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In this detailed study of popular sentimentalist literature of the late eighteenth century, David J. Denby sheds new light on Enlightenment thought and sensibility. He situates sentimentalist writing in its social and political context, analysing how its formal structures are reflected in contemporary theories concerning the nature of society, morality, and history.

According to Rousseau, the best relationship between unequals is one of 'benificence'. Drawing on literary theory in this 1993 book, Judith Still explores the problems implicit in such a belief.

This book reassesses the love poetry of Maurice Sceve from a phenomenological viewpoint. It calls into question the traditional critical view of Sceve as a poet consumed by the anguish and darkness of unrequited love, and frustrated by poetic and erotic quests which lead him nowhere.

In this 1993 reading of Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris Margery Evans proposes that Baudelaire's text serves to question the conventions of prose forms such as the novel and the moral fable. She shows how the text probes the fundamental tension between individuality and conformity, powerfully symbolized by the giant metropolis.

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 made a great impact on literary texts. Her study makes an important contribution to the literary history of material culture.

The tragedies produced in France in the sixteenth century by writers such as Garnier, La Taille, and Jodelle are increasingly accessible in good modern editions. Their subject matter included Bible stories and recent history, as well as Greek legend and Roman history. Until now, scholars have tended to regard them as a staging post on the road to Corneille and Racine.

This is a full-length study exploring Simone de Beauvoir's autobiographical and biographical writings in the context of ideas on selfhood formulated in The Second Sex and other philosophical essays. Ursula Tidd offers readings of Beauvoir's unpublished diaries and recently published letters along with more well-known texts.

This 1999 book surveys the past fifty years of philosophical reflection on the Enlightenment, and takes issue both with traditional liberal and with contemporary critical accounts. Through close analysis of philosophical, scientific and literary texts, it emphasizes the urgency of maintaining a dialogue between past and present, Enlightenment and modernity.

This 1999 study examines the vogue for nervous afflictions in late nineteenth-century France, and relates Proust's anxieties about hysteria to his concern about literary form. Finn reveals Proust's novel as deeply concerned with bodily and literary hysteria, his writing technique is one which calls into question the conventions of fiction.

In this book Floyd Gray explores how the treatment of controversial subjects in French Renaissance writing was affected by rhetorical conventions and the commercial requirements of an expanding publishing industry. Gray offers new readings of a wide range of discourses on gender issues - misogynist, feminist, autobiographical, homosexual and medical.

This is the most complete critical survey to date of women's literature in nineteenth-century France. Alison Finch's wide-ranging analysis of some 60 writers covers all genres at all levels, both popular and serious. Offering extensive reference features, the book represents an invaluable resource for all those studying French literature.

Between 1690 and 1715, well over one hundred literary fairy tales appeared in France, two-thirds of them written by women. The first part of this 1996 book situates the rise of this genre within the literary and historical context of late seventeenth-century France, and the second part examines the representation of sexuality, masculinity and femininity within selected groups of tales.

This 1995 book confronts the series of enigmas surrounding the 'Blanchot affair', in which one of the leading figures of contemporary French thought was shown to have been a prominent fascist journalist during the 1930s. Using this as a point of departure, Mehlman investigates the ideological and political connotations of similar literary material.

This book demonstrates instead the writers' use of irony and allegory in struggling against the deceitfulness of their own texts.

Michele Longino examines the ways in which Mediterranean exoticism inflects the themes represented in French classical drama. Longino explores plays by Corneille, Moliere and Racine, and offers a consideration of the role the staging of the near Orient played in shaping a sense of French colonial identity.

An important study of the book which invented European Romanticism, Stael's De l'Allemagne.

The medieval troubadours of the south of France profoundly influenced European literature for many centuries. This book is a full-length study of the first-person position adopted by many of them in its relation to language and society. Using theoretical approaches, Sarah Kay discusses to what extent this first person is a 'self' or 'character', and how far it is self-determining.

This book of linked essays contains the first critical study of Baudelaire's development as a poet, from his youth onwards. It also includes studies of the development of Baudelaire's aesthetic, detailed commentaries on a number of his finest poems, and accounts of three intriguing and crucial 'encounters' with notable contemporaries.

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.

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.

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 siecle 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'.

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. Sean 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 Regle 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.

This innovative analysis of the role of imagination as a central concept in both literary and art criticism studies works by Rimbaud, Mallarme, Kandinsky, and Mondrian.

The most recently acknowledged - and the most private - of the masters of modernity, Paul Valery is perhaps the most radical and wide-ranging. This 1999 volume of essays by internationally recognised scholars offered the first comprehensive account of Valery's work in English or French.

David Bellos's introduction sets Spitzer's method of textual and stylistic interpretation in its historical context and sketches out the career of this supremely knowledgeable reader for whom knowledge was less important than understanding.

In this highly original book Norman Bryson applied 'structuralist' and 'post-structuralist' approaches to French Romantic Painting. He considers the work of David, Ingres and Delacroix as artists who found themselves within an artistic tradition that had nothing creative to offer them.

This major collection of essays on the Marquis de Sade, first published in 1995, encompasses a wide range of critical approaches to his oeuvre, including some of the most celebrated texts in Sade scholarship.

In this book Dr Hobson analyses how art is perceived, focusing in turn on painting, the novel, drama, poetry and music in the eighteenth-century. Dr Hobson provides a method of mapping the changes in artistic style and opens an important perspective for the study of Romanticism and Realism.

This book offers both an introduction that is fully accessible to the newcomer and a series of original judgements on Proust's work that will provide stimulus and excitement for the specialist.

This book offers a comprehensive description of how writers, in particular poets in nineteenth-century France, became increasingly aware of the visual element in writing from the point of view both of content and of the formal organisation of the words in the text.