, chose to back Charles de Gaulle and actively financed and supported the Resistance. After the war, America’s decision to work with the Vichy regime cast a pall over US-French relations that lasted for decades.

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When Roosevelt Planned to Govern France
Charles L. Robertson
University of Massachusetts Press, 2011
This book tells the story of a plan put forth by President Franklin Roosevelt during World War II for an Allied military occupation of France in the aftermath of liberation, and of General Charles de Gaulle's efforts as self-appointed leader of the Free French Movement to thwart FDR's intentions. Charles L. Robertson frames the narrative as a mystery in which he plays the role of detective. He begins at a dinner party thirty years ago, where he first learned of the alleged plan from an elderly former aide to de Gaulle. Yet it wasn't until 2004, when he heard the same story repeated during the 60th commemoration of D-Day, that he set out to investigate whether it was true.

Many French are aware of this episode and believe, on the basis of later Gaullist officials' writings, that until the last moment a military occupation of their country was imminent. This view, across the years, has helped darken relations between France and the United States. Yet few if any Americans have ever heard of this plan, and in the event, no Allied military government of France was ever established.

How and why it never came to be, and why the French still believe it almost did, is the subject of this book. Robertson recounts how the president of the most powerful nation in the world was outmaneuvered in both his earlier plans for an occupation of France and his subsequent attempts to keep General de Gaulle from "seizing" power—in a France that ultimately, despite Roosevelt's intentions and expectations, regained its place among the victorious powers under de Gaulle's leadership.
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When the King Took Flight
Timothy Tackett
Harvard University Press, 2003

On a June night in 1791, King Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette fled Paris in disguise, hoping to escape the mounting turmoil of the French Revolution. They were arrested by a small group of citizens a few miles from the Belgian border and forced to return to Paris. Two years later they would both die at the guillotine. It is this extraordinary story, and the events leading up to and away from it, that Tackett recounts in gripping novelistic style.

The king's flight opens a window to the whole of French society during the Revolution. Each dramatic chapter spotlights a different segment of the population, from the king and queen as they plotted and executed their flight, to the people of Varennes who apprehended the royal family, to the radicals of Paris who urged an end to monarchy, to the leaders of the National Assembly struggling to control a spiraling crisis, to the ordinary citizens stunned by their king's desertion. Tackett shows how Louis's flight reshaped popular attitudes toward kingship, intensified fears of invasion and conspiracy, and helped pave the way for the Reign of Terror.

Tackett brings to life an array of unique characters as they struggle to confront the monumental transformations set in motion in 1789. In so doing, he offers an important new interpretation of the Revolution. By emphasizing the unpredictable and contingent character of this story, he underscores the power of a single event to change irrevocably the course of the French Revolution, and consequently the history of the world.

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When These Things Begin
Conversations with Michel Treguer
René Girard (Translated by Trevor Cribben Merrill)
Michigan State University Press, 2014
In this lively series of conversations with writer Michel Treguer, René Girard revisits the major concepts of mimetic theory and explores science, democracy, and the nature of God and freedom. Girard affirms that “our unprecedented present is incomprehensible without Christianity.” Globalization has unified the world, yet civil war and terrorism persist despite free trade and economic growth. Because of mimetic desire and the rivalry it generates, asserts Girard, “whether we’re talking about marriage, friendship, professional relationships, issues with neighbors or matters of national unity, human relations are always under threat.” Literary masters including Marivaux, Dostoevsky, and Joyce understood this, as did archaic religion, which warded off violence with blood sacrifice. Christianity brought a new understanding of sacrifice, giving rise not only to modern rationality and science but also to a fragile system that is, in Girard’s words, “always teetering between a new golden age and a destructive apocalypse.” Treguer, a skeptic of mimetic theory, wonders: “Is what he’s telling me true...or is it just a nice story, a way of looking at things?” In response, Girard makes a compelling case for his theory.
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The White Terror and the Political Reaction after Waterloo
Daniel P. Resnick
Harvard University Press
In this first monograph on the White Terror since Ernest Daudet wrote on the subject in 1878, Daniel Resnick presents the only documented account of the magnitude of the political reaction of 1815–16 in France. By means of a statistical record of police arrests and judicial convictions, he demonstrates the nature, extent, and impact on French political history of the widespread repression that grew out of the royalist crusade to extirpate any trace of Napoleonic influences. The calculated policy of intimidation pursued by the royalists, the author argues, engendered the political reflexes that were to prove fatal to the House of Bourbon.
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Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-Heritage Societies
Claire L. Adida, David D. Laitin, and Marie-Anne Valfort
Harvard University Press, 2016

Amid mounting fears of violent Islamic extremism, many Europeans ask whether Muslim immigrants can integrate into historically Christian countries. In a groundbreaking ethnographic investigation of France’s Muslim migrant population, Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-Heritage Societies explores this complex question. The authors conclude that both Muslim and non-Muslim French must share responsibility for the slow progress of Muslim integration.

