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Since its first title was published in 1982, Cambridge Studies in French has provided the context for innovative and influential volumes in French literature and culture. Under the General Editorship first of Malcolm Bowie (now University of Cambridge) and later of Michael Sheringham (University of London) the series has published work by major scholars on both sides of the Atlantic including Norman Bryson, Peter France, Sarah Kay and Michael Sprinker. Topics have ranged from the poetry of François Villon to the critical writings of Nathalie Sarraute, from fairy tales to material culture, from mimesis to surrealist collage. The series has now completed its commissioning programme.

  • General Editors: Michael Sheringham, Royal Holloway, University of London
  • Editorial Boards: R. Howard Bloch, Columbia University, New York , Malcolm Bowie, All Souls College, Oxford , Ross Chambers, University of Michigan, Antoine Compagnon, Columbia University, New York , Peter France, University of Edinburgh , Christie McDonald, Harvard University, Massachusetts , Toril Moi, Duke University, North Carolina , Naomi Schor, Harvard University, Massachusetts

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36 results in Cambridge Studies in French

Page 1 of 2

Sartre and 'Les Temps Modernes'
  • Howard Davies
  • Published online:
    05 February 2012
    Print publication:
    16 April 1987
  • 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. Dr Davies is the first author to examine the review from a multidisciplinary viewpoint. The result is a panorama of forty years of French intellectual history, of debate and rivalry informed by and influencing the political struggles of the time - the Cold War, the Algerian revolution, the Gaullist era, May 1968, the Maoism of the 1970s. It is also an important chapter in the biography of Sartre which offers a new sense of the magnitude of his philosophical and moral aspirations and a revaluation of his work and status.

Reading Realism in Stendhal
  • Ann Jefferson
  • Published online:
    05 February 2012
    Print publication:
    10 March 1988
  • This book poses the question: what happens when reading enters the realist process? and answers it by way of a critical study of Stendhal's writing. Ann Jefferson argues that a recognition of the role of reading in representation is particularly crucial to an understanding of Stendhal's realism, and her account includes substantial discussions of De l'Amour, Le Rouge et le Noir, the Vie de Henry Brulard and La Chartreuse de Parme. Her study also draws a number of illuminating parallels between Stendhal and aspects of modern critical theory, and uses them in order to reveal the high degree of sophistication and self-consciousness in Stendhal's writing, qualities which are attributed here to the intensity of his preoccupation with his readers. By focusing on the issue of reading in Stendhal this book not only proposes a reassessment of Stendhal's own work, but also opens up lines of enquiry on the critical problem that is realism.

Flaubert and the Gift of Speech
  • Dialogue and Discourse in Four "Modern" Novels
  • Stirling Haig
  • Published online:
    05 November 2011
    Print publication:
    09 October 1986
  • 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'. Dialogue in Flaubert does not attempt to represent an individual style but to circumscribe a larger phenomenon of language. Speech defines man both in the sense that it describes him as a set of human characteristics, and inscribes him within a system of social values. The author explores the development of Flaubert's use of dialogue in Madame Bovary, L'Education Sentimentale (both versions), and Bouvard et Pécuchet.

Flaubert's Characters
  • The Language of Illusion
  • Diana Knight
  • Published online:
    25 October 2011
    Print publication:
    06 June 1985
  • 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. Rather, Dr Knight explores the relationship between the contents of Flaubert's stories and his practice as a writer, thereby reinstating the functional value of character in his work. She shows that essential aspects of Flaubert's aesthetic - the opaqueness of language, stupidity, fascination and reverie as the object of art - depend on the psychological make-up of fictional characters: their pathological relationship to language and reality mirrors Flaubert's conception of the readers' stupefied response to his own stylistic effects and to his wilfully naive stories. Flaubert emerges as a representational writer, but one who is supremely self-conscious of the fictional status of his representations.

