This book traces the history of the romance through the turbulent history of twentieth-century women in France. It offers a compelling analysis not only of the mass-market or popular romance, but also of the bestselling 'middlebrow' novel, and of 'literary' romances by authors including Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, and their contemporary successors.

Romance in modern times is the most widely read yet the most critically despised of genres. Associated almost entirely with women, as readers and as writers, its popularity has been argued by gender traditionalists to confirm women's innate sentimentality, while feminist critics have often condemned the genre as a dangerous opiate for the female masses. This study adopts the more positive perspective of critics such as Janice Radway, and takes seriously the pleasure that women readers consistently seem to find in romance. Drawing on the social constructionist feminism of Simone de Beauvoir, the psychoanalytical theories of Jessica Benjamin, and a range of social theorists from Bourdieu to Zygmunt Bauman, the book uncovers the history of romantic fiction in France from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century, and explores its place in women's lives and imaginations. Romance is not defined - as it usually is - solely in terms of its mass-market form. Rather, the history of women's popular fiction is traced in its full context, as one dimension of a literary story that encompasses the mainstream or 'middlebrow' as well as 'high' culture. Thus this study ranges from the formula romance (from the pious but popular Delly to global brand Harlequin), through 'middlebrow' bestsellers like Marcelle Tinayre, Françoise Sagan, Régine Deforges, to critically esteemed stories of love in the work of such authors as Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, Elsa Triolet, and Camille Laurens. Criss-crossing the boundaries of taste and class, as well as those of sexual orientation, the romance has been at times reactionary, at others progressive, utopian, and contestatory. It has played an important part in the lives of twentieth-century women, providing both a source of imaginative escape, and a fictional space in which to rehearse and make sense of identity, relationship, and desire.

Victims of the Book uncovers a long-neglected but once widespread subgenre: the fin-de-siècle novel of formation in France. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, social commentators insistently characterized excessive reading as an emasculating illness that afflicted French youth. Novels about and geared toward adolescent male readers were imbued with a deep worry over young Frenchmen’s masculinity, as evidenced by titles like Crise de jeunesse (Youth in Crisis, 1897), La Crise virile (Crisis of Virility, 1898), La Vie stérile (A Sterile Life, 1892), and La Mortelle Impuissance (Deadly Impotence, 1903). In this book, François Proulx examines a wide panorama of these novels, as well as polemical essays, pedagogical articles, and medical treatises on the perceived threats posed by young Frenchmen’s reading habits. Fin-de-siècle writers responded to this pathologization of reading with a profusion of novels addressed to young male readers, paradoxically proposing their own novels as potential cures. In the early twentieth century, this corpus was critically revisited by a new generation of writers. Victims of the Book shows how André Gide and Marcel Proust in particular reworked the fin-de-siècle paradox to subvert cultural norms about literature and masculinity, proposing instead a queer pact between writer and reader.

Women's Writing in Twenty-First Century France is the first book-length publication on women-authored literature of this period, and comprises a collection of challenging critical essays that engage with the themes, trends and issues, and with the writers and their texts, of the first decade of the twenty-first century. PART ONE: Women’s Writing in Twenty-First-Century France: Trends and Issues 1. Women’s writing in twenty-first-century France: introduction, Amaleena Damlé and Gill Rye 2. What ‘passes’?: French women writers and translation into English, Lynn Penrod 3. What women read: contemporary women’s writing and the bestseller, Diana Holmes PART TWO: Society, Culture, Family 4. Vichy, Jews, enfants cachés: French women writers look back, Lucille Cairns 5. Wives and daughters in literary works representing the harkis, Susan Ireland 6. (Not) seeing things: Marie NDiaye, (negative) hallucination and ‘blank’ métissage, Andrew Asibong 7. Rediscovering the absent father, a question of recognition: Despentes, Tardieu, Lori Saint-Martin 8. Babykillers: Véronique Olmi and Laurence Tardieu on motherhood, Natalie Edwards PART THREE: Body, Life, Text 9. The becoming of anorexia and text in Amélie Nothomb’s Robert des noms propres and Delphine de Vigan’s Jours sans faim, Amaleena Damlé 10. The human-animal in Ananda Devi’s texts: towards an ethics of hybridity?, Ashwiny O. Kistnareddy 11. Embodiment, environment and the re-invention of self in Nina Bouraoui’s life-writing, Helen Vassallo 12. Irreverent revelations: women’s confessional practices of the extreme contemporary, Barbara Havercroft 13. Contamination anxiety in Annie Ernaux’s twenty-first-century texts, Simon Kemp PART FOUR: Experiments, Interfaces, Aesthetics 14. Experience and experiment in the work of Marie Darrieussecq, Helena Chadderton 15. Interfaces: verbal/visual experiment in new women’s writing in French, Shirley Jordan 16. ‘Autofiction + x = ?’: Chloé Delaume’s experimental self-representations, Deborah B. Gaensbauer 17. Beyond Antoinette Fouque (Il y a deux sexes) and beyond Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)? Anne Garréta’s sphinxes, Owen Heathcote 18. Amélie the aesthete: art and politics in the world of Amélie Nothomb, Anna Kemp 19. Conclusion, Amaleena Damlé and Gill Rye

