General

This 1993 reading of Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris is a response to Baudelaire's own challenge to read his text as one in which 'everything ... is head and tail, alternately and reciprocally'. Margery Evans proposes that Le Spleen de Paris serves to...

This book of linked essays contains the first critical study of Baudelaire's development as a poet, from his youth onwards. It also includes studies of the development of Baudelaire's aesthetic, detailed commentaries on a number of his finest poems, and...

This book addresses the issues of collecting, consuming, classifying and describing the curiosities, antiques and objets d'art that proliferated in French literary texts during the last decades of the nineteenth century. After Balzac made such issues...

This book explores the unique way in which Russian culture constructs the notion of everyday life, or byt, and offers the first unified reading of Silver-age narrative which it repositions at the centre of Russian modernism. Drawing on semiotics and...

In Literature, Art and the Pursuit of Decay, Timothy Mathews examines work by a range of writers and painters working in France in the twentieth century. The well-illustrated book engages with canonical figures - Guillaume Apollinaire, Marguerite Duras...

The emergence of a new theory of literature in the German Romantic period constituted a decisive turning point in the history of criticism. Prepared by new trends in critical thought during the latter half of the eighteenth century, a view of the...

Umberto Eco is Italy's most famous living intellectual, known among academics for his literary and cultural theories, and to an enormous international audience through his novels, The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum and The Island of the Day Before...

The Franciscan monk, humanist and physician Francois Rabelais, who flourished in sixteenth-century France, is widely considered as the Renaissance's greatest comic writer. His work - including most notably Gargantua and Pantagruel - continues to enthral...

Medieval French literature encompasses 450 years of literary output in Old and Middle French, mostly produced in Northern France and England. These texts, including courtly lyrics, prose and verse romances, dits amoureux and plays, proved hugely...

Contributing to the growing debate around the definition of Mediterranean noir, Barbara Pezzotti's groundbreaking study is the first in English to propose a rigorous classification of Mediterranean crime fiction. Intersecting crime fiction studies and...

The first of its kind, this guide enables readers to get as close as possible to the words of Dante's Comedy. Opening up interpretative possibilities that only become available through reading the poem in its original form, it equips students with an...

The first of its kind, this guide enables readers to get as close as possible to the words of Dante's Comedy. Opening up interpretative possibilities that only become available through reading the poem in its original form, it equips students with an...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781009225250Author Ullrich LangerFormat HardbackPage Count 300Imprint Cambridge University PressPublisher Cambridge University Press

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781009224338Author Olivia HolmesFormat HardbackPage Count 300Imprint Cambridge University PressPublisher Cambridge University Press

In this highly accessible introduction, Brian Nelson provides an overview of French literature - its themes and forms, traditions and transformations - from the Middle Ages to the present. Major writers, including Francophone authors writing from areas...

Bertolt Brecht, one of the most influential European playwrights of the twentieth century, was also a poet of distinction. Brecht's Poetry of Political Exile is the first comprehensive study devoted to his most important collection of political poetry,...

Franz Kafka (1883-1924) is one of the most influential of modern authors, whose darkly fascinating novels and stories - where themes such as power, punishment and alienation loom large - have become emblematic of modern life. This Introduction offers a...

In this study of vernacular French narrative from the twelfth century through the later Middle Ages, first published in 2000, Donald Maddox considers the construction of identity in a wide range of fictions. He focuses on crucial encounters, widespread...

The Renaissance in Italy continues to exercise a powerful hold on the popular imagination and on scholarly enquiry. This Companion presents a lively, comprehensive, interdisciplinary, and current approach to the period that extends in Italy from the turn...

This book is a systematic attempt to examine the literary consequences of German reunification. Placing the concept of the Kulturnation at the centre of its analysis, the book explores the ways in which literature both responds to and helps to constitute...

Key dimensions of Thomas Mann's writing and life are explored in this collection of specially commissioned essays. In addition to introductory chapters on all the main works of fiction, the essays and diaries, there are four chapters examining Mann's...

This 1999 study examines the connections between Proust's fin-de-siecle '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...

In Poetry and Music in Medieval France, first published in 2003, Ardis Butterfield examines vernacular song in medieval France. She begins with the moment when French song first survives in writing in the early thirteenth century, and examines a large...

Although much has been written about literary, cultural, and artistic influences in the work of Cervantes, at the time of this book's publication very little had been said about his interest in the classics. Frederick de Armas argues convincingly in this...

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...

This critical reinterpretation of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past offers a fresh, socio-historical analysis of the novel. Departing from the more formalist and rhetorical trends in recent Proust criticism, Michael Sprinker draws upon historical...

This major collection of essays on the Marquis de Sade, first published in 1995, encompasses a wide range of critical approaches to his uvre, including some of the most celebrated texts in Sade scholarship. It focuses on several distinctly contemporary...

In this study, Steven Botterill explores the intellectual relationship between the greatest poet of the fourteenth century, Dante, and the greatest spiritual writer of the twelfth century, Bernard of Clairvaux. Botterill analyses the narrative episode...

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. Focusing on the poetry of Clement Marot, Rabelais's Gargantua, Ronsard's sonnets and the...

The Soviet writer Andrei Platonov (1899-1951) belongs to a Russian philosophical tradition that includes such figures as Vladimir Solov'ev, Mikhail Bakhtin and Boris Pasternak. This 1992 study investigates the interrelation of themes, imagery and the use...

Stefan Heym's uncompromising stance made him unpopular with a succession of political regimes. The Nazis, the CIA and the East German secret police all held files on him. He was Hitler's youngest literary exile; McCarthyism was to drive him from the USA;...

This book offers a variety of approaches to Zola's masterpiece, published amid considerable controversy in 1876-7. L'Assommoir (the tale of a Parisian washerwoman who after a hard life turns to drink and dies in abject poverty) is analysed as a social...

Karamzin was the foremost Russian representative of the late eighteenth-century Sentimentalist movement. In this study, Gitta Hammarberg makes use of advances in literary theory (especially those based on the work of Bakhtin and Voloshinov) in order to...

Published in 1999 to mark the centenary of Vladimir Nabokov's birth, this volume brings together the work of eleven of the world's foremost Nabokov scholars offering perspectives on the writer and his fiction. Their essays cover a broad range of topics...

Professor Freeborn's book is an attempt to identify and define the evolution of a particular kind of novel in Russian and Soviet literature: the revolutionary novel. This genre is a uniquely Russian phenomenon and one that is of central importance in...

This up-to-date account of the novel's composition, structure, and achievement provides readers with the literary and historical knowledge needed to make sense of the text. Professor Bellos explains how Balzac challenged prevailing nineteenth-century...

In this 1987 text, by focusing on rhetoric, Dr Springer distinguishes between the encomiastic mode of the Papacy and the exhortatory mode of the Risorgimento. Springer shows that instead of concentrating on the pathos of the absence implicit in the...

The third international conference on classical influences took place in Cambridge in 1977 under the title 'Classical Influences in Western Education, Philosophy and Social Theory'. Dr Bolgar has here collected and edited the proceedings and produced a...

The Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges was one of the most influential figures to emerge from the great blossoming of South American literature in the twentieth century. As a scholar, poet, critic and writer of fiction he was widely read in English...

Throughout the Middle Ages, the number of female readers was far greater than is commonly assumed. D. H. Green shows that, after clerics and monks, religious women were the main bearers of written culture and its expansion. Moreover, laywomen played a...