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The Canonical Debate Today. Crossing Disciplinary and Cultural Boundaries re-enacts the canonical issues current in the ’90s from a new perspective, triggered by the changes that occurred worldwide in understanding the concepts and the status of theory, in the legacy of literary studies within the field of humanities, and in cultural production and reception. During the last decade discussions of globalization mostly took into account its impact on the status of academic disciplines such as comparative literature or cultural studies, or the reconfiguration of national literary fields. These debates do not dispense with canonicity altogether but make it more urgent and necessary. Canons see...
A study of the conscious shaping of memory within the community known as Port-Royal in seventeenth-century France, whose members thought that memory could contribute to the new ideas which they had about education. Concentrating on memoirs in the first chapter and on various educational treatises in the second, Hammond explores many previously unknown works. Port-Royal was to a large extent responsible for producing two of the greatest writers of the age, Blaise Pascal and Jean Racine; Hammond devotes a chapter to each. The role of memory in the persuasive process of Pascalʼs Pensées is shown to be vital to a full understanding of the work.
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...
The Art of Instruction: Essays on Pedagogy and Literature in 17th-Century France aims to add a new dimension to the scholarly discussion on how culture is inculcated by focusing on the interplay between aesthetic forms and pedagogical agendas. The nine essays in the collection take into account the full range of meanings associated with the term art: science, method, learning, beautiful expression, artistic creation. In exploring the role art plays in shaping an instructional system, the volume’s contributors examine literary genres that are both established (comedies, tragedies, sonnets) and nascent (novels, manuals, gazettes) as well as the works of a diverse group of seventeenth-century...
The steady development of queer theory over the last two decades has provided useful analytical tools and the will to dismiss the watchdog of heteronormativity. Modes of reading have evolved, as this volume of FLS amply attests. Following Bill Edmiston’s introduction to the volume — a concise and informative history of queer theory — the fifteen articles reveal, not surprisingly, significant diversity. One deals with queerness in the context of medieval writing where allegorical and euphemistic expression were understood to be irreconcilable. Another treats translations in Early Modern France of an Ovidian fable that had an inconvenient lesbian dimension. Rousseau’s fixation on his b...
The Twentieth-Century Humanist Critics revisits the work and place of eight scholars roughly contemporary with Anglo-American New Criticism: Leo Spitzer, Ernst Robert Curtius, Erich Auerbach, Albert Béguin, Jean Rousset, C.S. Lewis, F.O. Matthiessen, and Northrop Frye. William Calin first considers the achievements of each critic, examining his methodology and basic presuppositions as well as the critiques marshalled against him. Calin explores their relation to history, to canon-formation, and to our current theoretical debates. He then goes on to show how all eight form a current in the history of criticism related to both humanism and modernism. Underscoring the international, cosmopolitian aspects of literary scholarship in the twentieth century, The Twentieth-Century Humanist Critics brings together humanist critical traditions from Europe, the United Kingdom, and North America and reveals the surprising extent to which, in various languages and academic systems, critics were posing similar questions and offering a gamut of similar responses.
Examining literary discourses on female friendship and intimacy in seventeenth-century France, this study takes as its premise the view that, unlike men, women have been denied for centuries the possibility of same sex friendship. The author explores the effect of this homosocial and homopriviledged heritage on the deployment and constructions of female friendship and homoerotic relationships as thematic narratives in works by male and female writers in seventeenth-century France. The book consists of three parts: the first surveys the history of male thinkers' denial of female friendship, concluding with a synopsis of the cultural representations of female same-sex practices. The second ana...
Redreaming the Renaissance seeks to remedy the dearth of conversations between scholars of history and literary studies by building on the pathbreaking work of Guido Ruggiero to explore the cross-fertilization between these two disciplines, using the textual world of the Italian Renaissance as proving ground. In this volume, these disciplines blur, as they did for early moderns, who did not always distinguish between the historical and literary significance of the texts they read and produced. Literature here is broadly conceived to include not only belles lettres, but also other forms of artful writing that flourished in the period, including philosophical writings on dreams and prophecy; life-writing; religious debates; menu descriptions and other food writing; diaries, news reports, ballads, and protest songs; and scientific discussions. The twelve essays in this collection examine the role that the volume’s dedicatee has played in bringing the disciplines of history and literary studies into provocative conversation, as well as the methodology needed to sustain and enrich this conversation.
Bronwyn Reddan challenges the idealization of fairy-tale romance as the ultimate happy ending by showing how the women writers who dominated the first French fairy-tale vogue, the conteuses, used the genre to critique the power dynamics of courtship and marriage.