BiblioVault - Books about French

Iberville's Gulf Journals

Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville, translated by Richebourg Gaillard McWilliams

University of Alabama Press, 1991

Europe's expansion into the New World during the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries was a story of power alignment and cultural transmission as well as dramatic individual effort. Spain had her conquistadores, France her coureurs de bois, and England her sea dogs. Isolated from the authority of home governments, tempted by the abundance of gold, fur, and fish in the New World, these adventurers so vital to national policies of expansion developed their own personal creeds of conquest and colonization. Their individual exploits not only represent a humanistic theme essential in Europe's movement westward but heighten the analyses of cultural institutions of the era. It is within such a multidisciplinary light that one can experience the Gulf Coast adventures of Pierre LeMoyne d'Iberville.

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Image and Theme

Studies in Modern French Fiction: Bernanos, Malraux, Sarraute, Gide, Martin Du Gard

W. M. Frohock

Harvard University Press, 1969

These five monographs utilize recent advances in image-study and thematics to explore previously uninvestigated aspects of the works of five important French novelists. Viewed together, the individual monographs present variations on a systematic approach to the close study of French fiction. W.M. Frohock's introduction provides an explication of the relationships among the monographs, describes the basic research method employed, and enlarges upon underlying theoretical assumptions.

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Images of America in Revolutionary France

Michèle R. Morris, Editor

Georgetown University Press, 1990

This bilingual collection of essays, the fruits of a conference held in 1989 to commemorate the join Bicentennials of Georgetown University and the French Revolution, illuminates the various ways in which the American Revolution and its aftermath directly and indirectly influenced France before and after the French Revolution. The essays cluster around several basic themes: the condition of Native Americans and African-Americans, French perceptions of political, religious, and economic issues in the new republic, and the ways in which French images of America were affected by travel literature and the performing and plastic arts. The intercultural and interdisciplinary approaches taken by the fifteen authors are equally various and include social and political history, literary history and criticism, and linguistics.

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In the King's Wake

Post-Absolutist Culture in France

Jay Caplan

University of Chicago Press, 1999

Long before the guillotines of the 1789 Revolution brought a grisly political end to the ancien régime, Jay Caplan argues, the culture of absolutism had already perished. In the King's Wake traces the emergence of a post-absolutist culture across a wide range of works and genres: Saint-Simon's memoirs of Louis XIV and the Regency; Voltaire's first tragedy, Oedipe; Watteau's last great painting, L'Enseigne de Gersaint; the plays of Marivaux; and Casanova's History of My Life.

While absolutist culture had focused on value directly represented in people (e.g., those of noble blood) and things (e.g., coins made of precious metals), post-absolutist culture instead explored the capacity of signs to stand for something real (e.g., John Law's banknotes or Marivaux's plays in which actions rather than birth signify nobility). Between the image of the Sun King and visions of the godlike Romantic self, Caplan discovers a post-absolutist France wracked by surprisingly modern conflicts over the true sources of value and legitimacy.

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In the Skin of a Beast

Sovereignty and Animality in Medieval France

Peggy McCracken

University of Chicago Press, 2017

In medieval literature, when humans and animals meet—whether as friends or foes—issues of mastery and submission are often at stake. In the Skin of a Beast shows how the concept of sovereignty comes to the fore in such narratives, reflecting larger concerns about relations of authority and dominion at play in both human-animal and human-human interactions.

Peggy McCracken discusses a range of literary texts and images from medieval France, including romances in which animal skins appear in symbolic displays of power, fictional explorations of the wolf’s desire for human domestication, and tales of women and snakes converging in a representation of territorial claims and noble status. These works reveal that the qualities traditionally used to define sovereignty—lineage and gender among them—are in fact mobile and contingent. In medieval literary texts, as McCracken demonstrates, human dominion over animals is a disputed model for sovereign relations among people: it justifies exploitation even as it mandates protection and care, and it depends on reiterations of human-animal difference that paradoxically expose the tenuous nature of human exceptionalism.

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Insiders' French

Beyond the Dictionary

Eleanor Levieux and Michel Levieux

University of Chicago Press, 1999

If you had been living in France in the 1990s, the language you would have heard on the radio and television or seen in the newspapers would be far removed from the French language of ten or twenty years ago. The country and its language have changed tremendously in a relatively short period of time, and, as a result, English speakers with a grounding in French can still find themselves struggling to understand terms commonly encountered in contemporary French society. Luckily, Eleanor and Michel Levieux now bring us up to date with their Insiders' French, an utterly entertaining and informative guide to the language of the "new France."

This "new France" is a country poised to experience the European single currency but uncertain about being part of Europe. It is hooked on fast food but ambivalent about the country where it originated. France today has record unemployment and an increasingly controversial immigrant population. Clearly, given the rapidly changing conditions and lifestyles, conventional French dictionaries alone cannot completely inform readers and visitors. Insiders' French offers a solution to the incomprehension, a unique handbook in which you'll find the language of European union, the space program, abortion and women's rights, high-tech industries, and health care, among other topics. Entries proceed by association of ideas and related terms, with extensive cross-referencing, while still being alphabetized for easy reference like a standard dictionary. Cartoons from major French journals add to your understanding and enjoyment.

Insiders' French opens up the secret territory of French politics and culture that is often not understood by visitors or students, and it does so with wit and verve—qualities that remain in the French language despite its recent changes.

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Intratextual Baudelaire

The Sequential Fabric of the Fleurs du mal and Spleen de Paris

Randolph Paul Runyon

The Ohio State University Press, 2010

Intratextual Baudelaire: The Sequential Fabric of the Fleurs du mal and Spleen de Paris by Randolph Paul Runyon provides a new and provocative answer to the question that has intrigued readers for years: did the poet arrange the Fleurs du mal in a meaningful order? Runyon believes so, but not in the way most have conceived the question.

Barbey d’Aurevilly’s claim that there was a “secret architecture” hidden in the Fleurs has long misled scholars by leading them to look for some overarching hierarchical organization, when they should have been looking for how the poems actually fit together, each to each, in the sequential fabric of the text. This is what Runyon has done, in a meticulous reading of every poem and its place in the sequence. Intratextual Baudelaire provides the most thorough analysis available of the textual changes Baudelaire made between the first and second editions and shows why he made them: so that the sequential structure would be preserved despite the addition of new poems and the deletion of those judged obscene.

Extending his analysis to the Spleen de Paris with the same attention to detail and awareness of textual changes, Runyon shows that Baudelaire’s prose-poem collection displays the same rigorous sequential structure. Both collections are revealed as marvels of self-referential intratextuality. Whether one agrees with Runyon or not, Intratextual Baudelaire will certainly generate discussion among French studies scholars.

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The Inventors

And Other Poems

René Char

Seagull Books, 2015

One of the foremost poets of the French Resistance, René Char has been hailed by Donald Revell as “the conscience of modern French poetry.” Translated by Mark Hutchinson, The Inventors is a companion volume to Char’s critically acclaimed Hypnos. It gathers more than forty poems that represent a cross-section of Char’s mature work, spanning from 1936 to 1988. All three genres of Char’s work are represented here: verse poems, prose poems, and the abrupt, lapidary propositions for which he is best known. These maxima sententia combine the terseness of La Rochefoucauld with the probing and sometimes riddling character of the fragments of Heraclitus.

The Inventors includes a brief introduction to Char’s life and work, as well as a series of notes on the backstories of the works, which explain allusions that may not be immediately familiar to the English-speaking reader. These new translations stay true to the originals, while at the same time conveying much of the music and beauty of the French poems.

Praise for René Char
“Char, I believe, is a poet who will tower over twentieth-century French poetry.”—George Steiner

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Involuntary Confessions of the Flesh in Early Modern France

Nora Martin Peterson

University of Delaware Press, 2017

Involuntary Confessions of the Flesh in Early Modern France was inspired by the observation that small slips of the flesh (involuntary confessions of the flesh) are omnipresent in early modern texts of many kinds. These slips (which bear similarities to what we would today call the Freudian slip) disrupt and destabilize readings of body, self, and text—three categories whose mutual boundaries this book seeks to soften—but also, in their very messiness, participate in defining them. Involuntary Confessions capitalizes on the uncertainty of such volatile moments, arguing that it is instability itself that provides the tools to navigate and understand the complexity of the early modern world. Rather than locate the body within any one discourse (Foucauldian, psychoanalytic), this book argues that slips of the flesh create a liminal space not exactly outside of discourse, but not necessarily subject to it, either. Involuntary confessions of the flesh reveal the perpetual and urgent challenge of early modern thinkers to textually confront and define the often tenuous relationship between the body and the self. By eluding and frustrating attempts to contain it, the early modern body reveals that truth is as much about surfaces as it is about interior depth, and that the self is fruitfully perpetuated by the conflict that proceeds from seemingly irreconcilable narratives.

Interdisciplinary in its scope, Involuntary Confessions of the Flesh in Early Modern France pairs major French literary works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (by Marguerite de Navarre, Montaigne, Madame de Lafayette) with cultural documents (confession manuals, legal documents about the application of torture, and courtly handbooks). It is the first study of its kind to bring these discourses into thematic (rather than linear or chronological) dialog. In so doing, it emphasizes the shared struggle of many different early modern conversations to come to terms with the body’s volatility.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

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Italian Chronicles

Raymond N. Stendhal

University of Minnesota Press, 2017

Nineteenth-century French writer Marie-Henri Beyle, better known by his pen name Stendhal, is one of the earliest leading practitioners of realism, his stories filled with sharp analyses of his characters’ psychology. This translation of Stendhal’s Chroniques italiennes is a collection of nine tales written between 1829 and 1840, many of which were published only after his death. Together these collected tales reveal a great novelist working with highly dramatic subject matter to forge a vision of life lived at its most intense.

The setting for these tales is a romanticized Italy, a place Stendhal viewed as unpolluted by bourgeois inhibitions and conformism. From the hothouse atmosphere of aristocratic convents to the horrors of the Cenci family, the tales in Italian Chronicles all feature passionate, transgressive characters engaged in “la chasse au bonheur”—the quest for happiness. Most of the tragic, violent tales are based on historical events, with Stendhal using history to validate his characters’ extreme behaviors as they battle literal and figurative oppression and try to break through to freedom.

Complete with revenge, bloody daggers, poisonings, and thick-walled nunneries, this new translation of Italian Chronicles includes four never-before-translated stories and a fascinating introduction detailing the origins of the book. It is sure to gratify established Stendhal fans as well as readers new to the writer.

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An Italian Journey

Jean Giono

Northwestern University Press, 1998

In An Italian Journey, Jean Giono describes his journey to the land of his father's people. A reluctant traveler (he rarely left Provence), Giono discovers a strange beauty not only in the palazzi and canals of Venice but also in wistful waiters, suspicious hairdressers, pugnacious men of God, recalcitrant coffeemakers, umbrellas, and field machinery. In Giono's world a stamp collectors' market can appear to verge on revolution and inept municipal musicians suddenly offer Mozartian joys.

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