- "What is Literature?" and Other Essays
- Jean-Paul Sartre
- Introduction by Steven Ungar
- What is Literature? challenges anyone who writes as if literature could be extricated from history or society. But Sartre does more than indict. He offers a definitive statement about the phenomenology of reading, and he goes on to provide a dashing example of how to write a history of literature that takes ideology and institutions into account.
- Paperback 1988 / Hardcover 1988
- Absent without Leave
- Denis Hollier
- Catherine Porter, Translator
- Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris, Roger Caillois, André Malraux, the early Jean-Paul Sartre--these were writers torn between politics and the pleasures of the text, maturing in the 1930s and 1940s in a world that would have no place for literature. And yet it was the work of these writers that shaped French literature--influencing Derrida, Foucault, de Man, Deleuze, and Ricoeur--and so profoundly affected literary enterprise in the English-speaking world since 1968. This literary history, the prehistory of postmodernism, is what Hollier recovers in his interlocking studies of the main figures of French literary life before the age of anxiety gave way to the era of existentialist commitment.
- Paperback 1997 / Hardcover 1997
- André Gide
- Alan Sheridan
- In this literary biography of Gide, an intimate portrait of the reluctantly public man emerges. Following Gide from his first forays among the Symbolists through his sexual and political awakenings to his worldwide fame as a writer, sage, and commentator on his age, Sheridan richly conveys the drama of a remarkable life; the depth, breadth, and vitality of an incomparable oeuvre; and the spirit of a time that both so aptly expressed.
- Hardcover 1999 / Paperback 2000
- The Art of Telling
- Frank Kermode
- Kermode assesses the revolutionary transformations in literary criticism over the last fifteen years and places them in historical perspective. Examining novels ranging in scope from a 1907 bestseller to the avant-garde works of various periods, he includes such writers as Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Michel Butor, and Thomas Pynchon.
- Hardcover 1983 / Paperback
- Blessings in Disguise
- Jean Starobinski
- Arthur Goldhammer, Translator
- Hardcover
- Coming to Writing" and Other Essays
- Helene Cixous
- Deborah Jenson, Ed. and Trans.
- Sarah Cornell, Translator
- Ann Liddle, Translator
- Susan Sellers, Translator
- Susan Rubin Suleiman
- This collection presents six essays by one of France's most remarkable contemporary authors. A notoriously playful stylist, Cixous here explores how the problematics of the sexes--viewed as a paradigm for all difference, which is the organizing principle behind identity and meaning--manifest themselves, write themselves, in texts.
- Hardcover 1991 / Paperback
- Derrida
- Christopher Norris
- Norris demonstrates that Derrida's texts should be understood as belonging more to philosophy than to literature. He explains the significance of Derrida's writing on texts in the Western philosophical tradition, from Plato to Kant, liegel, and tiusserl, placing him squarely within that tradition. He also discusses some of the reasons for the massive institutional resistance that has so far prevented philosophers from engaging seriously with Derrida's work.
- Paperback
- Divagations
- Stéphane Mallarmé
- Translated by Barbara Johnson
- The salmagundi of prose poems, prose-poetic musings, criticism, and reflections that is Divagations has long been considered a treasure trove by students of aesthetics and modern poetry. This was the only book of prose that Mallarmé published in his lifetime and, in a new translation by Johnson, it is now available for the first time in English just as he arranged it, in all of its languor and musicality.
- Hardcover 2007
- English Romanticism and the French Tradition
- Margery Sabin
- Hardcover 1976
- Fictions of Romantic Irony
- Lilian R. Furst
- This book makes a new approach to romantic irony by envisaging it in a broad European context in relation both to earlier concepts of irony and to traditional uses of irony in narration. Through an analysis of six major European narratives of the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century it illustrates the reciprocal interplay of theory and practice, and the complex and central role that irony assumes as a shaping aesthetic factor. Using a wide perspective and an original synchronic disposition of texts within its historical framework, it identifies the distinctive philosophical and literary features of romantic irony.
- Hardcover 1984
- A Genetic Approach to Structures in the Work of Jean Genet
- Camille Naish
- Hardcover 1978
- The Hidden Reader
- Victor Brombert
- Brombert shows how a text works--its structure and narrative devices, and the symbolic function of characters, episodes, words--and he highlights the distinctive postures and styles of each writer. He gives us a sense of the hidden inner text as well as the techniques writers have devised to lead their readers to the discovery of what is hidden. With wonderful subtlety he unravels the reader's participatory response, whether it be Hugo reading Shakespeare, Sartre reading Hugo, Stendhal reading Rousseau, T. S. Eliot misreading Baudelaire, or Baudelaire, Balzac, and Flaubert reading their own sensibilities.
