Dorothy Gabe Coleman – författare

A study of Maurice Scève's sequence of love poems, the Délie - the first French canzoniere. There are two main themes: Scève's rendering of the intensity and complexity of the human experience of love, and secondly, his exploitation of the European tradition of love poetry. Dr Coleman tackles broad issues concerning appreciation of poetry, and more particularly, difficult poetry. Comparing individual poems by Horace, Scève and Mallarmé, she pinpoints the task of a serious reader: to experience sensitively and intellectually human emotions couched in artistic form. The book does not offer doctrines about Scève's love. instead, it looks at the contextual linguistic formulae which create love within the poems themselves: the allusiveness, the intellectual rigour, the tautness, the juxtaposition of words, combine with the voluptuousness and simplicity of the images, rhythm and sound, to make out of the poems a timeless an intensely personal experience.

It is well known in a general way that sixteenth-century French literature looked for its models towards Greece and Rome, but the topic is usually left there. This 1979 book begins with a reassessment of the original meaning and use of the work of Roman rhetoricians. It also identifies certain specific values or canons implicit in the actual texture of Latin poetry, and shows how these transformed French rhetorical theory and inaugurated the line of French poetry from Scève to Valéry. Mrs Coleman examines, both in general and in the work of Scève, Ronsard, Du Bellay and Montaigne, in particular, the way in which Roman values were recreated in the new language and the new literary forms. Scholars interested in the survival or prolongation of the classical tradition will be interested, and so, of course, will specialists in French and Renaissance literary studies.

A study of Rabelais (?1494-1553) as a literary artist giving special attention to the form and language of his fiction. Coleman uses a genuinely literary approach, using some of the techniques of stylistic analysis. She avoids the two extremes of approaching Rabelais either as a solemn sixteenth-century humanist who expressed profound truths in simple allegories or as a mere joker, drunk with words. Instead she sees him as finding a particular form - Menippean satire - in which he could achieve a balance between seriousness and irony, involvement and detachment, direct address to the reader and distance, and in which he was able to develop his own unique language. This study will interest students and teachers of French and European literature and Renaissance studies.

This book, first published in 1987, is an examination of Montaigne’s Essais and a guide to the reading of this fascinating, stimulating and imaginative writer – a writer who is also difficult to read and interpret. This book’s aim is to help the reader of Montaigne understand that their own experiences of life and literature can be brought to bear to help comprehend the true meaning of Montaigne.