“Using a variety of resources, research methods, and an innovative experimental design, the authors contend that while there is no doubt that prejudice and discrimination against Muslims exist, it is also true that some Muslim actions and cultural traits may, at times, complicate their full integration into their chosen domiciles. This book is timely (more so in the context of the current Syrian refugee crisis), its insights keen and astute, the empirical evidence meticulous and persuasive, and the policy recommendations reasonable and relevant.”
—A. Ahmad, Choice

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The Wife of Martin Guerre
Janet Lewis
Ohio University Press, 2013

In this new edition of Janet Lewis’s classic short novel, The Wife of Martin Guerre, Swallow Press executive editor Kevin Haworth writes that Lewis’s story is “a short novel of astonishing depth and resonance, a sharply drawn historical tale that asks contemporary questions about identity and belonging, about men and women, and about an individual’s capacity to act within an inflexible system.” Originally published in 1941, The Wife of Martin Guerre has earned the respect and admiration of critics and readers for over sixty years.

Based on a notorious trial in sixteenth-century France, this story of Bertrande de Rols is the first of three novels making up Lewis’s Cases of Circumstantial Evidence suite (the other two are The Trial of Sören Qvist and The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron).

Swallow Press is delighted and honored to offer readers beautiful new editions of all three Cases of Circumstantial Evidence novels, each featuring a new introduction by Kevin Haworth.

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The Wild Girl, Natural Man, and the Monster
Dangerous Experiments in the Age of Enlightenment
Julia V. Douthwaite
University of Chicago Press, 2002
This study looks at the lives of the most famous "wild children" of eighteenth-century Europe, showing how they open a window onto European ideas about the potential and perfectibility of mankind. Julia V. Douthwaite recounts reports of feral children such as the wild girl of Champagne (captured in 1731 and baptized as Marie-Angélique Leblanc), offering a fascinating glimpse into beliefs about the difference between man and beast and the means once used to civilize the uncivilized.

A variety of educational experiments failed to tame these feral children by the standards of the day. After telling their stories, Douthwaite turns to literature that reflects on similar experiments to perfect human subjects. Her examples range from utopian schemes for progressive childrearing to philosophical tales of animated statues, from revolutionary theories of regenerated men to Gothic tales of scientists run amok. Encompassing thinkers such as Rousseau, Sade, Defoe, and Mary Shelley, Douthwaite shows how the Enlightenment conceived of mankind as an infinitely malleable entity, first with optimism, then with apprehension. Exposing the darker side of eighteenth-century thought, she demonstrates how advances in science gave rise to troubling ethical concerns, as parents, scientists, and politicians tried to perfect mankind with disastrous results.
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A Woman Who Defends All the Persons of Her Sex
Selected Philosophical and Moral Writings
Gabrielle Suchon
University of Chicago Press, 2010

During the oppressive reign of Louis XIV, Gabrielle Suchon (1632–1703) was the most forceful female voice in France, advocating women’s freedom and self-determination, access to knowledge, and assertion of authority. This volume collects Suchon’s writing from two works—Treatise on Ethics and Politics (1693) and On the Celibate Life Freely Chosen; or, Life without Commitments (1700)—and demonstrates her to be an original philosophical and moral thinker and writer.

Suchon argues that both women and men have inherently similar intellectual, corporeal, and spiritual capacities, which entitle them equally to essentially human prerogatives, and she displays her breadth of knowledge as she harnesses evidence from biblical, classical, patristic, and contemporary secular sources to bolster her claim. Forgotten over the centuries, these writings have been gaining increasing attention from feminist historians, students of philosophy, and scholars of seventeenth-century French literature and culture. This translation, from Domna C. Stanton and Rebecca M. Wilkin, marks the first time these works will appear in English.

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The Woman Who Was Poor
A Novel
Leon Bloy
St. Augustine's Press, 2014
Written in the 1890s, Leon Bloy's masterful novel has had an immeasurable effect on all European Catholic writing since. (Bloy was responsible for the conversion of Jacques and Räissa Maritain in 1905, and they referred to him as their godfather.) It is an extraordinary book, powerful in the manner of dos Passos, and yet spiritual in the manner of the Bible. 
         
It is the story of a woman who is abysmally poor, brutally treated and exploited by her parents, living in the gutters of Paris, yet she retains the spiritual outlook and purity of a saint. We are spared no brutality, yet there are scenes of the most tender beauty.

