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     In Fiction Rivals Science, Allen Thiher describes the epistemic rivalry that the major nineteenth-century French novelists felt in dealing with science. After brief considerations of Stendhal, Thiher focuses on the four most important "realist" novelists in France: Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, and, going into the twentieth century, Proust. According to Thiher, each of these novelists considered himself to be in competition with science to make the novel an instrument for knowledge.

The first chapter sets forth the understanding of science that dominated the early nineteenth century in order to make it plausible that literary minds, throughout the nineteenth century, thought that they could not only rival science, but even make positive contributions to knowledge. The Newtonian paradigm that had dominated the Enlightenment was slowly being challenged by new developments both in physics and in nonphysical sciences such as biology. Especially in biology the development of a scientific discourse using narrative temporality favored the idea that novelists could also use fiction to construct discourses that advanced knowledge.

Balzac wanted to construct a natural history of society and correct the chemical theory of his time. Flaubert drew upon medicine and physiology for the rhetoric of his realist fiction. Zola used unsuccessful medical paradigms for his doctrine of heredity, and models drawn from thermodynamics to describe the relation of the individual to societal forces. Finally, Proust drew upon thinkers such as Poincar‚ to elaborate an epistemology that put an end to the rivalry novelists might feel with scientists. Proust located certain knowledge within the realm of human subjectivity while granting the power of laws to rule over the contingent realm of physical reality, in which, after Poincar‚, neither mathematics nor Newton was any longer a source of absolute certainty. Proust's novel is thus the last great realist work of the nineteenth century and the first modernist work of consciousness taking itself as the object of knowledge.

By demonstrating that the great French realist novelists dealt with many of the same problems as did the scientists of the nineteenth century, Fiction Rivals Science attempts to show how culture unites literary and scientific inquiry into knowledge. Providing a new interpretation of the development of literary realism, this important new work will be welcomed not only by literary scholars, but by historians of science and culture as well.

Considering Sappho as a creature of translation and interpretation, a figment whose features have changed with social mores and aesthetics, Joan DeJean constructs a fascinating history of the sexual politics of literary reception. The association of Sappho with female homosexuality has made her a particularly compelling and yet problematic subject of literary speculation; and in the responses of different cultures to the challenge the poet presents, DeJean finds evidence of the standards imposed on female sexuality through the ages. She focuses largely though not exclusively on the French tradition, where the Sapphic presence is especially pervasive. Tracing re-creations of Sappho through translation and fiction from the mid-sixteenth century to the period just prior to World War II, DeJean shows how these renderings reflect the fantasies and anxieties of each writer as well as the mentalité of his or her day.

In Figurations of France: Literary Nation-Building in Times of Crisis (1550-1650), Marcus Keller explores the often indirect and subtle ways in which key texts of early modern French literature, from Joachim Du Bellay’s Défense et illustration de la langue française to Corneille’s Le Cid, contribute to the fiction of France as a nation. Through his fresh take on these and other classics, he shows that they not only create the French as an imaginary community but also provide venues for an incisive critique of the political and cultural construct that underpins the modern nation-state.

Current theories of nationhood, in particular the concepts of the nation form and fictive ethnicity (Étienne Balibar), inform the close readings of Du Bellay’s Défense, Ronsard’s Discours, d’Aubigné’s Tragiques, Montaigne’s Essays, Malherbe’s odes, and Corneille’s Le Cid and Horace. They reveal the imaginary power and unifying force of early modern figurations of France that come to bear in this heteregoneous corpus of French literature, with texts ranging from manifesto and epic poem to essay and tragedy. Situating each author and text in their particular historical context, the study suggests that the literary invention of France in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is as abundant as it is conceptually innovative: Du Bellay, for example, develops an idea of France by portraying the French language as a pruned and grafted tree while d’Aubigné proposes to think of the French as a nuclear but fatherless family. Blood functions as a highly charged metaphor of nationhood in all texts.

Opening up new perspectives on these canonical works, the focus on literary nation-building also puts them into unexpected and thought-provoking relationships to each other. Figurations of France deliberately crosses the fictive boundary between the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries and argues that, in terms of imaginary nation-building, the contours that delineate the early modern period and separate it from what we call the modern era quickly begin to dissolve. Ultimately, the book makes the case for early modern literature as a creative and critical discourse, able to nourish and nuance our thinking about the nation as the postmodern nation-state is increasingly called into question by the economical, political, and cultural effects of globalization.

