The French Art Novel 1900-1930
Katherine Shingler
Research Monographs in French Studies 43•19 December 2016
- ‘An extremely informative and enjoyable study, which takes the reader on a rich and detailed tour of the early twentieth-century French artist’s world, “far beyond the form and concerns of the genre’s nineteenth-century foundational texts”. Clear, compelling, lucid, well researched, and beautifully written, Shingler’s book is an important and welcome sequel to scholarship written on the romantic art novel.’ — Dominique Jullien, H-France 18, May 2018, No. 111
- ‘Shingler uncovers an approach to twentieth-century novels that bears pursuing further. Shingler investigates gender issues thoroughly and with great clarity, but she also locates other anxieties in the work of these writers.’ — Alexander Dickow, French Studies 72.2, April 2018, 305–306 (full text online)
- ‘Il genere letterario dell’art novel viene de nito da Katherine Shingler come un genere in cui la nzione è strettamente connessa all’arte, nel senso che il focus della narrazione è rivolto a problematiche legate alle arti visive e i personaggi, perlopiù nel ruolo di protagonisti, sono degli artisti.’ — Michela Gardini, Studi francesi 185, 2018, 356-57
- ‘A well-documented volume offering in-depth analyses of a well-chosen corpus, which comprises the expected classics as well as less familiar novels. The book will be useful and illuminating for readers of art novels and for literature and art students and scholars alike.’ — Emilie Sitzia, Modern Language Review 113.4, October 2018, 879-80 (full text online)
Broken Glass, Broken World: Glass in French Culture in the Aftermath of 1870
Hannah Scott
Research Monographs in French Studies 46•19 December 2016
- ‘Perhaps due to glass’s ubiquity in the urban landscape, Parisians did not fully realize its fragile underpinning of Paris until Prussian bombing quite literally shattered glass’s transparency as urban phenomenon. It was through glass’s destruction that it became a privileged object manifesting the devastation of the année terrible for Parisians. Scott’s ingenuity lies in making glass visible, but especially in proposing broken glass as another ruin of Paris that both fascinated and disturbed contemporaries.’ — Colin Foss, H-France 18, March 2018, no. 53
- ‘Scott’s incredible historical precision within a compact monograph has tremendous benefits to the field and raises even larger questions about the relationship between the Third Republic’s emphasis on glass and the social roles played by glass today, especially in the ecological arena. One wonders how the windowpanes, glass aquariums, and wine glasses of the post-industrial era gave way to the plastic wrapping and electronic screens that now serve as barriers between ourselves, the rest of humanity, and the planet as a whole.’ — Claire Nettleton, Nineteenth-Century French Studies 46.3-4, 2018
- ‘This book is an outstanding contribution to an increasingly important field of study: the activating relationship between material culture and literary texts. Substantial and innovative chapters are devoted to Zola, Maupassant, and Huysmans, prefaced by a richly informative account of the proliferation of glass objects and structures, from the monumental to the miniscule, in nineteenth-century France.’ — Robert Lethbridge, French Studies 72.3, July 2018, 456-57
- ‘This engaging and perceptive monograph is a significant contribution to the growing body of scholarship that resituates nineteenth-century literature within its material environment... A remarkably original work, one which is grounded in material research but which manages, nonetheless, to be rightly a work of primarily literary criticism.’ — Natasha Ryan, Modern Language Review 113.3, July 2018, 661-62 (full text online)
Southern Regional French: A Linguistic Analysis of Language and Dialect Contact
Damien Mooney
Research Monographs in French Studies 47•19 December 2016
- ‘Encapsulates both the challenges and the promise of linguistics for history... the kinds of suggestive connections between linguistic form, social identity, and cultural context traced in chapter six hint at the considerable possibilities for integrating a substantive study of language into cultural history. It is to be hoped that more historians will take up this challenge.’ — Paul Cohen, H-France 18, February 2018, no. 5
- ‘Un travail de grande qualité et sera une référence incontournable pour tous les dialectologues, phonologues et sociolinguistes qui s’intéressent à la variation phonologique en français.’ — Julien Eychenne, French Studies 72.3, July 2018, 484-85
Balzac's Love Letters: Correspondence and the Literary Imagination
Ewa Szypula
Research Monographs in French Studies 52•19 December 2016
- ‘Balzac the inveterate re-reader forces his own readers into their own, creative, re-readings of his texts. How fortunate, then, that so many of Balzac’s own letters, not least those to Mme Hanska, have been preserved for our own reading and re-reading, and are thus able to give rise to this subtle, sophisticated, original — and eminently readable — new study.’ — Owen Heathcote, H-France 17, November 2017
- ‘On en saluera en n l’originalité, la nesse d’analyse, et l’attention subtile prêtée à l’écriture de Balzac, à ses tactiques comme à son tact, à sa volonté de maîtrise comme à sa délicatesse.’ — Thomas Conrad, Studi francesi 185, 2018, 335-36