The woman, Clotilde, becomes an artist's model, meeting all the great French writers, among them the gloomy and magnificent Marchenoir, who is Bloy himself. They are all impressed by the depth of her thoughts and feelings; she finally marries one of them. They are pitifully poor, and the pages that cover the birth and death of their child shock with horror while moving the reader in their tragic beauty and tenderness––for this is Bloy, always hovering between death and ecstasy. Left a widow, Clotilda finds her true vocation, a vocation of poverty. She is the woman who is poor, no other words describe her more accurately. The novel ends with those famous words of extraordinary optimism: "There is only one misery…not to be saints." 
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The Wombs of Women
Race, Capital, Feminism
Françoise Vergès
Duke University Press, 2020
In the 1960s thousands of poor women of color on the (post)colonial French island of Reunion had their pregnancies forcefully terminated by white doctors; the doctors operated under the pretext of performing benign surgeries, for which they sought government compensation. When the scandal broke in 1970, the doctors claimed to have been encouraged to perform these abortions by French politicians who sought to curtail reproduction on the island, even though abortion was illegal in France. In The Wombs of Women—first published in French and appearing here in English for the first time—Françoise Vergès traces the long history of colonial state intervention in black women’s wombs during the slave trade and postslavery imperialism as well as in current birth control politics. She examines the women’s liberation movement in France in the 1960s and 1970s, showing that by choosing to ignore the history of the racialization of women’s wombs, French feminists inevitably ended up defending the rights of white women at the expense of women of color. Ultimately, Vergès demonstrates how the forced abortions on Reunion were manifestations of the legacies of the racialized violence of slavery and colonialism.
 
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Women Against Napoleon
Historical and Fictional Responses to his Rise and Legacy
Edited by Waltraud Maierhofer, Gertrud Roesch, and Caroline Bland
Campus Verlag, 2007
Although Prussia’s beloved Queen Luise and the Swiss-born aristocrat and writer Germaine de Staël were Napoleon Bonaparte’s best-known female opponents, women’s discontent with Napoleon and the Napoleonic wars was more widespread—and vocal—than once assumed. Women against Napoleon expands our awareness of the range of women’s responses to the despot by presenting an international spectrum of female opposition, including contemporary letters, diaries, and published writings, as well as historical fiction of the twentieth century. By setting these materials together, this volume forges new links between literary, historical, and gender scholarship.
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Women and Discourse in the Fiction of Marguerite Duras
Love, Legends, Language
Susan D. Cohen
University of Massachusetts Press, 1993
One of the most famous living French writers, Marguerite Duras is renowned for her provocative and hauntingly beautiful works of fiction, drama, and cinema. This book offers the first comprehensive study of the narrative and stylistic characteristics of Duras's fiction. Susan D. Cohen examines the entire range of Duras's works, combining close textual analyses with a more general discussion of narrativity and its connections with gender, class, and race. The focus throughout is on language, representation, and difference, which Duras explores on every structural level.

Cohen shows how Duras's writings, even the controversial "erotic" works, expose and subvert the repression of women in traditional, dominant discourse and at the same time present an alternative, nonrepressive discursive model. She formulates a concept of creative "ignorance," which she identifies as the generative principle of Duras's textual production and the approach to language it proposes. Cohen also explores the distinctive features of Duras's prose, describing how the writer achieves the ritual, legendary aura that characterizes her work.
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Women and Power at the French Court, 1483-1563
Edited by Susan Broomhall
Amsterdam University Press, 2018
Women and Power at the French Court, 1483—1563 explores the ways in which a range of women “ as consorts, regents, mistresses, factional power players, attendants at court, or as objects of courtly patronage “ wielded power in order to advance individual, familial, and factional agendas at the early sixteenth-century French court. Spring-boarding from the burgeoning scholarship of gender, the political, and power in early modern Europe, the collection provides a perspective from the French court, from the reigns of Charles VIII to Henri II, a time when the French court was a renowned center of culture and at which women played important roles. Crossdisciplinary in its perspectives, these essays by historians, art and literary scholars investigate the dynamic operations of gendered power in political acts, recognized status as queens and regents, ritualized behaviors such as gift-giving, educational coteries, and through social networking, literary and artistic patronage, female authorship, and epistolary strategies.
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Women for Hire
Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850
Alain Corbin
Harvard University Press, 1990
Dispelling the lurid stereotypes portrayed in fiction, Alain Corbin depicts prostitution in nineteenth-century France not as a vice, crime, or disease, but as a well-organized business. Corbin reveals how the brothel served the sex industry in the same way that the factory served manufacturing: it provided an institution for the efficient and profitable sale of services.
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Women in Contemporary Culture
Roles and identities in France and Spain
Edited by Lesley Twomey
Intellect Books, 2000
Dealing with current events in France and Spain, this is the only comparative study of its kind, investigating how women construct their identities within the public sphere and highlighting the ways in which traditional or modern values impact on female identity in these countries. Which female figures are proposed for our admiration? Who proposes them and what values do they represent? This is an evaluation of womens lives at the end of the 20th Century the Century of Women celebrating the achievements and looking to opportunities presented by the century to come.
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Women in Revolutionary Paris, 1789-1795
Edited and translated by Darlene Gay Levy, Harriet Branson Applewhite, and Mary Durham Johnson
University of Illinois Press, 1979
200 years ago, the women of revolutionary Paris were demanding legal equality in marriage; educational opportunities for girls, including vocational training; public instruction, licensing, and support for midwives; guarantees for women's rights to employment; and an end to the exclusion of women from certain professions. The editors have uncovered, translated, and annotated sixty documents which shed light on these and other socioeconomic struggles by women and their impact on the French Revolutionary era. This work makes a significant contribution to the growing appreciation of the role of women in history, politics, ideology, and social change.
 
