TY - JOUR
AB - For reasons of space, this brisk, invigorating companion focuses on literature produced within France itself, but the quasi-absence of ‘francophone’ writers does not result in a stuffy, chronological overview of the same old names. On the contrary, the thematic divisions are fresh and imaginative, with a trans-historical approach in several chapters: on the critical essay from Montaigne to Badiou; on literature and sex from the middle ages to Despentes and Houellebecq, taking in cuckoldry, libertinism, prostitution, homosexuality and the AIDS memoir; or on poetic experimentation from Rimbaud, via Surrealism and négritude, to sound poetry. A thematic approach helps re-energize chapters focusing on a particular century: medieval romance and reality, reason and the Renaissance, seventeenth-century tragedy and fear, nature and the Enlightenment, Romantic nostalgia, the novel after Proust. The century-by-century mindset which can ghettoize major disciplinary conferences is avoided, with some authors, such as Montaigne, featuring in several chapters. French literature and national identity are shown to have evolved in parallel through constant dialogue with both the past and the outside world, offering a valuable international perspective on a literature condemned by the Victorians as immoral, yet admired in China and Russia. Charles Forsdick identifies a ‘Francosphere’, beyond a colonial francophonie, which includes all translingual writing in French, and the canon thus conceived emerges as an ‘eclectic postcolonial, postmodern assemblage’ (p. 211), thriving on continuity and confirmation as much as on disruption and change. The gender balance of authors covered is a vast improvement on older surveys, and there is an excellent recent bibliography. It is disappointing that all quotations – bar some, but not all, verse – are given in English translation only, since this is an excellent companion, dynamic and complex, which should be essential reading for all undergraduates. © The Author 2018. Published by Oxford University Press for the Court of the University of St Andrews. All rights reserved. The University of St Andrews is a charity registered in Scotland: No. SC013532.
TI - The Cambridge Companion to French Literature. Ed. by John D. Lyons
JF - Forum for Modern Language Studies
DO - 10.1093/fmls/cqx045
DA - 2018-01-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-cambridge-companion-to-french-literature-ed-by-john-d-lyons-DlZEerIxnd
SP - 116
EP - 116
VL - 54
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -