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An exploration of hypothetical turning points in history from Ancient Greece to September 11 What if history, as we know it, had run another course? Touching on alternate histories of the future and the past, or uchronias, A Past of Possibilities encourages deeper consideration of watershed moments in the course of history. Wide-ranging in scope, it examines the Boxer Rebellion in China, the 1848 revolution in France, and the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, and integrates science fiction, history, historiography, sociology, anthropology, and film. In probing the genre of literature and history that is fascinated with hypotheticals surrounding key points in history, Quentin Deluermoz and Pierre Singaravélou reach beyond a mere reimagining of history, exploring the limits and potentials of the futures past. From the most bizarre fiction to serious scientific hypothesis, they provide a survey of the uses of counterfactual histories, methodological issues on the possible in Social Sciences, and practical proposals for using alternate histories in research and the wider public.
The essays in Novel Stages examine the myriad intersections between drama and the novel in nineteenth-century France, a period when the two genres were in constant engagement with one another. The collection is unified by common intellectual concerns: the inscription of theatrical esthetics within the novel; the common practice among nineteenth-century novelists of adapting their works for the stage; and the novel's engagement with popular forms of theater. The essays provide insight into a specific aspect of the relationship between the theater and the novel in the nineteenth century. Their distinct perspectives form an overview of the literary landscape of nineteenth-century France, and demonstrate many ways in which all major nineteenth-century French novelists, including Hugo, Flaubert, Sand, and Zola, participated in the theatrical culture of their century.
These essays engage with narratives and narrative issues, in particular on the issue of performance in and of narrative, with the telling of performance and the performance of telling, and the way stories perform gender and identity. They focus on narrative as such, on narrative genres, and on particular narratives, but they all seek to inform thinking on narrative.
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“Plot”, writes Peter Brooks, “is so basic to our very experience of reading, and indeed to our articulation of experience in general, that criticism has often passed it over in silence…” (Reading for the Plot, xi). Finding the Plot both explores and helps to redress this critical neglect. The book brings together an international group of scholars to address the nature, effects and specific pleasures of consuming stories. If the central focus is on France and popular literary fiction, the book’s scope – like contemporary fiction itself – observes no national frontiers, and extends across a variety of media. The book addresses both the empirical question of which genres and types of text have been and are most “popular”, and the theoretical questions of how plots work, what pleasures they offer to readers, and why it matters that the plot should not be lost.
In addition to its more well known literary and artistic origins, the French surrealist movement drew inspiration from currents of psychological anxiety and rebellion running through a shadowy side of mass culture, specifically in fantastic popular fiction and sensationalistic journalism. The provocative nature of this insolent mass culture resonated with the intellectual and political preoccupations of the surrealists, as Robin Walz demonstrates in this fascinating study. Pulp Surrealism weaves an interpretative history of the intersection between mass print culture and surrealism, re-evaluating both our understanding of mass culture in early twentieth-century Paris and the revolutionary ai...
Prologue : Poe 1 -- Introduction : Mapping murder -- Archaeologies. Quarries and catacombs : underground crime in Second Empire Romans-feuilletons -- Skulls and bones : paleohistory in Leroux and Leblanc -- Crypts and ghosts : terrains of national trauma in Japrisot and Vargas -- Intersections. Street-name mysteries and private/public violence, 1867-2001 -- Cartographies. Terrains vagues : Gaboriau and the birth of the cartographic mystery -- Mapping the city : Malet's mysteries and Butor's Bleston -- Zéropa-land : Balkanization and the schizocartographies of Dantec and Radoman
Le roman policier existe depuis 150 ans, et malgré son ancienneté, il trouve difficilement sa place dans l'institution littéraire, alors qu'il est lu par des millions de lecteurs. Sous cette étiquette se cachent en fait des réalités très différentes. Il est donc utile de retracer l'évolution historique de ce genre protéiforme, d'Edgar Poe à Daniel Pennac, pour en saisir les multiples facettes. Ce parcours suppose que soit définie la notion de genre, et que le roman policier soit bien déterminé par rapport à plusieurs domaines proches comme le fantastique, le mythe, le nouveau roman ou le fait divers. Ces explorations, principalement basées sur le récit d'énigme, nous font redécouvrir la richesse du patrimoine policier francophone, à travers les œuvres d'Emile Gaboriau, Maurice Leblanc, Gaston Leroux, Pierre Véry, Claude Aveline, Simenon et Steeman ou les auteurs du néo-polar. Au sein de la paralittérature, le genre policier est ici abordé sous l'angle générique, structurel, thématique, sociologique, historique...