"This unique collection of documents will be a boon to teachers of history and to scholars of the French Revolution. . . . Recommended."
-- Library Journal
 
 
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Women Lovers, or The Third Woman
Natalie Clifford Barney, Edited and translated by Chelsea Ray, Introduction by Melanie C. Hawthorne
University of Wisconsin Press, 2016
This long-lost novel recounts a passionate triangle of love and loss among three of the most daring women of belle époque Paris. In this barely disguised roman à clef, the legendary American heiress, writer, and arts patron Natalie Clifford Barney, the dashing Italian baroness Mimi Franchetti, and the beautiful French courtesan Liane de Pougy share erotic liaisons that break all taboos and end in devastation as one unexpectedly becomes the “third woman.” Never before published in English, and only recently published in French, this modernist, experimental work has been brought to light by Chelsea Ray’s research and translation.
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Women of the Left Bank
Paris, 1900-1940
By Shari Benstock
University of Texas Press, 1986

Now available in a durable paperback edition, Shari Benstock's critically acclaimed, best-selling Women of the Left Bank is a fascinating exploration of the lives and works of some two dozen American, English, and French women whose talent shaped the Paris expatriate experience in the century's early years.

This ambitious historical, biographical, and critical study has taken its place among the foremost works of literary criticism. Maurice Beebe calls it "a distinguished contribution to modern literary history." Jane Marcus hails it as "the first serious literary history of the period and its women writers, making along the way no small contribution to our understanding of the relationships between women artists and their male counterparts, from Henry James to Hemingway, Joyce, Picasso, and Pound."

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Women of the Twelfth Century, Volume 1
Eleanor of Aquitaine and Six Others
Georges Duby
University of Chicago Press, 1997
In this volume, Georges Duby examines the lives of prominent twelfth-century French women as well as popular female literary figures of that time. Focusing on medieval notions of women and love, Duby looks for the ideological motivations for the representation of the female sex. He analyzes the ways in which women's biographies were written and how female characters were treated in fable and legend, pointing to the social and political forces at work in these representations.

The historical personages include Eleanor of Aquitaine whose several marriages brought her wealth and autonomy; the virtuous Héloïse; and the visionary recluse Juette. Duby also studies the literary figures of St. Marie-Madeleine, a composite figure who personified the essential female traits of frailty, ardent love, and evangelicalism; Iseut, literary beloved of Tristan; and two other emblematic figures, Dorée d'Amour and Phénix—women who became ladies through chivalrous love.

Provocative, informative, and entertaining, this book offers new insight on courtly love and the representations of women under medieval patriarchy.
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Women of the Twelfth Century, Volume 2
Remembering the Dead
Georges Duby
University of Chicago Press, 1997
In this volume, one of the greatest medieval historians of our time continues his rich and illuminating inquiry into the lives of twelfth-century women. Georges Duby bases his account on a twelfth-century genre that commemorated the virtues of noblewomen who had died and the roles they came to play in the history of their lineage. From these genealogical works a vivid picture emerges of the lives these women led, the values they held, and the way in which they were viewed by the ecclesiastical and chivalric writers who immortalized them.

The first section outlines the ways in which the dead—in both memory and legend—served to bond noble society in the twelfth century. Drawing on the Gesta by Dudo of Saint Quentin, the second section reflects on the roles that wives, concubines, and other women played during times of war and in the great exchanges of power that established the grand lineages of the Middle Ages. The third section reconstructs women as wives, mothers, and widows through the work of Lambert, Priest of Ardres.
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Women Together/Women Apart
Portraits of Lesbian Paris
Latimer, Tirza True
Rutgers University Press, 2005

What does it mean to look like a lesbian? Though it remains impossible to conjure a definitive image that captures the breadth of this highly nuanced term, today at least we are able to consider an array of visual representations that have been put into circulation by lesbians themselves over the last six or seven decades. In the early twentieth century, though, no notion of lesbianism as a coherent social or cultural identity yet existed.

