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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

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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.

Writing Marginality in Modern French Literature
  • From Loti to Genet
  • Edward J. Hughes
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    23 April 2001
  • Writing Marginality in Modern French Literature, first published in 2001, explores how cultural centres require the peripheral, the outlawed and the deviant in order to define and bolster themselves. It analyses the hierarchies of cultural value which inform the work of six modern French writers: the exoticist Pierre Loti; Paul Gauguin, whose Noa Noa enacts European fantasies about Polynesia; Proust, who analyses such exemplary figures of exclusion and inclusion as the homosexual and the xenophobe; Montherlant, who claims to subvert colonialist values in La Rose de sable; Camus, who pleads an alienating detachment from the cultures of both metropolitan France and Algeria; and Jean Genet. Crucially Genet, who was typecast as France's moral pariah, in charting Palestinian statelessness in his last work, Un Captif amoureux (1986), reflects ethically on the dispossession of the Other and the violence inherent in the West's marginalization of cultural difference.

Nathalie Sarraute, Fiction and Theory
  • Questions of Difference
  • Ann Jefferson
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    03 July 2000
  • Nathalie Sarraute (1900–99) is regarded as one of the major French novelists of the twentieth century. Initially hailed as a leading theorist and exemplar of the nouveau roman, she has come to be regarded as an important author in her own right with her own distinctive concerns. In this major 2000 study of Sarraute, the first in English since her death, Ann Jefferson offers a fresh perspective on Sarraute's entire oeuvre - her novels, her outstanding autobiography Enfance and her influential critical writings - by focusing on the crucial issue of difference which emerges as one of her central preoccupations. Drawing on a variety of critical approaches, Jefferson explores Sarraute's fundamental ambivalence to differences of various kinds including questions of gender and genre. She argues that difference is simultaneously asserted and denied in Sarraute's work, and that the notion of difference, so often celebrated by other writers and thinkers, is shown in Sarraute's work to the inseparable from ambiguity and anxiety.

Gender, Rhetoric, and Print Culture in French Renaissance Writing
  • Floyd Gray
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    25 May 2000
  • In this book Floyd Gray explores how the treatment of controversial subjects in French Renaissance writing was affected both by rhetorical conventions and by the commercial requirements of an expanding publishing industry. Focusing on a wide range of discourses on gender issues - misogynist, feminist, autobiographical, homosexual and medical - Gray reveals the extent to which these marginalized texts reflect literary concerns rather than social reality. He then moves from a close analysis of the rhetorical factor in the Querelle des femmes to consider ways in which writing, as a textual phenomenon, inscribes its own, sometimes ambiguous, meaning. Gray offers richly detailed readings of writing by Rabelais, Jean Flore, Montaigne, Louise Labé, Pernette du Guillet and Marie de Gournay among others, challenging the inherent anachronism of those forms of criticism that fail to take account of the rhetorical and cultural conditions of the period.

Literature and Material Culture from Balzac to Proust
  • The Collection and Consumption of Curiosities
  • Janell Watson
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    13 January 2000
  • 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 significant in canonical literature, the Goncourt brothers, Huysmans, Mallarmé and Maupassant celebrated their golden age. Flaubert and Zola scorned them. Rachilde and Lorrain perverted them. Proust commemorated their last moments of glory. Focusing on the bibelot (the modern French term for knick-knack, curiosity or other collectible), Janell Watson shows how the sudden prominence given to curiosities and collecting in nineteenth-century literature signals a massive change in attitudes to the world of goods, which in turn restructured the literary text according to the practical logic of daily life, calling into question established scholarly notions of order. Her study makes an important contribution to the literary history of material culture.

Simone de Beauvoir, Gender and Testimony
  • Ursula Tidd
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    28 October 1999
  • This is a full-length study exploring Simone de Beauvoir's autobiographical and biographical writings in the context of ideas on selfhood formulated in Le deuxième sexe and her other philosophical essays of the 1940s. Drawing on more recent work in autobiographical studies and working within a broadly Foucauldian framework, Ursula Tidd offers a detailed analysis of Beauvoir's auto/biographical strategy as a woman writer seeking to write herself into the male-constructed autobiographical canon. Tidd first analyses Beauvoir's notions of selfhood in her philosophical essays, and then discusses her four autobiographical and two biographical volumes, along with some of her unpublished diaries, in an attempt to explore notions of selectivity, and the politics of truth-production and reception. The study concludes that Beauvoir's vast auto/biographical project, situated in specific personal and historical contexts, can be read as shaped by a testimonial obligation rooted in a productive consciousness of the Other.

Reading the French Enlightenment
  • System and Subversion
  • Julie Candler Hayes
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    15 July 1999
  • In this 1999 book, Julie Candler Hayes offers an ambitious reinterpretation of a crucial aspect of Enlightenment thought, the rationalizing and classifying impulse. Taking issue both with traditional liberal and contemporary critical accounts of the Enlightenment, she analyses the writings of Denis Diderot, Emilie Du Châtelet, the Abbé de Condillac, Buffon, d'Alembert and numerous others, to argue for a new understanding of 'systematic reason' as complex, paradoxical and ultimately liberating. Hayes examines the tensions between freedom and constraint, abstraction and materialism, linear and synoptic order, that pervade not only philosophic and scientific discourse, but also epistolary writing, fiction and criticism. Drawing on the insights of a wide range of theorists from Adorno, Habermas and Foucault to Deleuze and Derrida, she offers a dialogue between the eighteenth century and our own, an ongoing exploration of the question, 'what is Enlightenment?'.

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.

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.

The Family in Crisis in Late Nineteenth-Century French Fiction
  • Nicholas White
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    13 January 1999
  • The Family in Crisis in Late Nineteenth-Century French Fiction, first published in 1999, focuses on a key moment in the construction of the modern view of the family in France. Nicholas White's analysis of novels by Zola, Maupassant, Hennique, Bourget and Armand Charpentier is fashioned by perspectives on a wide cultural field, including legal, popular and academic discourses on the family and its discontents. His account encourages a close rereading of canonical as well as overlooked texts from fin de siècle France. What emerges between the death of Flaubert in 1880 and the publication of Bourget's Un divorce in 1904 is a series of Naturalist and post-Naturalist representations of transgressive behaviour in which tales of adultery, illegitimacy, consanguinity, incest and divorce serve to exemplify and to offer a range of nuances on the Third Republic's crisis in what might now be termed 'family values'.

Fairy Tales, Sexuality, and Gender in France, 1690–1715
  • Nostalgic Utopias
  • Lewis C. Seifert
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    13 November 1996
  • Between 1690 and 1715, well over one hundred literary fairy tales appeared in France, two-thirds of them written by women. This 1996 book explores why fashionable adults were attracted to this new literary genre and, integrating socio-historical, structuralist, and post-structuralist approaches, considers how it became a medium for reconceiving literary and historical discourses of sexuality and gender. The first part of the book considers how the marvellous is used to legitimize the genre, to exemplify theories of 'modern' culture, and to reaffirm women's potential as writers. The second part examines how specific groups of tales both reiterate and unsettle late seventeenth-century discourses of love, masculinity and femininity through conventions such as the romantic quest, the marriage closure, chivalric heroes and good and evil fairies.

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.

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.

Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature
  • Simon Gaunt
  • Published online:
    24 August 2009
    Print publication:
    11 May 1995
  • This wide-ranging study explores the ideological framework of genre in Old French and Occitan literature by charting the relationship between ideology and gender in five key genres: the chansons de geste, courtly romance, the Occitan canso, hagiography, and the fabliaux. Simon Gaunt offers new readings of canonical Old French and medieval Occitan texts such as the Chanson de Roland, Chrétien de Troyes's Chevalier de la charrette, and lyrics by Bernart de Ventadorn, and in addition he considers many less well-known works and less familiar genres such as hagiography and the fabliaux. Drawing on contemporary feminist theory, he examines how masculinity, as well as femininity, is constructed in medieval French and Occitan texts, and shows that gender is a crucial element in the formation of the ideologies that underpin medieval literary genres.

Sade and the Narrative of Transgression
  • Edited by David B. Allison, Mark S. Roberts, Allen S. Weiss
  • Published online:
    21 August 2009
    Print publication:
    30 March 1995
  • This major collection of essays on the Marquis de Sade, first published in 1995, encompasses a wide range of critical approaches to his œuvre, including some of the most celebrated texts in Sade scholarship. It focuses on several distinctly contemporary areas of interest: the explicitly libidinal components of Sade's work and the effects they engender, the textual and narrative apparatus which supports these operations, the ethical and political concerns which arise from them, and the problematic issues surrounding the conceptual closure of representation. Sade is placed at the centre of current debates in literary and philosophical criticism, feminist and gender theory, aesthetics, rhetoric and eighteenth-century French cultural history, and this volume will be of interest to a wide range of readers across these disciplines.

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.

Sentimental Narrative and the Social Order in France, 1760–1820
  • David J. Denby
  • Published online:
    29 August 2009
    Print publication:
    03 March 1994
  • In this discerning study of sentimental discourse of the late eighteenth century, David J. Denby sheds new light on Enlightenment thought and sensibility. He reveals how sentimental sub-literature reflects the social attitudes of the emerging bourgeoisie, and how its formal structures are reflected in contemporary theories concerning the nature of society, morality, and politics. Denby explores how the language and forms of sentimental narratives were adopted and exploited by political and social writers, and how sentimentalism provided a theme of continuity underlying the dominant sense of change brought about by the Revolution. In this interdisciplinary book Denby argues that sentimentalism is central to the culture of late eighteenth-century France. Texts discussed include works by Rousseau and de Staël.

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.

Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis
  • The Socio-Poetics of Modernism
  • Eugene W. Holland
  • Published online:
    22 August 2009
    Print publication:
    23 September 1993
  • This study of Baudelaire's writings applies the principles of schizoanalysis to literary history and cultural studies. By resituating psychoanalysis in its socio-economic and cultural context, this framework provides an illuminating approach to the poetry and art criticism of the foremost French modernist. Professor Holland's book draws upon and transforms virtually the entire spectrum of recent Baudelaire scholarship and demonstrates the impact of the capitalist market and its attendant authoritarianism (as well as Baudelaire's much-discussed family circumstances) on the psychology and poetics of the writer, who abandoned his romantic idealism in favour of a modernist cynicism that has characterized modern culture ever since.

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.

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