French & Francophone Studies

This ebook set provides students and researchers with a comprehensive resource on the subject of colonialism and expansion. The work describes and analyzes the many aspects of the history of Europe's expansion overseas into the Americas, Asia, Africa and the Pacific, beginning in the 15th century and the building and collapse of empires (Spanish, Portuguese, British, French, Dutch, German, American). Race relations in decolonized regions as well as current examples of continuing dependence by much of the developing world on Western nations are covered. Articles also address the ideology and theories behind colonialism and imperialism, as well as the major and controversial issues at the core of the debate on colonialism and its consequences.

In this account of French literature, sixteen essays by leading specialists offer provocative insights into French literary culture, its genres, movements, themes, and historic turning points, including the cultural and linguistic challenges of today's multi-ethnic France.

The Enlightenment has long been seen as synonymous with the beginnings of modern Western intellectual and political culture. As a set of ideas and a social movement, this historical moment, the 'age of reason' of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, is marked by attempts to place knowledge on new foundations. The Cambridge Companion to the French Enlightenment brings together essays by leading scholars representing disciplines ranging from philosophy, religion and literature, to art, medicine, anthropology and architecture, to analyse the French Enlightenment.

This volume offers insight into the novel in French over the past two centuries. In a series of essays, experts discuss a variety of topics including nineteenth-century realism, women and fiction, popular fiction, experiment and innovation, war and the Holocaust, the Francophone novel, and postmodern fiction. They offer a reassessment of major figures, while deliberately reading traditional views of literary history against the grain. Theoretical discussion is combined with close reading of texts and exploration of context, comparison with other genres and other literatures, and reference to novels from earlier periods.

Medieval French literature encompasses 450 years of literary output in Old and Middle French, mostly produced in Northern France and England. These texts, including courtly lyrics, prose and verse romances, dits amoureux and plays, proved hugely influential for other European literary traditions in the medieval period and beyond. This Companion offers a wide-ranging and stimulating guide to literature composed in medieval French from its beginnings in the ninth century until the Renaissance. The essays are grounded in detailed analysis of canonical texts and authors such as the Chanson de Roland, the Roman de la Rose, Villon's Testament, Chrétien de Troyes, Machaut, Christine de Pisan and the Tristan romances.

This reference book provides extensive information about French women writers and the world in which they lived. It spans French literature from the Middle Ages to the present and covers those writers who lived and worked mainly in France. It begins with a feminist history of French literature and concludes with a selected, general bibliography and a chronology of women writers.