In Women Together/Women Apart, Tirza True Latimer explores the revolutionary period between World War I and World War II when lesbian artists working in Paris began to shape the first visual models that gave lesbians a collective sense of identity and allowed them to recognize each other. Flocking to Paris from around the world, artists and performers such as Romaine Brooks, Claude Cahun, Marcel Moore, and Suzy Solidor used portraiture to theorize and visualize a "new breed" of feminine subject. The book focuses on problems of feminine and lesbian self-representation at a time and place where the rights of women to political, professional, economic, domestic, and sexual autonomy had yet to be acknowledged by the law. Under such circumstances, same-sex solidarity and relative independence from men held important political implications.

Combining gender theory with visual, cultural, and historical analysis, Latimer draws a vivid picture of the impact of sexual politics on the cultural life of Paris during this key period. The book also illuminates the far-reaching consequences of lesbian portraiture on contemporary constructions of lesbian identity.

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Women's Words
Essay on French Singularity
Mona Ozouf
University of Chicago Press, 1997
In her controversial book Women's Words, Mona Ozouf argues that French feminism lacks the rancor and resentment of its counterparts in England and America and explains why this placid, even timid brand of feminism is uniquely French.

Ozouf uses the woman's portrait, traditionally a male genre, to portray ten French women of letters whose lives span the period from the eve of the French Revolution to the resurgence of the feminist movement in the late twentieth century. She studies the letters and memoirs of Mme du Deffand, Mme de Charrière, Mme Roland, Mme de Staël, Mme de Rémusat, George Sand, Hubertine Auclert, Colette, Simone Weil, and Simone de Beauvoir. Rejecting the male constructions of femininity typical of this genre, Ozouf restores these women's voices in order to study their own often-conflicted attitudes toward education, marriage, motherhood, sex, and work, as well as the dilemma of writing in a literary world that did not support women's work.

Ozouf claims that a uniquely French feminism informed these women's lives, one that stems from the great egalitarian spirit of the French Revolution and is more tolerant of difference than its American counterparts. She argues that as a result, modern French culture has not isolated women from men in the same ways as American and British cultures have done.
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Wordsworth's Second Nature
A Study of the Poetry and Politics
James Chandler
University of Chicago Press, 1984
Wordsworth is England's greatest poet of the French Revolution: he witnessed some of its events first hand, participated in its intellectual and social ambitions, and eventually developed his celebrated poetic campaign in response to its enthusiasms. But how should that response be understood? Combining careful interpretive analysis with wide-ranging historical scholarship, Chandler presents a challenging new account of the political views implicit in Wordsworth's major works–in The Prelude, above all, but also in the central lyrics and shorter narrative poems.

Central to the discussion, which restores Wordsworth to both the French and English contexts in which he matured, is a consideration of his relation to Rousseau and Burke. Chandler maintains that by the time Wordsworth set forth his "program for poetry" in 1798, he had turned away from the Rousseauist idea of nature that had informed his early republican writings. He had already become a poet of what Burke called "second nature"–human nature cultivated by custom, habit, and tradition–and an opponent of the quest for first principles that his friend Coleridge could not forsake. In his analysis of the poetry, Chandler suggests that even Wordsworth's most apparently private moments, the lyrical "spots of time," ideologically embodied the uncalculated habits of an oral narrative discipline and a native English mind.
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World Film Locations
Paris
Edited by Marcelline Block
Intellect Books, 2011
“We’ll always have Paris,” Humphrey Bogart assures Ingrid Bergman in the oft-quoted farewell scene from Casablanca in which Bogart’s character, hard-hearted restaurateur Rick Blaine, bids former lover Ilsa Lund goodbye. The backdrop against which they first fell in love, Paris later serves as a reminder of their deep mutual longings. And with a host of different realizations by filmmakers from Philip Kaufman to Julien Leclercq to Woody Allen, there is no question that Paris has likewise endured in the memories of cinephiles worldwide.
 
World Film Locations: Paris takes readers on an unforgettable tour of the City of Lights past and present through the many films that have been set there. Along the way, we revisit iconic tourist sites from the Eiffel Tower—whose stairs and crossbars inspired more than one famous chase scene—to the Moulin Rouge overlooking the famously seedy Place Pigalle. Other films explore lesser-known quartiers usually tucked away from the tourist’s admiring gaze. Handsomely illustrated with full-color film stills and contemporary photographs, more than fifty scenes are individually considered with special attention to their use of Paris’s topography as it intersects with characters, narrative, and plot. A host of important genres and cinematic movements are featured, including poetic realism, the New Wave, cinéma-verité, the literary works of the Left Bank Group, and Luc Besson’s slickly stylized cinéma du look. Meanwhile, essays foreground contributions from Francophone African directors and émigré filmmakers.
 
