The articles in this volume are the reworkings of papers given at the second joint postgraduate colloquium organised by the department of French at the University of Bristol and the University of Exeter in July 1999.The volume offers a varied but cohesive exploration of the transposition of the political message into art, from the sixteenth century to the present day. It reveals the importance of discourse in political narratives, the close link between religion and ideology across the centuries and how violence is very often the key to political transformation. It is at the margins that the political is most evident, margins of realism, margins of narrative, margins of society. Are all texts political? This depends on the definition of the word but the conclusion to the colloquium was that whatever form the political may take, rewriting it means not only redefining the political but ultimately also rewriting the historical.