- ‘Szypula treats the letters as texts in their own right, arguing persuasively that they can be analysed in much the same way as we might read and interpret Balzac’s fiction... As Szypula argues compellingly, the themes of writing and rereading assume special importance in the 1844 novel Modeste Mignon, in which Balzac can be seen to reflect on the limitations of rereading, particularly when a letter-writer is insincere. The study concludes with an Afterword that examines Mme Han ska’s attempts at revising Balzac’s letters following his death, a process that shows — as Szypula does so refreshingly in this volume — that this correspondence has never truly closed, but instead remains intriguingly open to rereading and re-interpretation.’ — Andrew Watts, French Studies 72.4, October 2018, 610-11
Laforgue, Philosophy, and Ideas of Otherness
Sam Bootle
Research Monographs in French Studies 54•25 May 2018
- ‘This is the first full-length study of Laforgue to be published in English since Anne Holmes’s Jules Laforgue and Poetic Innovation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). For all that anglophone scholarship has contributed in the intervening twenty-five years to the critical picture of a poet best known for his pioneering vers libre, it has lacked the sustained depth and breadth of attention that Sam Bootle’s excellent monograph offers... Through its own openness to Laforgue’s intellectual eclecticism, this book offers a necessary and compelling account of a poet far more widely recognized for his formal experimentation than for his very particular brand of culture critique.’ — Claire White, French Studies 73.3, July 2019, 471-72 (full text online)
- ‘Ecco qui la monografia di un giovane ricercatore incentrata sulla presenza della filosofia tedesca e orientale nella produ- zione di Jules Laforgue. Lo studio è così convincente che un suo capitolo, volto in lingua francese, è entrato a far parte di un recentissimo numero (2, 2017) della “Revue d’Histoire littéraire de la France” coordinato da Henri Scepi e dedicato a Laforgue, Poésie et Philosophie. A fine volume, l’indice dei nomi, concetti e titoli evi- denzia che, in questo luogo, l’indagine è di più ampio spettro, coinvolgendo sia l’opera in versi che l’opera in prosa di Jules Laforgue.’ — Alessandra Marangoni, Studi francesi 188, 2020, 383
- ‘Bootle’s fine monograph brings us fresh and valuable perspec- tives on Laforgue’s infinitely intriguing poetry, prose, and, above all, philosophical engagement with the world.’ — Alexandra K. Wettlaufer, Modern Language Review 115.3, July 2020, 726-27 (full text online)
The Poetry of Céline Arnauld: From Dada to Ultra-Modern
Ruth Hemus
Research Monographs in French Studies 58•28 September 2020
The Language of Disease: Writing Syphilis in Nineteenth-Century France
Steven Wilson
Research Monographs in French Studies 62•28 September 2020
- ‘One of the book’s strongest points is its effort to highlight critical traditions that are rarely brought into the conversation. Wilson regularly offers helpful summaries and clarifications on the different critical currents discussed.’ — Alexandre Wenger, Metascience 23 October 2021 (full text online)
- ‘Wilson’s study contributes significantly to an emerging area of research acknowledging the centrality of syphilis to broader social, medical, and hygienic anxieties, while employing methodologies from the critical medical humanities to focus specifically on the diseased body and its relationship to the language of disease... As we are constantly reminded of the importance of quarantine, contagion, and transmission, Wilson’s approach to the body and language raises questions for future study on how the diseased or sick body shapes and generates language, and how this language shapes our understanding of the body.’ — Beatrice Fagan, Modern Language Review 117.1, January 2022, 127-28 (full text online)
- ‘Steven Wilson’s The Language of Disease makes a significant contribution to ongoing efforts to de-anglicize the medical humanities... While Wilson’s book is, by his own admission, but 'one study of [the language of] one disease in one country at one particular time,' there is no doubt that the approach it adopts will be of considerable value to future explorations of the linguistic dimension of disease.’ — Jordan Owen McCullough, Literature and Medicine 39.1, Spring 2021, 180-84 (full text online)
- ‘Wilson constructs a compelling argument in favour of the medical humanities considering both the critical value of expanding its preoccupation with contemporary medicine, and the importance of taking a more global approach... Wilson’s book is brimming with information, fresh critical perspectives, and compelling close readings that ensure that it will become an important reference for scholars of nineteenth-century French studies in search of this most elusive of diseases.’ — Sarah Jones, Irish Journal of French Studies 21, 2021, 150-51
- ‘Steven Wilson’s book is guided by a question which is at once both extraordinarily timely and yet timeless: how does the diseased body shape language and what, in turn, are the effects of language in shaping our understanding of the diseased body? ... This important book thereby provides a fresh perspective on nineteenth-century writing on syphilis, allowing the reader to realize the urgency of a truly critical, comparative, and transnational medical humanities.’ — Anna Magdalena Elsner, French Studies 76.2, April 2022, 298-99 (full text online)
The Living Death of Modernity: Balzac, Baudelaire, Zola
Dorothy Kelly
Research Monographs in French Studies 63•22 July 2021