For centuries, Paris has reigned over the popular imagination. For those who have visited or those who have only imagined it through art, literature, and film, World Film Locations: Paris presents a wonder-filled cinematic exploration of the mythical city that fans of French cinema—and new initiates—will appreciate.
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The World of René Girard
Interviews
Nadine Dormoy
Michigan State University Press, 2024
In 1988, Nadine Dormoy conducted a series of interviews with René Girard at a pivotal moment in his career, just after a number of books and conferences had situated his work in a new context of research on self-organizing systems. In these interviews, Girard discusses the flurry of intellectual activity that followed the landmark 1981 Stanford University conference, Disorder and Order. Attended by several Nobel prize winners and other important intellectual figures, this event expanded his reputation in Europe and laid the groundwork for later accolades, including the Modern Language Association’s Award for Lifetime Scholarly Achievement and being elected as a member of the Académie Française. Girard also discusses Theater of Envy, his then-forthcoming book on Shakespeare and his first book written in English, as well as corrects several misunderstandings of his mimetic hypothesis. Dormoy is a spirited interlocutor, like Girard a postwar émigré who came to make a new life for herself teaching French in American universities. Translated into English for the first time by leading mimetic studies scholar William A. Johnsen, The World of René Girard is a must-have for those new to and familiar with Girard’s work.
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The World War I Memoirs of Robert P. Patterson
A Captain in the Great War
Gary J. Clifford
University of Tennessee Press, 2012


“This memoir illuminates key aspects of the war experience: the enthusiasm for fighting, tensions with officers, tedium with regard to noncombatant work, the variety of trench experiences, the sharp learning curve that the army underwent on the ground, and the confusing nature of combat for ground troops. As the centennial of the war approaches this well-annotated memoir that connects Patterson’s individual experiences to the larger U.S. experience of the war will appeal to general readers and specialists alike.”  —Jennifer D. Keene, author of World War I: The American Soldier Experience

A journalist once called Under Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson “the toughest man in Washington” for his fervid efforts in managing U.S. mobilization in World War II. The World War I Memoirs of Robert P. Patterson: A Captain in the Great War recounts Patterson’s own formative military experiences in the First World War.
Written in the years following the conflict, this is a remarkable rendering of what it was like to be an infantry line officer during the so-called Great War. Patterson started his military career as a twenty-seven-year-old, barely-trained captain in the American Expeditionary Forces (A.E.F.). He was part of the 306th Infantry Regiment of New York’s famous 77th “Statue of Liberty” Division from July to November 1918. In this detailed account, Patterson describes in understated yet vivid prose just how raw and unprepared American soldiers were for the titanic battles on the Western Front. Patterson downplays his near-death experience in a fierce firefight that earned him and several of his men from Company F the Distinguished Service Cross. His depiction of the brutal Meuse-Argonne battle is haunting—the drenching cold rains, the omnipresent barbed wire, deep fog-filled ravines, the sweet stench of mustard gas, chattering German machine-guns, crashing artillery shells, and even a rare hot meal to be savored.


Dealing with more than just combat, Patterson writes of the friendships and camaraderie among the officers and soldiers of different ethnic and class backgrounds who made up the “melting pot division” of the 77th. He betrays little of the postwar disillusionment that afflicted some members of the “Lost Generation.”Editor J. Garry Clifford’s introduction places Patterson and his actions in historical context and illuminates how Patterson applied lessons learned from the GreatWar to his later service as assistant secretary, under secretary, and secretary of war from 1940 to 1947.


 

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Worlds of Production
The Action Frameworks of the Economy
Michael Storper and Robert Salais
Harvard University Press, 1997

This intellectually bold but accessible book seeks to go beyond limitations of the reigning neoclassical and institutional paradigms in explaining the organization of economic activity. It does this by construing “non-economic” factors such as institutions, cultures, and social practices as conventions, which coordinate economic actors by defining specific “frameworks of economic action.” In these conventional frameworks, the standard distinction between economic and non-economic no longer exists. The authors explore in detail four basic frameworks—or “possible worlds of production”—which underpin the mobilization of economic resources, the organization of production systems and factor markets, patterns of economic decision making, and forms of profitability. The case studies examine how these possible worlds act to support innovative production complexes in a variety of sectors in several countries.

Michael Storper and Robert Salais show that economic actors coordinate actions with one another and interpret what others are doing in ways that are constructed by convention. The principal challenge to economic policy today, they argue, is to reconcile internally coherent conventions with the external tests of product and financial markets, which tend increasingly to escape jurisdictional borders. There is no single model of growth and efficiency that brings these two sides together around the world today, even in narrowly defined product markets. If policies are to deal effectively with an increasingly unified global system of flows of commodities, money, and people, they must be aware of the diverse, economically viable action frameworks found in different industries, regions, and nations.

