French and Francophone Studies – serie

Through a discussion of border identities, this book presents a balance-sheet of key developments in modern French society and culture in the context of globalization. It seeks to re-define and re-consider the notion of the border in respect of the identification of a variety of visible and invisible 'border' situations.

Reputation of Louis Aragon (1897-1982) is built upon his activities during the Second World War when his poetry embodied the spirit of the French Resistance. This book goes beyond the figure of the Resistance poet to explore the significance of the subject of war throughout his career.

This book responds to the current critical interest in phantoms and haunting. It explores and assesses the twentieth century's fascination with the ghost in relation to notions of identity, authorship and memory, tracing the changing form of the ghost in key twentieth-century French media: film, photography, literature and theory. However, the ghosts of works present cannot be understood fully without considering the ghosts of works past. Each of the twentieth-century works analyzed considers itself haunted by the past, by memory, be it personal or textual. Consequently, this volume also considers this past and these textual memories by exploring specific ghosts in successive ages (Medieval, Renaissance, Early-Modern and the nineteenth century) and genres key to these epochs (poetry, drama and the novel).Thus, this collection offers an insight into the ghost's past, its evolution across time and genre, before turning to focus on how art in twentieth-century France deals with its textual memories and the ghosts of its past. A substantial introduction explains and pulls together the themes and analytical structure of this volume to provide unity and cohesion among the various chapters.

"French Muslims" provides a critical perspective on Muslim politics and experiences in contemporary France, the European country with the largest Muslim population. Drawing from the work of four Muslim thinkers and activists - Chahdortt Djavann, Fadela Amara, Tariq Ramadan, and Houria Bouteldja - this volume examines issues such as the veil, integration, the role of the school, the traditions of the French republic, and the legacy of the French empire. In addition, Gemie analyzes the most important organizations and structures representing French Muslim opinion today, including the French Council of the Muslim Faith and the Union of Islamic Organizations of France.

Explores the state of French fiction through an examination of the work of five major French writers, Annie Ernaux, Pascal Quignard, Marie Darrieussecq, Jean Echenoz and Patrick Modiano. This book deals with some of the writers on British and American university French courses.

Explores the state of French fiction through an examination of the work of five major French writers, Annie Ernaux, Pascal Quignard, Marie Darrieussecq, Jean Echenoz and Patrick Modiano. This book deals with some of the writers on British and American university French courses.

This book provides a new interpretation of the relationship between consumption, drinking culture, memory and cultural identity in an age of rapid political and economic change. Using France as a case-study it explores the construction of a national drinking culture -the myths, symbols and practices surrounding it- and then through a multisited ethnography of wine consumption demonstrates how that culture is in the process of being transformed. Wine drinking culture in France has traditionally been a source of pride for the French and in an age of concerns about the dangers of 'binge-drinking', a major cause of jealousy for the British. Wine drinking and the culture associated with it are, for many, an essential part of what it means to be French, but they are also part of a national construction. Described by some as a national product, or as a 'totem drink', wine and its attendant cultures supposedly characterise Frenchness in much the same way as being born in France, fighting for liberty or speaking French. Yet this traditional picture is now being challenged by economic, social and political forces that have transformed consumption patterns and led to the fragmentation of wine drinking culture. The aim of this book is to provide an original account of the various causes of the long-term decline in alcohol consumption and of the emergence of a new wine drinking culture since the 1970s and to analyse its relationship to national and regional identity.

This book provides a detailed analysis of the political arguments about the place of Muslims in contemporary France, and also discusses the ideas put forward by a range of Muslim thinkers. France has become the setting for one of the most important conflicts in the modern world. On the one hand, it possesses a rigidly organized, centralized state, whose bureaucrats and civil servants are animated by a code of secular activism. On the other hand, France is also the home for Europe's largest Muslim minority, variously estimated at numbering between four and six million people. This means that in terms of simple numbers, France can be counted as the world's fifteenth Islamic power. Previous conflicts with religion have left a deep impression on French political culture: from the sixteenth and seventeenth-century conflicts between Catholics and Protestants played to the formation of the collaborationist Vichy government in 1940. In recent decades, Muslims have been stigmatized as an irreconcilable minority unable to adapt to the secular culture of the majority of French citizens. This work draws out the political implications of the current conflict. It is based on events and publications produced in a single five year period, beginning with the shock of the 2002 Presidential elections, in which Le Pen was the second most successful candidate, ranging through the legislation of March 2004 which banned the Islamic headscarf from French state schools, and which sparked off a series of bad-tempered exchanges between left and right-wing French nationalists, anti-racism campaigners, secularists, anti-clericals and a variety of Muslim authors.

This book charts and analyses the emergence of the conventional representation of the French events of 1968 and argues that the dominance of this narrative, despite its limitations, stems from the convenience that such a consensus provides for those that have been pivotal in shaping the collective memory of this critical moment in recent history.

