Privileged Anonymity: The Writings of Madame de Lafayette
Anne Green
Research Monographs in French Studies 1•1 June 1996
- ‘Produces many fresh insights, and demonstrates admirably that La Fayette's writing repays detailed scrutiny... Readable, instructive and accessible: valuable for specialists and illuminating for the general reader.’ — Maya Slater, Times Literary Supplement 1996
- ‘This thought-provoking study inaugurates a major new series of critical monographs... Offers many fresh insights into these important texts, and it is to be warmly welcomed.’ — Jonathan Mallinson, French Studies LIV.2, 2000, 215-6
- Luisa Benatti, Studi francesi 124, 1998, 135
Towards a Cultural Philology: Phèdre and the Construction of 'Racine'
Amy Wygant
Research Monographs in French Studies 4•1 July 1999
- ‘This book approaches Racine not primarily as a classicist, but as a playwright rooted in his own time... Through references to philosophy, art and music, Wygant interrogates the meaning of frequently used phrases such as 'the music of Racine'. This study draws together many strands of research through the juxtaposition of a multiplicity of areas and details.’ — Rosemary Arnoux, New Zealand Journal of French Studies 22.2, 2001, 43-4
- ‘A fresh, clever, often entertaining book, about lots of things as well as Phèdre, and the brief volume is lavishly and revealing illustrated.’ — Richard Parish, Modern Language Review 96.1, 2001, 187-8 (full text online)
Saint-Evremond: A Voice from Exile
Denys Potts
Research Monographs in French Studies 10•1 May 2002
- ‘In the introduction to this little book, Denys Potts gives an excellent introduction to Saint-Evremond's career and writings... Most of the space in the letters is given over to financial details of a Balzacian kind, but in between these come flashes of the wit and man-about-town, nostalgic moments, thoughts about literature, reflections on age.’ — Peter France, Times Literary Supplement 1 November, 2002
- ‘This book is a delight on a number of levels... The exemplary introduction and notes by Denys Potts offer far more than one might expect: not only do we learn about the contents of the letters themselves, but we are also given an erudite yet highly readable account of Saint-Evremond's life and his importance as both thinker and stylist... Invaluable documentary material for Saint-Evremond scholars and a fine introduction to a master of the epistolary art.’ — Nicholas Hammond, Modern Language Review 98.4, 2003, 986-7 (full text online)
- ‘These letters seek help in pressing for private annuity payments long overdue. Those to his fellow-Norman Mme de Gouville are embroidered with self-ironic 'galanteries' and with jokes about the tight-fistedness of their province. Letters to the abbé, an amateur scientist and inventor, playfully evoke debt-recovery in terms of Cartesian mechanics.’ — Robin Howells, Huguenot Society Proceedings 28.1, 2003, 121
- ‘A particularly full and illuminating account of the life and thought of [Potts's] elusive subject... The letters afford a kind of coda to the biography that leads into them.’ — Richard Parish, French Studies LVIII.1, 2004, 105-6
- ‘This volume also provides a very useful introduction, which gives an overview of Saint-Evremond's life and ideas and the context in which the letters were written.’ — unsigned notice, Forum for Modern Language Studies XL.2, April 2004, 238
Silent Witness: Racine's Non-Verbal Annotations of Euripides
Susanna Phillippo
Research Monographs in French Studies 14•1 June 2003
- ‘Phillippo ... is to be congratulated on finding interest in such apparently unpromising markings and on giving them voice. Indeed, her book is a triumph of sober scholarship and critical imagination.’ — Michael Hawcroft, French Studies LVIII.3, 2004, 408-9
- ‘Source criticism seems to have caught a second wind lately ... Silent Witness represents an enlightened form of this methodological approach, giving an inside view of Racine's creative process that allows us to look over his shoulder in the atelier d'artiste.’ — Ronald W. Tobin, L'Esprit Créateur Vol. XLIV, n. 2, Summer 2004, 97-8
- ‘This book has been painstakingly researched and set out in a manner to facilitate the reader's understanding of the detailed argument based on close reading of the French and Greek texts.’ — Rosemary Arnoux, New Zealand Journal of French Studies 25/1, 2004, 61-2
- ‘It is true that we will never know why Racine marked certain passages, and that we can also argue for the influence of text that is unmarked. The study of sources will necessarily often belong to the domain of informed speculation. But if we accept that literary criticism deals more in persuasion than in certainties, we will be more sympathetic to this well-judged attempt to look at an old question in what is an original, clear-headed, and stimulating way.’ — John Campbell, Modern Language Review 100.2, April 2005, 500-01 (full text online)
- ‘For anyone interested in Euripides and his influence, the research and the argument here presented offer much to tantalize.’ — Clara Shaw Hardy, The Classical Bulletin 81.1, 2005, 98-100
- ‘Phillippo's conclusions remain firmly within the limits of what can reasonably be deduced from the evidence and the complete listing in an appendix of Racine's non-verbal annotations allow the sceptic to check against the original Euripidean text. This book has added an important element to the study of Racine's work.’ — Mark Bannister, International Journal of the Classical Tradition Fall 2004, 312-13
Poisoned Words: Slander and Satire in Early Modern France
Emily Butterworth
Research Monographs in French Studies 21•24 May 2006
- ‘Emily Butterworth’s thoughtful and elegantly argued study... makes an important contribution to that burgeoning area of critical study where literature can never be conceived outside the notion of law, and in this case, the law itself.’ — Henry Phillips, Modern Language Review 103.3, July 2008, 852-53 (full text online)
- ‘Her excellent book will be of interest to anybody concerned with rhetoric, polemic and the fashioning (and unfashioning) of early modern reputations.’ — Timothy Chesters, French Studies 469-70
- ‘Butterworth’s valuable work clearly shows that slander and satire are linked to other important preoccupations of the time (such as the use of rhetoric and the formation of identity) and brings a welcome focus on three writers, each of whom addresses one of Lucian’s positions: slanderer, audience and victim.’ — unsigned notice, Forum for Modern Language Studies 45.3 (2009), 351-54
Furetière's Roman bourgeois and the Problem of Exchange: Titular Economies
Craig Moyes
Research Monographs in French Studies 34•21 December 2012
- ‘Although this highlighting of the connection between Le Roman bourgeois and the Dictionnaire universel is not new, it provides a stream of stimulating insights, taking the argument far beyond the intertextuality that is usually the limit of critical concern in this area. A chapter on ‘Numismatics’, for instance, moves easily from Furetière’s satire of bourgeois marriage as a model of social and financial exchange, encapsulated in the ‘Tariffe des partis sortables’, by way of the décri of monetary (but also literary) value, to the linguistic ‘gold standard’ that the Académie intended to establish with its dictionary, so alien to Furetière’s own aims.’ — Mark Bannister, French Studies 68.3, July 2014, 394-96
- ‘L’intérêt de cet essai de critique littéraire ne se situe, en effet, non seulement dans sa lecture minutieuse, singulière, souvent ingénieuse du Roman bourgeois dont il souligne bien les pièges et les passionnants replis, mais aussi dans les multiples approches critiques employées tout au long de l’ouvrage.’ — Jean-Alexandre Perras, H-France 14, December 2014, 199