Bücher der Reihe Cambridge Studies in French

This 1986 study of Manon Lescaut draws on various debates in psychoanalysis, feminism and literary criticism. It aims to analyse the narrator's presentation of this story of a young man's passion for a femme fatale and to suggest ways in which feminist criticism can help explain how the text operates.

An important new critical analysis of Derrida's theory of writing, based upon close readings of key texts.

This book poses the question: what happens when reading enters the realist process?

This 1992 book analyses the relation between an emergent modern subjectivity in seventeenth-century French literature, particularly in dramatic works, and the contemporaneous evolution of the absolutist state.

This book analyses the use of the crucial concept of 'taste' in the works of five major seventeenth-century French authors, Mere, Saint Evremond, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyere and Boileau. It combines close readings of important texts with a thoroughgoing political analysis of seventeenth-century French society in terms of class and gender.

This is a 1992 study of writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, mainly in France, but also in Britain and Russia. Its focus is on the establishing and questioning of rational, 'civilized' norms of 'politeness', which in the ancien regime meant not just polite manners, but a certain ideal of society and culture.

This study, first published in 1986, examines the many facets of Mallarmes relationship to the visual arts.

This is a major study of the Nobel prize-winning French novelist Claude Simon. Simon is a complex figure: for all that he writes in a distinctively modern fictional tradition (exemplified by Proust, Joyce, Beckett and Robbe-Grillet), his novels contain strong elements of visual representation alongside a very different king of free-floating, anti-realist writing.

This book examines the problematic area of narrative structure under conditions of severe stress. Each of the four authors, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Rimbaud and Mallarme, is shown to be concerned with the tension between narrative coherence as a desirable goal and an unfortunate check placed on the 'free' play of fantasy.

Drawing on a range of theoretical perspectives developed in and around the work of Barthes, Kristeva, Genette and Derrida, Dr Prendergast explores approaches to the concept of mimesis and relates these to a number of narrative texts produced in the period which literary history familiarly designates as the age of realism.

In this major study Rhiannon Goldthorpe takes up the challenge of Sartre's diversity in an original and provocative way. In addition, by reference to recently published fragments from Sartre's earlier work, Goldthorpe calls into question existing views of Sartre's intellectual development and provides a new history of the crucial Sartrean concept of 'commitment'.

Since the appearance of Bakhtin's famous study of Rabelais and popular culture, Rabelais's writings have been a major focus of debate in literary and cultural criticism. Jerome Schwartz draws on both sides of the historical/formalist debate in this new reading of the four authentic books of Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel.

This highly original study is concerned with the theory of knowledge. It approaches the subject in a new way by exploring the recurrent paradox which equates pure ignorance with perfect knowledge, twin ideals free from the impurities and imperfections of discourse.

This book is a major study of the development of French poetry in the Renaissance, which examines changes in style and vision by looking both at how poetry was read in this period and how it was written.

This is a history of Jean-Paul Sartre's monthly review Les Temps Modernes, an immensely influential publication launched in 1945. The journal set out from the beginning to effect a revolutionary redefinition of psychology, sociology, political theory and anthropology, in order to assist in the socialist transformation of France and the world.

This is the first book-length study of Flaubert's use of dialogue, an important but neglected component of his fictional texts. Professor Haig's starting point is Sartre's observation that 'Flaubert does not believe that we speak: we are spoken'.

This major new study takes issue both with the traditional critical view that Flaubert's central characters are weak and with the approach adopted by a number of contemporary critics who claim that character is deliberately undermined in the interests of non-representational writing.

This book explores a fundamental paradox within Mallarme work as a whole.

This book is an intensive study of what was by far the most productive year in Baudelaire's literary career. It combines biographical investigation with detailed textual analysis in order to locate the sources of the extraordinary 'explosion' (Baudelaires' own word) of poetic creativity that he experienced during that year.

This book offers crucial perspectives on the vexed question of chronology in Flaubert's work. Claire Addison argues that Flaubert's manipulation of dates is deliberate and sheds light on the subtle and complex interplay between the life and work of the author.

A feminist analysis which combines a psychoanalytic perspective on catastrophic birth with the politics of reproduction in the emergent democracy of nineteenth-century France.

This study focuses on Denis Diderot, whose experimentation with presenting critical knowledge exemplifies the Enlightenment's struggle to produce a rationalist critique of all prior knowledge.

This 1992 book studies the importance of typographic shapes in French Renaissance literature in the context of psychoanalysis and of the history of printed writing.This book studies the importance of typographic shapes in French Renaissance literature in the context of psychoanalysis and of the history of printed writing.

This 1993 book examines the ways in which Pascal posed and solved intellectual problems in his immense and varied output. Hugh Davidson shows how three of the classical 'liberal arts', rhetoric, dialectic and geometry, pervade Pascal's method as liberating and guiding influences in his search for truth.

This book casts new light on the work of Francois Villon, one of the most famous but least understood poets of the later Middle Ages. Jane Taylor points to the flair and originality of Villon's poetry, and the urgency and brilliance of his poetic dialogue with his predecessors and contemporaries.

Timothy Mathews examines work by a range of writers and painters working in France in the twentieth century. This well-illustrated book engages with canonical figures - Marguerite Duras, Jean Genet and Roland Barthes, Pablo Picasso and Rene Magritte - as well as more neglected individuals including Robert Desnos and Jean Fautrier.

In this wide-ranging study of Old French and Occitan literature, Simon Gaunt draws on contemporary feminist theory to examine how masculinity, as well as femininity, is constructed in these texts, and shows the crucial role of gender in the formation of the ideologies that underpin medieval literary genres.

In Naturalist Fiction, the first major study of naturalist fiction as a distinct literary genre, Professor Baguley focuses mainly on French naturalist literature, analysing a number of key works in detail, as well as drawing on examples from other national traditions, particularly from the English novel.

This study of Baudelaire's writings applies the principles of socioanalysis to literary history and cultural studies. By resituating psychoanalysis in its socio-economic and cultural context, this framework provides an illuminating approach to Baudelaire's poetry and art criticism.

Dr Scott argues that only by attending to the precise locations of words in line or stanza, and to the specific value of syllables, or by understanding the often conflicting demands of rhythm and metre, can the reader of poetry acquire a real grasp of the intimate life of words in verse with all their fluctuations of meaning, mood and tone.