With contributions from leading scholars across the entire range of French studies, this up-to-date volume examines both the current state of French studies in the United Kingdom, as well as its future in an increasingly interdisciplinary world where student demand, new technologies, and developments in transnational education are changing the ways in which we teach, learn, research and assess achievements. Required reading for French studies scholars worldwide, this volume builds upon the findings of the influential Review of Modern Foreign Languages Provision in Higher Education and maps the present and future of the field.

French Studies in and for the 21st Century draws together a range of key scholars to examine the current state of French Studies in the UK, taking account of the variety of factors which have made the discipline what it is. The book looks ahead to the place of French Studies in a world that is increasingly interdisciplinary, and where student demands, new technologies and transnational education are changing the ways in which we learn, teach, research and assess. Required reading for all UK French Studies scholars, the book will also be an essential text for the French Studies community worldwide as it grapples with current demands and plans for the future.

This book is the first to offer a cultural history of French literature from its very beginnings, analysing the relationship between French literature and France’s evolving power structures from the Middle Ages through to the present day. It shows the political connections between the elite literature of France and other aspects of its culture, from racism, misogyny, tolerance and liberal reform to song, street performance, advertising and cinema. The nation’s literature contributed to these and was shaped by them. The book highlights the continuities and the unique fault-lines in the society that, over a millennium, has produced ‘French culture’. It looks at France’s early and continuing struggle for a national identity through both its language and its literature, and it shows that this struggle co-exists with openness to other cultures and a bawdy or subtle rebelliousness against the Church and other forms of authority. En route it takes in cuisine, gardens and the French tradition in mathematics. The survey provides an accessible approach to key issues in the history of French culture as well as a wide context for specialists.

Is Superman Canadian? Who decides, and what is at stake in such a question? How is the Underground Railroad commemorated differently in Canada and the United States, and can those differences be bridged? How can we acknowledge properly the Canadian labour behind Hollywood filmmaking, and what would that do to our sense of national cinema? Reading between the Borderlines grapples with these questions and others surrounding the production and consumption of literary, cinematic, musical, visual, and print culture across the Canada-US border. Discussing a range of popular as well as highbrow cultural forms, this collection investigates patterns of cross-border cultural exchange that become visible within a variety of genres, regardless of their place in any arbitrarily devised cultural hierarchy. The essays also consider the many interests served, compromised, or negated by the operations of the transnational economy, the movement of culture's "raw material" across nation-state borders in literal and conceptual terms, and the configuration of a material citizenship attributed to or negotiated around border-crossing cultural objects. Challenging the oversimplification of cultural products labelled either "Canadian" or "American," Reading between the Borderlines contends with the particularities and complications of North American cultural exchange, both historically and in the present.

This book analyses the romantic drama and the way that passionate love is presented as the central storyline in popular cinema, drawing upon genre studies and sociology. Exploring the passionate love story as a cinematic form, it also contributes, through comparison, to research on the romantic comedy.

Accounts of public intellectuals in France and French feminism have focused on a specific set of women thinkers overlooking some major women intellectuals. This book aims redresses this balance by studying these forgotten intellectuals creating a cultural and theoretical re-evaluation of the gendered phenomenon of the public intellectual in France.