Corneille, Classicism and the Ruses of Symmetry
  • Mitchell Greenberg
  • Published online:
    25 October 2011
    Print publication:
    02 October 1986
  • Professor Greenberg's lucid study examines the themes of authority, power and sexuality in Corneille's major plays, drawing on the work of Foucault, and Freudian and feminist critics. He begins by considering the question of myth and of a 'pre-historical' cultural memory in Médée, and proceeds to a detailed analysis of each of the four best-known tragedies: Le Cid, Horace, Cinna, and Polyeucte. A concluding chapter discusses two middle-period plays and Suréna, Corneille's last tragedy. Professor Greenberg argues that the formal symmetries of classical tragedy reflect a desire for control in the realm of both politics and sexuality. He also seeks to show how these principles of symmetry are challenged or undermined in various ways by the plays themselves. The result is an exacerbation of sexual and political desire which invests Cornelian tragedy with its peculiar power and involves us so deeply in its world.

The Rhetoric of Sexuality and the Literature of the French Renaissance
  • Lawrence D. Kritzman
  • Published online:
    04 August 2010
    Print publication:
    28 March 1991
  • This 1991 book examines the relationship between psychoanalytic theory and the literature of the French Renaissance by exploring the issues of gender, the body, and repression in many of the key literary texts of the period, including Scève, Rabelais, Marguerite de Navarre, Ronsard, and Montaigne. By means of detailed readings of individual texts, Lawrence Kritzman examines how sexuality functions as a rhetorical trope through which desire is represented. Professor Kritzman's study concentrates on three major objectives: the issues of gender identity and sexual difference in French Renaissance texts; the question of how the body is represented in the blasons, love poetry and prose of the period; and the way in which figural language depicts the libidinal, political and social tensions at work in texts. It was the first wide-ranging theoretical study to provide reading models to investigate the taboo subject of sexuality underlying literary production in the French Renaissance.

Reading Paul Valéry
  • Universe in Mind
  • Edited by Paul Gifford, Brian Stimpson
  • Published online:
    04 August 2010
    Print publication:
    21 January 1999
  • Paul Valéry's work is a unique odyssey in the universe of ideas and mental forms. The most recently acknowledged - and the most private - of the masters of modernity, Valéry is perhaps the most radical and wide-ranging. He navigates freely within the mental galaxies known to scientists, poets, literary theorists, musicians, philosophers, historicans and social anthropologists, always concerned to explore the potential and limits of the human mind. Originally published in 1999, the present volume of essays by internationally recognised scholars offered the first comprehensive account of Valéry's work in English or French. It provided a series of readings bringing into focus the deeper coherence that animates what Valéry called his 'unitary mind in a thousand pieces', and offered perspectives on the immense range of his experimental and fragmentary writings. This book moved forward the frontiers of our understanding of Valéry's work, and substantially altered the way in which he was perceived.

Pascal and the Arts of the Mind
  • Hugh M. Davidson
  • Published online:
    26 January 2010
    Print publication:
    24 September 1993
  • This 1993 book studies the ways in which Pascal posed and solved intellectual problems in three very different areas of his work: mathematics and mathematical physics, religious experience and theology, communication and controversy. 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. They appear throughout his production and are used and adapted with great skill both in his attacks on tradition in mathematics and physics and in his defences of tradition in the sphere of religion and morality. Professor Davidson throws light on both the diversity and the unity of Pascal's thought, and places it in the context of other seventeenth-century innovations in the use of traditional disciplines.

Genealogies of the Text
  • Literature, Psychoanalysis, and Politics in Modern France
  • Jeffrey Mehlman
  • Published online:
    19 January 2010
    Print publication:
    28 September 1995
  • In this 1995 book, which includes a substantial introduction, Jeffrey Mehlman confronts the politically devastating resonances in the work of several leading French writers. The essays focus on the series of enigmas surrounding the 'Blanchot affair' - a scandal provoked by Mehlman's revelation in 1977 that Maurice Blanchot, one of the tutelary figures of contemporary French thought, had in the 1930s been a prominent fascist journalist. Mehlman takes the issue of Blanchot's forgotten political essays deep into the most revered - and misunderstood - of his novels, L'Arrêt de mort. Using this affair as a point of departure, Mehlman sheds light on the question of the usability of psychoanalysis for literary readings (examining, for example, Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Valéry); he also investigates the ideological and political connotations of similar literary and theoretical material. The volume as a whole provides a consistently provocative meditation on literature, ethics, and the experience of the French in World War II.

