Marguerite Yourcenar

Legendary Figures examines revolutionary views of the past that have played a crucial role in European & American literature of the last 150 years. The author traces these new approaches to history through an impressive range of novels, from Flaubert's Salammbo to Christa Wolf's Cassandra. The author argues that this new "historical sense," which arose in the mid-nineteenth century, gained eloquent expression in Flauber's writings. What is crucial about the new historical sense is that it views the past as essentially "alien" & "other." The connection between past & present may be powerful, but it is always indirect & difficult to negotiate. As a result, the past seems exotic & unattainable, the object of nostalgia & desire. The author distinguishes this sense of history, with its persistent discontinuities between past & present, from the more continuous & progressive views of history of novelists like Sir Walter Scott & such philosophers as Hegel, Marx, & Lukacs. In their writings, history "proceeds according to the laws of cause & effect, & each epoch can be understood as both the result of the previous one & the cause of the next." In contrast, the modernist writer that the author examines - Flaubert, Pater, Mann, Broch, Wilder, Yourcenar, & Wolf - imagine a past that is "mythic" & "legendary" & thus a metaphor for everything distant, complicated, unattainable, & unknowable.

Reflecting the salient undercurrents of contemporary researh on women writers, this volume is an appraisal of the work of the writer as woman and presents critics' perceptions about how women writers have dealt with the complexity of changing female visions in the 20th century. Each of the 34 essays, contributed by some of today's most distinguished writers, speaks to the work of a particular 20th-century woman writer, and each constitutes a contribution to the scholarly debate.

Rhetoric is the art of persuasion, whether spoken or written. In the first chapter of Rhetoric: Readings in French Literature, Michael Hawcroft sets out its principles comprehensively and lucidly, providing an easily-consulted outline of key terms and a wide range of illustrative examples. Subsequent chapters explore rhetoric at work in different genres, via close reading of texts which range from the drama of Molière, Racine, and Beckett; Montaigne, Sévigné, and Gide on the self; the prose fiction of Laclos, Zola, and Sarraute; poetry by D'Aubigné, Baudelaire, and Césaire; and the oratory of de Gaulle and Yourcenar. Rhetorical analysis uncovers subtleties and complexities in texts which emerge as exciting dramas of communication. This is at once a handbook of rhetoric and a guide to its application to French texts from the sixteenth century to the present.

Through an explanation of forty figures in European culture, ^The Seduction of the Mediterranean argues that the Mediterranean, classical and contemporary, was the central theme in homoerotic writing and art from the 1750s to the 1950s. Episodes of exile, murder, drug-taking, wild homosexual orgies and court cases are woven into an original study of a significant theme in European culture. The myth of a homoerotic Mediterranean made a major contribution to general attitudes towards Antiquity, the Renaissance and modern Italy and Greece.

Fifty-one essays cover the lives and works of the most important women writers in the history of French literature with an emphasis on their experiences as writers, a discussion of their major themes, and brief surveys of critical reactions. Each essay is followed by a bibliography of primary works, a list of titles translated into English, and a selection of critical studies. An additional essay describes the trobairitz, the women troubadours of the 12th and 13th centuries. The volume ends with a chronology featuring the dates of events and trends of special significance to French women.