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

Ubiquitous in the streets and brothels of nineteenth-century Paris, the prostitute was even more so in the novels and paintings of the time. Charles Bernheimer discusses how these representations of the sexually available woman express male ambivalence about desire, money, class, and the body. Interweaving close textual analysis with historical anecdote and theoretical speculation, Bernheimer demonstrates how the formal properties of art can serve strategically to control anxious fantasies about female sexual power. Drawing on methods derived from cultural studies, psychoanalysis, social history, feminist theory, and narrative analysis, this interdisciplinary classic (available now for the first time in paperback) was awarded Honorable Mention in 1990 for the James Russell Lowell prize awarded by the Modern Language Association for the best book of criticism.

Figures of the World: The Naturalist Novel and Transnational Form overturns Eurocentric genealogies and globalizing generalizations about “world literature” by examining the complex, contradictory history of naturalist fiction. Christopher Laing Hill follows naturalism’s emergence in France and circulation around the world from North and South America to East Asia. His analysis shows that transnational literary studies must operate on multiple scales, combine distant reading with close analysis, and investigate how literary forms develop on the move.
 
The book begins by tracing the history of naturalist fiction from the 1860s into the twentieth century and the reasons it spread around the world. Hill explores the development of three naturalist figures—the degenerate body, the self-liberated woman, and the social milieu—through close readings of fiction from France, Japan, and the United States. Rather than genealogies of European influence or the domination of cultural “peripheries” by the center, novels by Émile Zola, Tayama Katai, Frank Norris, and other writers reveal conspicuous departures from metropolitan models as writers revised naturalist methods to address new social conditions. Hill offers a new approach to studying culture on a large scale for readers interested in literature, the arts, and the history of ideas.
 

Andre Penicaut, a carpenter, sailed with Iberville to the French province of Louisiana in 1699 and did not return to France until 1721. The book he began in the province and finished upon his return to France is an eyewitness account of the first years of the French colony, which stretched along the Gulf Coast from Florida to Texas and in the Mississippi Valley from the Balize to the Illinois country. As a ship carpenter, Penicaut was chosen as a member of several important expeditions: he accompanied Le Sueur up the Mississippi River in 1700 to present-day Minnesota, and he went with Juchereau de St. Denis on the first journey from Mobile to the Red River and overland to the Rio Grande, to open trade with the Spaniards in Mexico. Penicaut helped to build the first post in Louisiana, at Old Biloxi, and the second post on the Mobile River.

Penicaut was at his best when describing the lives and social customs of the Indians of the region. He saw them in realistic terms, showing no prejudice toward their native habits. Neither were his French colleagues cast in heroic or villainous molds—though their accomplishments must strike modern readers as truly epic.

When first published, Fleur de Lys and Calumet was a major stimulus to scholarship in the field. This new edition will be welcomed by a new generation of scholars and readers interested in the colonial history of the Deep South and the Mississippi Valley.

Situated at the head of the Alabama River system—at the juncture of the Coosa and Tallapoosa rivers—Fort Toulouse in 1717 was planned to keep the local Indians neutral, if not loyal, to the French and contain the British in their southernmost Atlantic colonies. Unlike the usual frontier settlements, Fort Toulouse was both a diplomatic post, since its officers acted as resident ministers, and a military post. Because it was located in a friendly territory adjoining an area under a rival (British) influence, the post participated in psychological warfare rather than in blood-letting. It used trade and aid, and was familiar with spies and double-agents—welcoming and debriefing British defectors; no cannon was discharged in anger at Toulouse.

The most eminent figure to have been connected directly with Fort Toulouse was General Andrew Jackson, who established a military post there during the War of 1812 after his victory over the Indians at Horseshoe Bend. The outpost was named Fort Jackson in his honor and played a key role in the treaty negotiations and eventual settlement of the Indian land by Americans.

