You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Complicity in Fin-de-siècle Literature examines late-nineteenth century French understandings of literature as a morally collusive medium, which implicates readers, writers, and critics in risqué or illicit ideas and behaviour. It considers definitions of complicity from the period's evolving legal statutes, critical debates about literary 'bad influence', and modern theories of reader response, in order to achieve a deeper understanding of how cultural production of the period forged relationships of implication and collusion. While focusing on fin-de-siècle French culture, the book's theoretical discussions provide a new terminology and conceptual framework through which to analyse lite...
Robert Gildea’s penetrating history of France during World War II sweeps aside the French Resistance of a thousand clichés. Gaining a true understanding of the Resistance means recognizing how its image has been carefully curated through a combination of French politics and pride, ever since jubilant crowds celebrated Paris’s liberation in 1944.
Decentring the Avant-Garde presents a collection of articles dealing with the topography of the avant-garde. The focus is on different responses to avant-garde aesthetics in regions traditionally depicted as cultural, geographical and linguistic peripheries. Avant-garde activities in the periphery have to date mostly been described in terms of a passive reception of new artistic trends and currents originating in cultural centres such as Paris or Berlin. Contesting this traditional view, Decentring the Avant-Garde highlights the importance of analysing the avant-garde in the periphery in terms of an active appropriation of avant-garde aesthetics within different cultural, ideological and historical settings. A broad collection of case studies discusses the activities of movements and artists in various regions in Europe and beyond. The result is a new topographical model of the international avant-garde and its cultural practices.
The history of Europe is marked not only by violence and division but also by efforts to reduce the destructiveness of war. In this volume, the authors explore the meaning of ‘Europe’ within war and peace discourses from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. They examine imagined wars, the post-1815 security order, the portrayal of Russian and Muslim 'Others,' double standards in international law, pacifist rhetoric, and the role of ‘Europe’ in war propaganda and resistance movements. The authors demonstrate how both war and peace practices have shaped the concept of ‘Europe’ over time.
Resistance to German-led Axis occupation occurred all the way across the European continent during the Second World War. It took a wide range of forms – non-cooperation and disinformation, sabotage, espionage, armed opposition and full-scale partisan warfare. It is an important element in the experience and the national memory of the peoples who found themselves under Axis government and control. For over thirty years there has been no systematic attempt to give readers a panoramic yet detailed view of the make-up, actions and impact of resistance movements from Scandinavia down to Greece and from France through to Russia. This authoritative and accessible survey, written by a group of the...
‘Impressions from Paris’ studies the contributions of various women artists and writers who lived in Paris during the Interwar Years, from the 1920s to 1940. The “Roaring Twenties” constituted years of experimentation and freedom to test new techniques and lifestyles at a time affected by serious political changes leading to World War II. Their trajectories have left traces that can be mapped out, studied, and addressed today, a hundred years later. The volume revisits their experiences through various lenses that include art history, gender, fashion, literary analysis, psychology, philosophy, as well as film and food. The volume revisits the artistic, literary, and journalistic cont...
Interdisciplinarity: this book covers a range of media and genres from cinema to journalism to novels and a range of disciplines from feminism, film studies, Francophone studies, history, etc., which allows readers to access a particularly extensive range of disciplines within one volume and to make informed comparisons. Transhistoricism: the chronological range of essays included in this journal from the medieval period through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the present demonstrates that women have always managed to access their own territory within the masculinised urban environment and this encourages readers to rethink previous gendered assumptions about women and the city. Feminism: the essays here form part of the wider movement in academic research to redress the gendered imbalance of perspectives on a range of subjects: here allowing us to look anew at French and Francophone culture and history as part of this feminist rewriting.
Contributing to the current lively discussion of collaboration in French letters, this collection raises fundamental questions about the limits and definition of authorship in the context of the nineteenth century's explosion of collaborative ventures. While the model of the stable single author that prevailed during the Romantic period dominates the beginning of the century, the authority of the speaking subject is increasingly in crisis through the century's political and social upheavals. Chapters consider the breakdown of authorial presence across different constructions of authorship, including the numerous cenacles of the Romantic period; collaborative ventures in poetry through the pr...
This book studies travel writing produced by French authors between the two World Wars following visits to authoritarian regimes in Europe and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). It sheds new light on the phenomenon of French political travel in this period by considering the well-documented appeal of Soviet communism for French intellectuals alongside their interest in other radical regimes which have been much less studied: fascist Italy, the Iberian dictatorships and Nazi Germany. Through analyses of the travel writing produced as a result of such visits, the book gauges the appeal of these forms of authoritarianism for inter-war French intellectuals from a broad political spe...