Evil: A History in Modern French Literature and Thought

Evil: A History in Modern French Literature and Thought

Author: Damian Catani

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2013-02-14

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 1441185070

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In this original, interdisciplinary approach to evil in French literature, Damian Catani links literary depictions of evil with cultural events to chart a history of the concept in some of the most important texts in modern literature. Beginning with Balzac and Baudelaire, Catani covers the restoration and the Second Empire before interpreting how Catholic stereotypes of the 'evil feminine' and new scientific theories impacted the work of Lautréamont and Zola. Moving into the twentieth century, evil is then explored in terms of the Self, power, knowledge and politics through readings of Proust, Céline, Sartre and Foucault. By seamlessly bringing together aesthetic, philosophical, historical and ideological concerns to read key French writers from the 18th to the 21st century, this study argues why a broader treatment of literary evils is vital to understanding our contemporary moral and political climate.


A History of Modern French Literature

A History of Modern French Literature

Author: Christopher Prendergast

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2017-02-21

Total Pages: 737

ISBN-13: 1400885043

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An accessible and authoritative new history of French literature, written by a highly distinguished transatlantic group of scholars This book provides an engaging, accessible, and exciting new history of French literature from the Renaissance through the twentieth century, from Rabelais and Marguerite de Navarre to Samuel Beckett and Assia Djebar. Christopher Prendergast, one of today's most distinguished authorities on French literature, has gathered a transatlantic group of more than thirty leading scholars who provide original essays on carefully selected writers, works, and topics that open a window onto key chapters of French literary history. The book begins in the sixteenth century with the formation of a modern national literary consciousness, and ends in the late twentieth century with the idea of the "national" coming increasingly into question as inherited meanings of "French" and "Frenchness" expand beyond the geographical limits of mainland France. Provides an exciting new account of French literary history from the Renaissance to the end of the twentieth century Features more than thirty original essays on key writers, works, and topics, written by a distinguished transatlantic group of scholars Includes an introduction and index The contributors include Etienne Beaulieu, Christopher Braider, Peter Brooks, Mary Ann Caws, David Coward, Nicholas Cronk, Edwin M. Duval, Mary Gallagher, Raymond Geuss, Timothy Hampton, Nicholas Harrison, Katherine Ibbett, Michael Lucey, Susan Maslan, Eric Méchoulan, Hassan Melehy, Larry F. Norman, Nicholas Paige, Roger Pearson, Christopher Prendergast, Jean-Michel Rabaté, Timothy J. Reiss, Sarah Rocheville, Pierre Saint-Amand, Clive Scott, Catriona Seth, Judith Sribnai, Joanna Stalnaker, Aleksandar Stević, Kate E. Tunstall, Steven Ungar, and Wes Williams.


An Introduction to 16th-century French Literature and Thought

An Introduction to 16th-century French Literature and Thought

Author: Neil Kenny

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2014-02-25

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 1472521358

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The age of Shakespeare, Cervantes, Erasmus, Luther, and Machiavelli produced in France too some of Europe's greatest ever literature and thought: Montaigne's Essays, Rabelais' comic fictions, Ronsard's poetry, Calvin's theology. These and numerous other extraordinary writings emerged from and contributed to cultural upheavals: the movement usually known as the Renaissance, which sought to revive ancient Greek and Roman culture for present-day purposes; religious reform, including the previously unthinkable rejection of Catholicism by many in the Reformation, culminating in decades of civil war in France; the French language's transformation into an instrument for advanced abstract thought. This book introduces this vibrant literature and thought via an apparent paradox. Most writers were profoundly concerned to improve life in the here-and-now - socially, politically, morally, spiritually. Yet they often tried to do so by making detours, in their writing, to other times and places: antiquity; heaven and hell; the hidden recesses of Nature, the cosmos, or the future; the remote location of an absent loved one; the newly 'discovered' Americas.The point was to show readers that the only way to live in the here-and-now was to connect it to larger realities - cosmic, spiritual, and historical.


Encyclopedia of Modern French Thought

Encyclopedia of Modern French Thought

Author: Christopher John Murray

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-01-11

Total Pages: 748

ISBN-13: 1135455643

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In this wide-ranging guide to twentieth-century French thought, leading scholars offer an authoritative multi-disciplinary analysis of one of the most distinctive and influential traditions in modern thought. Unlike any other existing work, this important work covers not only philosophy, but also all the other major disciplines, including literary theory, sociology, linguistics, political thought, theology, and more.


Less Rightly Said

Less Rightly Said

Author: Antonia Szabari

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2009-10-23

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0804773548

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Well-known scholars and poets living in sixteenth-century France, including Erasmus, Ronsard, Calvin, and Rabelais, promoted elite satire that "corrected vices" but "spared the person"—yet this period, torn apart by religious differences, also saw the rise of a much cruder, personal satire that aimed at converting readers to its ideological, religious, and, increasingly, political ideas. By focusing on popular pamphlets along with more canonical works, Less Rightly Said shows that the satirists did not simply renounce the moral ideal of elite, humanist scholarship but rather transmitted and manipulated that scholarship according to their ideological needs. Szabari identifies the emergence of a political genre that provides us with a more thorough understanding of the culture of printing and reading, of the political function of invectives, and of the general role of dissensus in early modern French society.


Questions of Influence in Modern French Literature

Questions of Influence in Modern French Literature

Author: T. Baldwin

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2013-10-31

Total Pages: 339

ISBN-13: 1137309148

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This collection engages with questions of influence, a vexed and problematic concept whose intellectual history is both ancient and vast. It examines a range of texts written in French, sometimes in dialogue with visual/musical works, drawn mainly from the eighteenth century onwards. Connections are made with related work in a range of disciplines.


The Columbia History of Twentieth-century French Thought

The Columbia History of Twentieth-century French Thought

Author: Lawrence D. Kritzman

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 828

ISBN-13: 9780231107914

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Unrivaled in its scope and depth, "The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought" assesses the intellectual figures, movements, and publications that helped shape and define fields as diverse as history and historiography, psychoanalysis, film, literary theory, cognitive and life sciences, literary criticism, philosophy, and economics. More than two hundred entries by leading intellectuals discuss developments in French thought on such subjects as pacifism, fashion, gastronomy, technology, and urbanism. Contributors include prominent French thinkers, many of whom have played an integral role in the development of French thought, and American, British, and Canadian scholars who have been vital in the dissemination of French ideas.


The Shock of the Ancient

The Shock of the Ancient

Author: Larry F. Norman

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2011-04-15

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 0226591506

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The cultural battle known as the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns served as a sly cover for more deeply opposed views about the value of literature and the arts. One of the most public controversies of early modern Europe, the Quarrel has most often been depicted as pitting antiquarian conservatives against the insurgent critics of established authority. The Shock of the Ancient turns the canonical vision of those events on its head by demonstrating how the defenders of Greek literature—rather than clinging to an outmoded tradition—celebrated the radically different practices of the ancient world. At a time when the constraints of decorum and the politics of French absolutism quashed the expression of cultural differences, the ancient world presented a disturbing face of otherness. Larry F. Norman explores how the authoritative status of ancient Greek texts allowed them to justify literary depictions of the scandalous. The Shock of the Ancient surveys the diverse array of aesthetic models presented in these ancient works and considers how they both helped to undermine the rigid codes of neoclassicism and paved the way for the innovative philosophies of the Enlightenment. Broadly appealing to students of European literature, art history, and philosophy, this book is an important contribution to early modern literary and cultural debates.