In addition to discussing geopolitical and military affairs and diplomatic relations with Indian chiefs, Thomas describes daily life at the post and the variety of interactions between residents and visitors. Waselkov's introduction places the original 1960 book within the context of the existing scholarship of that time and adds an extensive and enlightening review of the most recent archaeological and historical research to Thomas' pioneering work.

       This wide-ranging book is the first to offer---in one volume---detailed
        results of many of the investigations of French colonial sites made in
        the mid-continent during the last decade. It includes work done at Fort
        St. Louis, Fort de Chartres, Fort Massac, French Peoria, Cahokia, Prairie
        du Pont, Prairie du Rocher, and other locations controlled by the French
        during a time when their dominance in North America was more than twice
        that of Britain and Spain combined.
      Five of the book's fifteen chapters summarize major excavations at colonial
        fortifications, four of which are public monuments that currently attract
        thousands of visitors each year. Another five chapters deal with French
        colonial villages, and the remainder of the book is devoted to diet, trade,
        the role of historic documents in the reconstruction of life on the French
        colonial frontier, and other topics.
 

A tectonic shift has occurred in the gastronomic field in France, upsetting the cultural imagination. In a European country captivated by a high-stakes power struggle between chefs and restaurants in the culinary field, the mass marketing of factory-processed industrial cuisine and fast foods has created shock waves in French society, culture, and the economy. 

In this insightful book, French Gastronomy and the Magic of Americanism, Rick Fantasia examines how national identity and the dynamics of cultural meaning-making within gastronomy have changed during a crucial period of transformation, from the 1970s through the 1990s. He illuminates the tensions and surprising points of cooperation between the skill, expertise, tradition, artistry, and authenticity of grand chefs and the industrial practices of food production, preparation, and distribution. 

Fantasia examines the institutions and beliefs that have reinforced notions of French cultural supremacy—such as the rise and reverence of local cuisine—as well as the factors that subvert those notions, such as when famous French chefs lend their names to processed, frozen, and pre-packaged foods available at the supermarket. Ultimately, French Gastronomy and the Magic of Americanism shows what happens to a cultural field, like French gastronomy, when the logic and power of the economic field imposes itself upon it.

Brilliantly uniting the personal and the critical, French Lessons is a powerful autobiographical experiment. It tells the story of an American woman escaping into the French language and of a scholar and teacher coming to grips with her history of learning. Kaplan begins with a distinctly American quest for an imaginary France of the intelligence. But soon her infatuation with all things French comes up against the dark, unimagined recesses of French political and cultural life.

The daughter of a Jewish lawyer who prosecuted Nazi war criminals at Nuremburg, Kaplan grew up in the 1960s in the Midwest. After her father's death when she was seven, French became her way of "leaving home" and finding herself in another language and culture. In spare, midwestern prose, by turns intimate and wry, Kaplan describes how, as a student in a Swiss boarding school and later in a junior year abroad in Bordeaux, she passionately sought the French "r," attentively honed her accent, and learned the idioms of her French lover.

When, as a graduate student, her passion for French culture turned to the elegance and sophistication of its intellectual life, she found herself drawn to the language and style of the novelist Louis-Ferdinand Celine. At the same time she was repulsed by his anti-Semitism. At Yale in the late 70s, during the heyday of deconstruction she chose to transgress its apolitical purity and work on a subject "that made history impossible to ignore:" French fascist intellectuals. Kaplan's discussion of the "de Man affair" — the discovery that her brilliant and charismatic Yale professor had written compromising articles for the pro-Nazi Belgian press—and her personal account of the paradoxes of deconstruction are among the most compelling available on this subject.

French Lessons belongs in the company of Sartre's Words and the memoirs of Nathalie Sarraute, Annie Ernaux, and Eva Hoffman. No book so engrossingly conveys both the excitement of learning and the moral dilemmas of the intellectual life.