In examining a number of francophone Montreal novels from 1960 to 2005, this interdisciplinary study considers the ways in which these connect with material landscapes to produce a city of neighbourhoods. In so doing, it reflects on how Montreal has been seen as both home and not home for francophone Quebecers. Morgan offers an overview of the fiction; examines micro and macro geographies of Montreal, and identifies some key literary trends. In so doing, it reflects on the importance of the imaginary in our experiencing and understanding of the urban.

This innovative study of the Montreal novel in French looks at how imaginary and material landscapes come together to produce a city of neighbourhoods.

Women's Writing in Twenty-First Century France is the first book-length publication on women-authored literature of this period, and comprises a collection of challenging critical essays that engage with the themes, trends and issues, and with the writers and their texts, of the first decade of the twenty-first century.PART ONE: Women’s Writing in Twenty-First-Century France: Trends and Issues1. Women’s writing in twenty-first-century France: introduction, Amaleena Damlé and Gill Rye2. What ‘passes’?: French women writers and translation into English, Lynn Penrod3. What women read: contemporary women’s writing and the bestseller, Diana HolmesPART TWO: Society, Culture, Family4. Vichy, Jews, enfants cachés: French women writers look back, Lucille Cairns5. Wives and daughters in literary works representing the harkis, Susan Ireland6. (Not) seeing things: Marie NDiaye, (negative) hallucination and ‘blank’ métissage, Andrew Asibong7. Rediscovering the absent father, a question of recognition: Despentes, Tardieu, Lori Saint-Martin8. Babykillers: Véronique Olmi and Laurence Tardieu on motherhood, Natalie EdwardsPART THREE: Body, Life, Text9. The becoming of anorexia and text in Amélie Nothomb’s Robert des noms propres and Delphine de Vigan’s Jours sans faim, Amaleena Damlé10. The human-animal in Ananda Devi’s texts: towards an ethics of hybridity?, Ashwiny O. Kistnareddy11. Embodiment, environment and the re-invention of self in Nina Bouraoui’s life-writing, Helen Vassallo12. Irreverent revelations: women’s confessional practices of the extreme contemporary, Barbara Havercroft13. Contamination anxiety in Annie Ernaux’s twenty-first-century texts, Simon KempPART FOUR: Experiments, Interfaces, Aesthetics14. Experience and experiment in the work of Marie Darrieussecq, Helena Chadderton15. Interfaces: verbal/visual experiment in new women’s writing in French, Shirley Jordan16. ‘Autofiction + x = ?’: Chloé Delaume’s experimental self-representations, Deborah B. Gaensbauer17. Beyond Antoinette Fouque (Il y a deux sexes) and beyond Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)? Anne Garréta’s sphinxes, Owen Heathcote18. Amélie the aesthete: art and politics in the world of Amélie Nothomb, Anna Kemp19. Conclusion, Amaleena Damlé and Gill Rye

This book uses six canonical novelists and their recreations in a variety of media to argue a reconceptualisation of our approach to the study of adaptation. The works of Balzac, Hugo, Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant and Verne reveal themselves not as originals to be defended from adapting hands, but as works fashioned from the adapted voices of a host of earlier artists, moments and media. The text analyses reworkings of key nineteenth-century texts across time and media in order to emphasise the way in which such reworkings cast new light on many of their source texts, and how they reveal the probing analysis nineteenth-century novelists undertake in relation to notions of originality and authorial borrowing. Adapting Nineteenth-Century France charts such revision through a range of genres encompassing the modern media of radio, silent film, fiction, musical theatre, sound film and television.ContentsIntroduction, Kate GriffithsI Labyrinths of Voices: Emile Zola, Germinal and Radio, Kate GriffithsII Diamond Thieves and Gold Diggers: Balzac, Silent Cinema and the Spoils of Adaptation, Andrew WattsIII Fragmented Fictions: Time, Textual Memory and the (Re)Writing of Madame Bovary, Andrew WattsIV Les Misérables, Theatre and the Anxiety of Excess, Andrew WattsV Chez Maupassant: The (In)Visible Space of Television Adaptation, Kate GriffithsVI Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours: Verne, Todd, Coraci and the Spectropoetics of Adaptation, Kate GriffithsConclusion, Andrew Watts

This book uses six canonical novelists and their recreations in a variety of media to argue a reconceptualisation of our approach to the study of adaptation. The works of Balzac, Hugo, Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant and Verne reveal themselves not as originals to be defended from adapting hands, but as works fashioned from the adapted voices of a host of earlier artists, moments and media. The text analyses reworkings of key nineteenth-century texts across time and media in order to emphasise the way in which such reworkings cast new light on many of their source texts, and how they reveal the probing analysis nineteenth-century novelists undertake in relation to notions of originality and authorial borrowing. