Throughout her career, Colette experimented with genre for the purposes of telling stories of her life. The books that resulted, known collectively as her 'livres-souvenirs', are far from being autobiographies in the customary sense. By addressing the need to reconsider the generic issues surrounding autobiographical story-telling, Anne Freadman's study brings the richness of 'the genre question' to the fore, shedding a fresh light on this much-loved body of work. From the vignettes ofLa Maison de Claudineto the note-books ofL'etoile vesper andLe Fanal bleu, from stories of losing to stories of collecting, Colette's memory books take different narrative forms and explore the passing of time in different ways. This book investigates Colette's variegated generic choices as so many ways of 'telling time'.

Anita Brookner was known for writing boring books about lonely, single women. Misreading Anita Brookner unlocks the mysteries of the Brookner heroine by creating entirely new ways to read six Brookner novels. Drawing on diverse intertextual sources, Peta Mayer illustrates how Brookner's solitary twentieth-century women can also be seen as variations of queer nineteenth-century male artist archetypes.

This collection of essays addresses the question of lucidity as a thematic in literature and film but also as a quality of both expression and insight in literary criticism and critical thought more generally. The essays offer treatments of lucidity in itself and in relation to its opposites, forms of obscurity and darkness. They offer attention to problems of philosophical thought and reason, to questions of literary and poetic form, and of photographic and filmic contemplation. Ranging from engagements with early modern writing through to more recent material the contributions focus in particular on nineteenth- and twentieth-century French prose and poetry, the field which has been the predominant focus of Alison Finch’s critical writing. They are written as tributes to the distinctively lucid insights of her work and to the breadth and clarity of its intellectual engagement.

Imagine trying to tell someone something about yourself and your desires for which there are no words. What if the mere attempt at expression was bound to misfire, to efface the truth of that ineluctable something? In Someone, Michael Lucey considers characters from twentieth-century French literary texts whose sexual forms prove difficult to conceptualize or represent. The characters expressing these “misfit” sexualities gravitate towards same-sex encounters. Yet they differ in subtle but crucial ways from mainstream gay or lesbian identities—whether because of a discordance between gender identity and sexuality, practices specific to a certain place and time, or the fleetingness or non-exclusivity of desire. Investigating works by Simone de Beauvoir, Colette, Jean Genet, and others, Lucey probes both the range of same-sex sexual forms in twentieth-century France and the innovative literary language authors have used to explore these evanescent forms. As a portrait of fragile sexualities that involve awkward and delicate maneuvers and modes of articulation, Someone reveals just how messy the ways in which we experience and perceive sexuality remain, even to ourselves.

This is the first book to study the middlebrow novel in France. It asks what middlebrow means, and applies the term positively to explore the 'poetics' of the types of novel that have attracted 'ordinary' fiction readers - in their majority female - since the end of the 19th century.

Genre Studies around the Globe: Beyond the Three Traditions exemplifies rich and vibrant international scholarship in the area of non-literary genre studies in the early 21st century. Based on the Genre 2012 conference held in Ottawa, Canada, the volume brings under one cover the three Anglophone traditions (English for Specific Purposes, the Sydney School, Rhetorical Genre Studies) and the approaches to genre studies developed in other national, linguistic, and cultural contexts (Brazilian, Chilean, and European). The volume contributors investigate a variety of genres, ranging from written to spoken to multimodal, and discuss issues, central to the field of genre studies: genre conceptualization in different traditions, its theoretical underpinnings, the goals of genre research, and pedagogical implications of genre studies. This collection is addressed to researchers, teachers, and students of genre who wish to familiarize themselves with current international developments in genre studies.

Helene Cixous (1937-), distinguished not least as a playwright herself, told Le Monde in 1977 that she no longer went to the theatre: it presented women only as reflections of men, used for their visual effect. The theatre she wanted would stress the auditory, giving voice to ways of being that had previously been silenced. She was by no means alone in this. Cixous's plays, along with those of Nathalie Sarraute (1900-99), Marguerite Duras (1914-96), and Noelle Renaude (1949-), among others, have proved potent in drawing participants into a dynamic 'space of the voice'. If, as psychoanalysis suggests, voice represents a transitional condition between body and language, such plays may draw their audiences in to understandings previously never spoken. In this ground-breaking study, Noonan explores the rich possibilities of this new audio-vocal form of theatre, and what it can reveal of the auditory self.

Collective nouns such asmajorite or foulehave long been of interest to linguists for their unusual semantic properties, and provide a valuable source of new data on the evolution of French grammar. This book tests the hypothesis that plural agreement with collective nouns is becoming more frequent in French. Through an analysis of data from a variety of sources, including sociolinguistic interviews, gap-fill tests and corpora, the complex linguistic and external factors which affect this type of agreement are examined, shedding new light on their interaction in this context. Broader questions concerning the methodological challenges of studying variation and change in morphosyntax, and the application of sociolinguistic generalisations to the French of France, are also addressed.

"The Guadeloupean writer and critic Maryse Conde has for the last twenty-five years divided her time between her native Guadeloupe and the United States. If the author's work has attracted much critical attention in the United States, it is the fictional works that have been the focus of this attention with these predominantly read in the light of political themes such as identity and resistance. In these intelligent and sensitive readings, Eva Sansavior argues in favour of adopting a broader thematic and generic approach to the author's work. Sansavior accounts for the multiple and oblique uses of literature in the Conde's literary and critical work tracking its complex interactions with tradition, reception, politics and autobiography and also the singular possibilities that these interactions present for re-imagining the ideas of politics, literature, identity and, ultimately, the nature of critical practice itself."

The Dada movement, revered as perhaps the purest form of cultural subversion and provocation in 20th-century Europe, has been a victim of the readiness with which cultural historians have swallowed its own propaganda. Based on extensive close analysis of French-language Dada work in its original form, and offering English translations throughout, this major reappraisal looks at a broad range of media and topics - including poetry, film, philosophy, and quantum physics - in order to get beyond Dada's typecasting as avant-garde anti-hero. Work by women writers and other marginalized figures combines with that of canonical Dadaists to present Dada in a radically new set of guises: poetic and textually subtle; intellectually and philosophically meaningful; peaceable and quasi-Buddhist; and, perhaps most uncomfortably of all, conformist and reactionary.