- Hardcover 1988
- Image and Theme
- W. M. Frohock, Editor
- Paperback 1969
- Instigations
- Richard Sieburth
- Hardcover 1978
- L'univers theatral de Corneille
- A. S.-M. Goulet
- Hardcover 1978
- Les Esprits
- Pierre de Larivey
- Donald Stone
- Paperback 1978
- The Letters of Gustave Flaubert: 1830-1857
- Gustave Flaubert
- Edited and translated by Francis Steegmuller
- Hardcover 1980 / Paperback
- The Letters of Gustave Flaubert: 1857-1880
- Gustave Flaubert
- Francis Steegmuller, Ed. and Trans.
- An acknowledged master of translation, Francis Steegmuller has given us by far the most generous and varied selection of Flaubert's letters in English. He presents these with an engrossing narrative that places them in the context of the writer's life and times. Throughout this exposition in Flaubert's own words of his views on life, literature, and the passions, readers of his novels will be powerfully reminded of the fertility of his genius, and delighted by his poetic enthusiasm. Flaubert's letters are documents of life and art; lovers of literature and of the literary adventure can rejoice in this edition.
- Hardcover 1982 / Paperback
- A Lion for Love
- Robert Alter
- Carol Cosman, In collaboration with
- Paperback 1986
- A New History of French Literature
- Denis Hollier, Editor
- This splendid introduction to French literature from 842 A.D. to the present decade is the most imaginative single-volume guide to the French literary tradition available in English.
- Hardcover 1989 / Paperback 1998
- Original Subjects
- Ala A. Alryyes
- Original Subjects explores the interweaving of the child-hero and the fortunes of a nation, as these are portrayed in a wide selection of novels and national narratives in the French and English traditions.
- Hardcover 2001 / Paperback 2001
- Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture
- Dudley Andrew
- Steven Ungar
- Andrew and Ungar apply an evocative "poetics of culture" to capture the complex atmospherics of Paris in the 1930s. Rather than a straight story of the Popular Front, they have produced something closer to the format of an illustrated newspaper whose multiple columns represent the breadth of urban life during this critical decade at the end of the Third French Republic.
- Hardcover 2005 / Paperback 2008
- Post Scripts
- Vincent Kaufmann
- Deborah Treisman, Translator
- Hardcover
- Rimbaud's Theatre of the Self
- James Lawler
- In a new interpretation of a poet who has swayed the course of modern poetry--in France and elsewhere--Lawler focuses on what he demonstrates is the crux of Rimbaud's imagination: the masks and adopted personas with which he regularly tested his identity and his art.
- Hardcover 1992
- Solitude in Society
- Robert Sayre
- Sayre brings a special kind of literary intelligence to his study of the problem of isolation in modern society. He first discusses the notion of solitude as it is treated in classical literature and carries it through to the nineteenth century, with emphasis on the literary history of France. In the second part of the book he presents detailed interpretations of five twentieth-century French novels.
- Hardcover 1978
- The Tain of the Mirror
- Rodolphe Gasché
- Deconstruction is no game of mirrors, revealing the text as a play of surface against surface. Its more radical philosophical effort is to get behind the mirror and question the very nature of reflection. The Tain of the Mirror (tain names the tinfoil, or lusterless back of the mirror) explores that gritty surface without which no reflection would be possible. Gasche does what no one has done before in many discussions of Derrida, namely to tie his work in an authoritative way to its origins in the history of the criticism of reflexivity.
- Hardcover 1986 / Paperback 1988
- Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel
- Victor Brombert
- Victor Brombert reassesses in a modern perspective the power and originality of Hugo's work, and provides a new interpretation of Hugo's narrative art as well as a synthesis of his poetic and moral vision. The twenty-eight drawings by Hugo reproduced in this book are further testimony to the visionary nature of Hugo's imagination.
- Hardcover 1984 / Paperback
- The World Republic of Letters
- Pascale Casanova
- Translated by M. B. DeBevoise
- In this book, Casanova shows us the state of world literature behind the stylistic refinements--a world of letters relatively independent from economic and political realms, and in which language systems, aesthetic orders, and genres struggle for dominance. Rejecting facile talk of globalization, with its suggestion of a happy literary "melting pot," Casanova exposes an emerging regime of inequality in the world of letters, where minor languages and literatures are subject to the invisible but implacable violence of their dominant counterparts.
- Hardcover 2005 / Paperback 2007
- The Writer of Modern Life
- Walter Benjamin
- Edited by Michael W. Jennings
- Translated by Howard Eiland
- Translated by Edmund Jephcott
- Translated by Rodney Livingstone
- Translated by Harry Zohn
- Benjamin's essays on the great French lyric poet Charles Baudelaire revolutionized not just the way we think about Baudelaire, but our understanding of modernity and modernism as well. In these essays, Benjamin challenges the image of Baudelaire as late-Romantic dreamer, and evokes instead the modern poet caught in a life-or-death struggle with the forces of the urban commodity capitalism that had emerged in Paris around 1850.
- Paperback 2006