The Discourse of Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century France
  • Diderot and the Art of Philosophizing
  • Daniel Brewer
  • Published online:
    23 November 2009
    Print publication:
    29 April 1993
  • This study explores the problems faced by writers of the Enlightenment, who attempted to demystify all previous forms of knowledge by applying rationalist critiques that can in turn be applied to examine their own critical work. It focuses on the works of one of the best-known writers of eighteenth-century France, Denis Diderot, analysing his experimentation with presenting critical knowledge. Paying close attention to the formal-poetic nature of Diderot's writing, his 'art', it examines the interplay between critical knowledge and its representation, between epistemology and aesthetics. Professor Brewer shows how Diderot's work in the areas of philosophy, science, the fine arts and literature pushed Enlightenment critique to its limits, and points to its remarkable similarity to aspects of modern critical theory.

System and Writing in the Philosophy of Jacques Derrida
  • Christopher Johnson
  • Published online:
    10 November 2009
    Print publication:
    15 April 1993
  • This is an important, critical analysis of Derrida's theory of writing, based upon close readings of key texts ranging from his stringent critique of structuralist criticism to his sympathetic and dialogical analysis of Freud's scriptural models. It reveals a dimension of Derrida's thinking which, although consistently present in his works, has been neglected in favour of those 'deconstructionist' clichés used in much recent literary criticism. Christopher Johnson highlights the special character of Derrida's philosophy that comes from the fertilising contact that Derrida has had with contemporary natural science and with systems theory. In addition, he shows how Derrida's philosophy of system and writing rejoins an atomist and materialist tradition repressed by centuries of idealist metaphysics. This study casts fresh light on an exacting set of intellectual issues facing philosophy and critical theory today.

Proust, the Body and Literary Form
  • Michael R. Finn
  • Published online:
    05 November 2009
    Print publication:
    25 March 1999
  • This 1999 study examines the connections between Proust's fin-de-siècle 'nervousness' and his apprehensions regarding literary form. Michael Finn shows that Proust's anxieties both about bodily weakness and about novel-writing were fed by a set of intriguing psychological and medical texts, and were mirrored in the nerve-based afflictions of earlier writers including Flaubert, Baudelaire, Nerval and the Goncourt brothers. Finn argues that once Proust cast off his concerns about being a nervous weakling he was freed to poke fun both at the supposed purity of the novel form. Hysteria - as a figure and as a theme - becomes a key to the Proustian narrative, and a certain kind of wordless, bodily copying of gesture and event is revealed to be at the heart of a writing technique which undermines many of the conventions of fiction.

Michel Leiris
  • Writing the Self
  • Seán Hand
  • Published online:
    22 October 2009
    Print publication:
    01 August 2002
  • This is the first full-length study in English of Michel Leiris's work. Frequently cited as a central figure in contemporary French culture, Leiris was an outstanding writer whose double career as ethnographer and creative writer places him at important points of intersection within French cultural history. Seán Hand explores Leiris's active participation in some of the most striking intellectual and artistic movements of the twentieth century: surrealism in the twenties, ethnography in the thirties and existentialism in the forties. Hand locates his writing in these different contexts in relation to the major artistic, political and philosophical concepts of the period. He goes on to argue that Leiris's multi-volume autobiography La Règle du jeu stands as the model form of self-enquiry in the twentieth century. More broadly, Hand explores Leiris's continuing obsession with the notion of 'presence'. Informed by recent critical theories, Hand offers a multi disciplinary approach to this intriguing writer.

A Question of Syllables
  • Essays in Nineteenth-Century French Verse
  • Clive Scott
  • Published online:
    21 October 2009
    Print publication:
    11 September 1986
  • 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. The analyses through which the book pursues its argument address two principal concerns: the way in which syllabic position projects words and colours their complicated and challenged by the relationship of rhythm to metre.

Politeness and its Discontents
  • Problems in French Classical Culture
  • Peter France
  • Published online:
    20 October 2009
    Print publication:
    09 January 1992
  • 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 régime meant not just polite manners, but a certain ideal of society and culture. Within this general context, a series of familiar oppositions, between polite and rude, tame and wild, urban(e) and rustic, élite and popular, adult and child, reason and unreason, gives the initial impetus to enquiries which often show how these opposites interpenetrate, how hierarchies are reversed, and how compromises are sought. Polite society, like polite literature, needs and desires its opposite. The ideal is often the meeting of garden and wilderness, where the savage encounters the civilized and gifts are exchanged. Professor France points to the centrality, but also the vulnerability, in classical culture, of the ideal of 'politeness', and his discussion embraces revolutionary eloquence and enlightened primitivism, the value of hyperbole, and the essay as a form of polite sociability.

