Mary Lewis Shaw – författare

Performance in the Texts of Mallarmé offers a new theory of performance in the poetic and critical texts of Stephane Mallarmé, a theory challenging the prevailing interpretation of his work as epitomizing literary purism and art for art's sake.Following an analytical presentation of the concepts of ritual and performance generally applied, Mary Shaw shows that Mallarmé perceived music, dance, and theater as ideal languages of the body and therefore as ideal forms of ritual through which to supplement and celebrate poetic texts. She focuses on previously unexplored references to supplementary, extratextual performances in four of Mallarmé's major poetic texts—Herodiade, L'après-midi d'un faune, Igitur, and Un coup de des—revealing the consistent formal expression of his original conception of literature's relationship to the performing arts.Shaw then discusses Mallarmé's monumental project, Le Livre, a metaphysical book designed to be performed in a series of ritual celebrations. She analyzes and describes the intrinsic structure and contents of this unfinished work as the fullest realization of the text-performance relationship elaborated throughout Mallarmé's corpus. Shaw offers Le Livre as a prototype of avant-garde performance, drawing important parallels between Mallarmé's literary experimentation and crucial developments in twentieth-century arts.

The Cambridge Introduction to French Poetry is a comprehensive survey of French poetry. The poets discussed - all quoted in the original, followed by an English translation - belong to every period from the eleventh century to the present, and include Francophone authors from areas other than France. The goals of this Introduction are to provide tools for the analysis of French poems, while assessing ever-changing distinctions and hierarchies between verse and prose, forms and genres, and levels of style; and to give a sense of French poetry's endless quest for self-definition, by examining its ambivalent relations with political realities, philosophical ideas, and the achievements of other arts, notably music and painting. Accessible, wide-ranging and designed specifically for use on courses, this Introduction contains a useful glossary of poetic terms, and will prove invaluable to students and teachers alike.