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Worthy Monuments
Art Museums and the Politics of Culture in Nineteenth-Century France
Daniel J. Sherman
Harvard University Press, 1989

Attracting controversy as readily as they do crowds, art museums--the Grand Louvre project and the new Orsay in Paris, or the proposed Whitney and Guggenheim additions in New York, for example--occupy a curious but central position in world culture. Choosing the art museums of provincial France in the previous century as a paradigm, Daniel Sherman reaches toward an understanding of the museum's place in modern society by exploring its past. He uses an array of previously unstudied archival sources as evidence that the museum's emergence as an institution involved not only the intricacies of national policy but also the political dynamics and social fabric of the nineteenth-century city.

The author ascertains that while the French state played an important role in the creation of provincial museums during the Revolutionary era, for much of the next century it was content simply to send works of art to the provinces. When in the 1880s the new Republican regime began to devote more attention to the real purposes and functions of provincial museums, officials were surprised to learn that the initiative had already passed into the hands of local elites who had nurtured their own museums from their inception.

Sherman devotes particular attention to the museums of Bordeaux, Dijon, Marseilles, and Rouen. From their origins as repositories for objects confiscated during the Revolution, they began to attract the attention of local governments, which started to add objects purchased at regional art exhibitions. In the period 1860-1890, monumental buildings were constructed, and these museums became identified with the cities' bourgeois leaders. This central connection with local elites has continued to our own day, and leads into the author's stimulating reflections on the art museum's past, present, and future.

This original and highly readable account should attract those with an interest in cultural institutions and art history in general as well as those who study the history and sociology of modern France.

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The Wrecking of La Salle's Ship Aimable and the Trial of Claude Aigron
By Robert S. Weddle
University of Texas Press, 2009

When Robert Cavelier, sieur de La Salle, landed on the Texas coast in 1685, bent on founding a French colony, his enterprise was doomed to failure. Not only was he hundreds of miles from his intended landfall—the mouth of the Mississippi—but his supply ship, Aimable, was wrecked at the mouth of Matagorda Bay, leaving the colonists with scant provisions and little protection against local Indian tribes. In anger and disgust, he struck out at the ship's captain, Claude Aigron, accusing him of wrecking the vessel purposely and maliciously.

Captain Aigron and his crew escaped the doomed colony by returning to France on the warship that had escorted the expedition on its ocean crossing. Soon after reaching France, Aigron found himself defendant in a civil suit filed by two of his officers seeking recompense for lost salary and personal effects, and then imprisoned on order of King Louis XIV while La Salle's more serious accusations were being investigated.

In this book, Robert Weddle meticulously recounts, through court documents, the known history of Aigron and the Aimable, and finds that despite La Salle's fervent accusations, the facts of the case offer no clear indictment. The court documents, deftly translated by François Lagarde, reveal Captain Aigron's successful defense and illuminate the circumstances of the wreck with Aigron's testimony. Much is also revealed about the French legal system and how the sea laws of the period were applied through the French government's L'Ordonnance de la Marine.

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Writing about the Merovingians in the Early United States
Gregory I. Halfond
Arc Humanities Press, 2023
In a young American republic seeking to define itself in relation to European cultural and political models past and present, it was assumed that the history of Europe’s peoples could be tracked across time over the longue durée. From this perspective, even the barbarous long-haired kings of the distant Merovingian era helped to define the political and cultural identity of a France—and, indeed, a Europe—whose actions Americans recognized as relevant to their own republic. Americans saw medieval parallels not only in the actions of successive French regimes, but in contemporary transatlantic issues of anxiety, including the adjudication of claims of political legitimacy and the debate over the perpetuation of racial slavery. That early American writers located their own meanings in the history of Merovingian Francia is indicative of a less linear, and more diverse and transnational, historiography than previously recognized.
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Writing Faith
Text, Sign, and History in the Miracles of Sainte Foy
Kathleen Ashley and Pamela Sheingorn
University of Chicago Press, 1999
A trickster saint whose miracles reportedly included the healing of an inguinal hernia via a hammer and anvil, Sainte Foy inspired one of the most important collections of miracle stories of the central middle ages. Kathleen Ashley and Pamela Sheingorn explore the act of "writing faith" as performed both by the authors of these stories and by the scholars who have used them as sources for the study of medieval religion and society.

As Ashley and Sheingorn show, differing agendas shaped the miracle stories over time. The first author, Bernard of Angers, used his narratives to critique popular religion and to establish his own literary reputation, while the monks who continued the collection tried to enhance their monastery's prestige. Because these stories were rhetorical constructions, Ashley and Sheingorn argue, we cannot use them directly as sources of historical data. Instead, they demonstrate how analyzing representations common to groups of miracle stories—such as negative portrayals of Muslims on the eve of the Crusades—can reveal the traces of history.