Subjectivity and Subjugation in Seventeenth-Century Drama and Prose
  • The Family Romance of French Classicism
  • Mitchell Greenberg
  • Published online:
    16 October 2009
    Print publication:
    25 September 1992
  • 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. It shows how major writers of the Classical period (Corneille, Racine, Moliere, Lafayette) elaborate a new subject in and through their representations of the family, and argues that the family serves as the mediating locus of a patriarchal ideology of sexual and political containment. Most importantly, it asks why the theatre became the privileged form of representation in this state, and why this theatre concentrates almost exclusively on family conflict. Professor Greenberg argues that the narrative of oedipal sexuality and subjugation central to this new literary canon reflected the conflicting social, political and economic forces that were shifting European society away from the universe of the Renaissance and guiding it towards the 'transparency' of Classical representation.

Naturalist Fiction
  • The Entropic Vision
  • David Baguley
  • Published online:
    14 October 2009
    Print publication:
    23 February 1990
  • This is the first major study of naturalist fiction as a distinct literary genre. It focuses mainly on French naturalist literature, analysing a number of key works in detail, but also draws examples from other national traditions, particularly from the English novel. Professor Baguley questions and revises many traditional assumptions on important theoretical issues such as the nature of literary history, the concepts of 'realism' and 'naturalism', and the relations between science and literature. He demonstrates the prevalence of certain recurrent generic patterns, themes and techniques in the general body of naturalist literature, ranging from disquieting tragic developments to the most outrageous ironic and parodic effects. He argues persuasively that, far from being a mere record of the external aspects of reality, naturalist fiction is a literature of 'scandalous' provocation which employs the strategies of realist art to convey a profoundly disturbing vision of that reality.

Where Flaubert Lies
  • Chronology, Mythology and History
  • Claire Addison
  • Published online:
    09 October 2009
    Print publication:
    31 May 1996
  • This book offers crucial perspectives on the vexed question of chronology in Flaubert's work. Critics have struggled long and hard with the apparent inconsistencies in his writing, but Claire Addison's study reveals that the situation is far more subtle, complex and intriguing than hitherto supposed. She argues that Flaubert's manipulation of dates is deliberate and that what have previously been dismissed as inadvertent errors are in fact evidence of the strong presence of Flaubert's family life, events in historical Europe and events in the life of his literary characters. This interesting reading goes far beyond what traditional methods of literary history allow us to perceive of the link between the life and work of the author.

The Birth of European Romanticism
  • Truth and Propaganda in Staël's 'De l'Allemagne', 1810–1813
  • John Claiborne Isbell
  • Published online:
    23 September 2009
    Print publication:
    13 October 1994
  • It was through Staël's best-seller De l'Allemagne that the term 'Romanticism', coined in Germany, reached Europe and America. Around this term, Staël built a new and universal agenda: her manifesto offered Napoleon's Europe an alternative to everything he stood for. The new universe she revealed helped to bury the neo-Classical world and to shape the nineteenth century. In this important work, Dr Isbell reasserts Staël's place in history and analyses her vast agenda, which covers every Classical and Romantic divide in art, philosophy, religion, and society from 1789 to 1815. This investigation sheds light upon the two different revolutions that created modern Europe, seen here by a leader of both.

Politics and Narratives of Birth
  • Gynocolonization from Rousseau to Zola
  • Carol A. Mossman
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    01 April 1993
  • This book is a feminist analysis which combines a psychoanalytic perspective on catastrophic birth with the politics of reproduction in the emergent democracy of nineteenth-century France. It focuses on three major thinkers whose personal relation to origins is problematic, Rousseau, Constant and Stendhal, and also includes a broad reading of the nineteenth-century novel within the frame of pathological generation, giving special attention to works by Michelet and Zola. Professor Mossman identifies important areas of interaction between production and reproduction at the level of aesthetic form and between private, birth-related discourse and the ideology of the birth of democracy. Within the context of the collapse of Ancien Régime France, the nascent ideology of motherhood collides with modes of discourse that invade and colonize the maternal body, generating a considerable burden of anxiety expressed in the nineteenth-century French novel.

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