The Familiar Enemy re-examines the linguistic, literary, and cultural identities of England and France within the context of the Hundred Years War. During this war, two profoundly intertwined peoples developed complex strategies for expressing their aggressively intimate relationship. This special connection between the English and the French has endured into the modern period as a model for Western nationhood. Ardis Butterfield reassesses the concept of 'nation' in this period through a wide-ranging discussion of writing produced in war, truce, or exile from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, concluding with reflections on the retrospective views of this conflict created by the trials of Jeanne d'Arc and by Shakespeare's Henry V. She considers authors writing in French, 'Anglo-Norman', English, and the comic tradition of Anglo-French 'jargon', including Machaut, Deschamps, Froissart, Chaucer, Gower, Charles d'Orléans, as well as many lesser-known or anonymous works. Traditionally Chaucer has been seen as a quintessentially English author. This book argues that he needs to be resituated within the deeply francophone context, not only of England but the wider multilingual cultural geography of medieval Europe. It thus suggests that a modern understanding of what 'English' might have meant in the fourteenth century cannot be separated from 'French', and that this has far-reaching implications both for our understanding of English and the English, and of French and the French.

A series of limiting definitions have tended to delineate the Franco-British cinematic relationship. As this collection of essays reveals, there is much more to it than simple oppositions between British critical esteem for the films of France and French dismissal of ‘le cinéma British’, or the success of Ken Loach et al. at the French box office and the relative dearth of French movies on British screens. In fact, there has long been a rich and productive dialogue between these two cultures in which both their clear differences and their shared concerns have played a vital role. This book provides an overview of the history of these relations from the early days of sound cinema to the present day. The chapters, written by leading experts in the history of French, British and European cinema, provide insights into relations between French and British cinematic cultures at the level of production, exhibition and distribution, reception, representation and personnel. The book features a diverse range of studies, including: the exhibition of French cinema in Britain in the 1930s, contemporary ‘extreme’ French cinema, stars such as Annabella, David Niven and Jane Birkin and the French Resistance on British screens.

Gesa Stedman's ambitious new study is a comprehensive account of cross-channel cultural exchanges between seventeenth-century France and England, and includes discussion of a wide range of sources and topics. Literary texts, garden design, fashion, music, dance, food, the book market, and the theatre as well as key historical figures feature in the book. Importantly, Stedman concentrates on the connection between actual, material transfer and its symbolic representation in both visual and textual sources, investigating material exchange processes in order to shed light on the connection between actual and symbolic exchange. Individual chapters discuss exchanges instigated by mediators such as Henrietta Maria and Charles II, and textual and visual representations of cultural exchange with France in poetry, restoration comedies, fashion discourse, and in literary devices and characters. Well-written and accessible, Cultural Exchange in Seventeenth-Century France and England provides needed insight into the field of cultural exchange, and will be of interest to both literary scholars and cultural historians.

This volume focuses on the literary connotations of the 'Channel Packet' and sets forth lively dialogues between French and British culture at a key period of artistic innovation and exchange between 'high' and popular art forms.

Gonthier sets Montesquieu's work in the context of early eighteenth-century Anglo-French relations, taking a comparative approach to show how Montesquieu's engagement with English thought and writing persisted throughout his writing career.

Topics covered in this volume include literary Chinese as a language for science, the history and principles of scientific translation in Europe, the theatrical panorama in the 19th century and its roots in optical theory and experiment, and an alternative perspective on Gerard Manley Hopkins.

French Music in Britain 1830–1914 investigates the presence, reception and influence of French art music in Britain between 1830 (roughly the arrival of ‘grand opera’ and opéra comique in London) and the outbreak of the First World War. Five chronologically ordered chapters investigate key questions such as: * Where and to whom was French music performed in Britain in the nineteenth century? * How was this music received, especially by journal and newspaper critics and other arbiters of taste? * What characteristics and qualities did British audiences associate with French music? * Was the presence and reception of French music in any way influenced by Franco-British political relations, or other aspects of cultural transfer and exchange? * Were British composers influenced by their French contemporaries to any extent and, if so, in what ways? Placed within the wider social and cultural context of Britain’s most ambiguous and beguiling international relationship, this volume demonstrates how French music became an increasingly significant part of the British musician’s repertory and influenced many composers. This is an important resource for musicologists specialising in Nineteenth-Century Music, Music History and European Music. It is also relevant for scholars and researchers of French Studies and Cultural Studies.

This volume adopts a varied approach to the study of the 'material world' in the French literature, thought and visual arts of the 19th century. Contributors look not only at the Romantic and Realist transcendence of the Neo-classical heritage of abstraction and idealism, but also adopt modern critical perspectives to analyse central themes such as urbanisation, fetishism and the representation of the female body.