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Writing for Justice
Victor Séjour, the Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, and the Age of Transatlantic Emancipations
Elèna Mortara
Dartmouth College Press, 2015
In Writing for Justice, Elèna Mortara presents a richly layered study of the cultural and intellectual atmosphere of mid-nineteenth-century Europe and the United States, through close readings of the life and work of Victor Séjour, an expat American Creole from New Orleans living in Paris. In addition to writing The Mulatto, an early story on slavery in Saint-Domingue, Séjour penned La Tireuse de cartes (The Fortune-Teller, 1859), a popular play based on the famed Mortara case. In this historical incident, Pope Pius IX kidnapped Edgardo Mortara, the child of a Jewish family living in the Papal States. The details of the play’s production—and its reception on both sides of the Atlantic—are intertwined with the events of the Italian Risorgimento and of pre–Civil War America. Writing for Justice is full of surprising encounters with French and American writers and historical figures, including Hugo, Hawthorne, Twain, Napoleon III, Garibaldi, and Lincoln. As Elèna Mortara passionately argues, the enormous amount of public attention received by the case reveals an era of underappreciated transatlantic intellectual exchange, in which an African American writer used notions of emancipation in religious as well as racial terms, linking the plight of blacks in America to that of Jews in Europe, and to the larger battles for freedom and nationhood advancing across the continent. This book will appeal both to general readers and to scholars, including historians, literary critics, and specialists in African American studies, Jewish, Catholic, or religious studies, multilingual American literature, francophone literature, theatrical life, nineteenth-century European politics, and cross-cultural encounters.
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Writing Japonisme
Aesthetic Translation in Nineteenth-Century French Prose
Pamela A. Genova
Northwestern University Press, 2016

Winner of the SCMLA 2017 Book Award

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, French visual artists began incorporating Japanese forms into their work. The style, known as Japonisme, spanned the arts.

Identifying a general critical move from a literal to a more metaphoric understanding and presentation of Japonisme, Pamela A. Genova applies a theory of "aesthetic translation" to a broad response to Japanese aesthetics within French culture. She crosses the borders of genre, field, and form to explore the relationship of Japanese visual art to French prose writing of the mid- to late 1800s. Writing Japonisme focuses on the work of Edmond de Goncourt, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Émile Zola, and Stéphane Mallarmé as they witnessed, incorporated, and participated in an unprecedented cultural exchange between France and Japan, as both creators and critics. Genova’s original research opens new perspectives on a fertile and influential period of intercultural dynamics.

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The Writing of Melancholy
Modes of Opposition in Early French Modernism
Ross Chambers
University of Chicago Press, 1993
Ross Chambers, an eminent critic of French literature, proposes an original theory of the development of French modernism. His work brings together practical criticism, textual theory, and historical analysis to fashion a new way of thinking about writing and reading as they intersect with history. Along the way, Chambers offers brilliant readings of texts from Madame Bovary to Les Fleurs du mal.

After the failed revolution of 1848, the sense of disillusion that swept through France deeply affected the literature of the time. Chambers argues that literary melancholy and disorientation constituted a symptom of historical conditions rather than, as many other critics contend, a willful resistance to them.

Enriched by careful readings of works by Flaubert, Nerval, Baudelaire, Gautier, and Hugo, this book is a subtle meditation on the powers of writing and reading and a suggestive contribution to current debates over the historical status of literary texts. Originally published in French, the book has been revised and expanded to include a new chapter on Gérard de Nerval's "Sylvie."
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Writing the Lost Generation
Expatriate Autobiography and American Modernism
Craig Monk
University of Iowa Press, 2008
Members of the Lost Generation, American writers and artists who lived in Paris during the 1920s, continue to occupy an important place in our literary history. Rebelling against increased commercialism and the ebb of cosmopolitan society in early twentieth-century America, they rejected the culture of what Ernest Hemingway called a place of “broad lawns and narrow minds.”
      Much of what we know about these iconic literary figures comes from their own published letters and essays, revealing how adroitly they developed their own reputations by controlling the reception of their work. Surprisingly the literary world has paid less attention to their autobiographies.
      In Writing the Lost Generation, Craig Monk unlocks a series of neglected texts while reinvigorating our reading of more familiar ones. Well-known autobiographies by Malcolm Cowley, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein are joined here by works from a variety of lesser-known—but still important—expatriate American writers, including Sylvia Beach, Alfred Kreymborg, Samuel Putnam, and Harold Stearns. By bringing together the self-reflective works of the Lost Generation and probing the ways the writers portrayed themselves, Monk provides an exciting and comprehensive overview of modernist expatriates from the United States.
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