Contemporary French Cultural Studies

This book should prove enormously useful to undergraduate readers who are seeking to gain an overall orientation within the field of French culture. An excellent resource to the general academic reader who might wish to decipher and interpret the complex and polyphonic text of French culture.European Journal of CommunicationBoth editors and contributors are to be congratulated on producing a book that works both as an undergraduate introduction and as a series of critical essays on French culture on the cusp of the twenty-first century.Journal of European Area Studies

• Part 1 Introduction and SourcesIntroductionFrance @ your fingertipsPart 2 The Background to French Cultural ExceptionalismHow the French present is shaped by the past: the last 100 years in historical perspectiveFrench cultural policy: the special role of the stateFrench education: equal or elitist?Part 3 Cultural Differences and Identity Politics in France TodaySocial differences: age and placeSexual fault lines: sex and gender in cultural contextThe challenge of multiculturalism: regional and religious differences in France todayFrench political culture: homogenous or fragmented?Part 4 Frenchness Revisited: Forces for Cultural UnityIf it isn't clear it isn't French: language and identityFrench public culture: spaces and placesFrenchness constructed and reconstructedPart 5 French Cultural Production at the turn of the Twenty-First CenturySport and identity in the new FranceNo Coca-cola please, we're French! The advertising culture in FranceA night out: theatre and operaCinema in a nation of filmgoersFestivals and fetes populairesThe changing French media: press barons, NRG and digital TVFrom Messian to MC Solaar: music in France in the late twentieth centuryReading books in France: la culture du livreIntellectuals in French culture: where to look todayA guide to contemporary cultural analysis: the French contribution