French Women Authors examines the importance afforded the spiritual in the lives and works of French women authors over the centuries, thereby highlighting both the significance of spiritually informed writings in French literature in general, as well as the specific contribution made by women writers. Eleven different authors have been selected for this collection, representing major literary periods from the medieval to the (post)modern. Each author is examined in the light of a Christian worldview, creating an approach which both validates and interrogates the spiritual dimension of the works under consideration. At the same time, the book as a whole presents a broad perspective on French women writers, showing how they reflect or stand in opposition to their times. The chronological order of the chapters reveals an evolution in the modes of spirituality expressed by these authors and in the role of spiritual belief or religion in French society over time. From the overwhelmingly Christian culture of the Middle Ages and pre-Enlightenment France to the wide diversity prevalent in (post)modern times, including the rise of Islam within French borders, a radical shift has permeated French society, a shift that is reflected in the writers chosen for this book. Moreover, the sensitivity of women writers to the individual side of spiritual life, in contrast with the practices of organized religion, also emerges as a major trend in this book, with women often being seen as a voice for social and religious change, or for a more meaningful, personal faith. Lastly, despite a blatant rejection of God and religion, spiritual threads still run through the works of one of France’s most celebrated contemporary writers (Marguerite Duras), whose cry for an absolute in the midst of a spiritual vacuum only reiterates the quest for transcendence or for some form of spiritual expression, as voiced in the works of her female predecessors and contemporaries in France, and as demonstrated in this book.

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

The noted historian Richard Cobb presents an engaging synthesis of research, combined with highly original observations and analyses of the war years in France. The reader is given access to a unique private chronicle of the relations between occupants and occupés, which provides the “I was there” understanding that is a hallmark of Cobb’s well-known ability to humanize history. The author characterizes this work as “an essay in interpretation and imagination, an evocation drawing heavily on literary, or semi-literary, sources and even on autobiography, rather than a straight piece of history. The book is about people, individuals, rather than about institutions and administration.” A recognized classic is now back in print.

Compared to other nationalities, few French have immigrated to the United States, and the state of Michigan is no exception in that regard. Although the French came in small numbers, those who did settle in or pass through Michigan played important roles as either permanent residents or visitors.
The colonial French served as explorers, soldiers, missionaries, fur traders, and colonists. Later, French priests and nuns were influential in promoting Catholicism in the state and in developing schools and hospitals. Father Gabriel Richard fled the violence of the French Revolution and became a prominent and influential citizen of the state as a U.S. Congressman and one of the founders of the University of Michigan. French observers of Michigan life included Alexis de Tocqueville. French entrepreneurs opened copper mines and a variety of service-oriented businesses. Louis Fasquelle became the first foreign-language instructor at the University of Michigan, and François A. Artault introduced photography to the Upper Peninsula. As pioneers of the early automobile, the French made a major contribution to the language used in auto manufacturing.

Among the best-known and most prolific French women writers of the sixteenth century, Madeleine (1520–87) and Catherine (1542–87) des Roches were celebrated not only for their uncommonly strong mother-daughter bond but also for their bold assertion of poetic authority for women in the realm of belles lettres. The Dames des Roches excelled in a variety of genres, including poetry, Latin and Italian translations, correspondence, prose dialogues, pastoral drama, and tragicomedy; collected in From Mother and Daughter are selections from their celebrated oeuvre, suffused with an engaging and enduring feminist consciousness.
 
Madeleine and Catherine spent their entire lives in civil war–torn Poitiers, where a siege of the city, vandalism, and desecration of churches fueled their political and religious commentary. Members of an elite literary circle that would inspire salon culture during the next century, the Dames des Roches addressed the issues of the day, including the ravages of religious civil wars, the weak monarchy, education for women, marriage and the family, violence against women, and the status of women intellectuals. Through their collaborative engagement in shared public discourse, both mother and daughter were models of moral, political, and literary agency.

The Lexicon brings together lexical material from a wide range of published and non-published sources to create an extensive compilation of the vocabulary of Fulfulde as it is spoken in that part of central Mali known as Masina (in Fulfulde, Maasina). The Lexicon is intended primarily for non-Fulfulde speakers who are learning the language at the intermediate or advanced levels and who need access to a comprehensive reference source on Fulfulde vocabulary. Scholars, development workers, and others whose research or fieldwork involves use of the Fulfulde of Masina may find it helpful as well in clarifying nuances of meaning and standardized spelling for the less familiar terms they might encounter. It is also intended that the present work, beyond the matter of organizing vocabulary, will contribute significantly to the expanding lexicographical and linguistic investigations of Fulfulde.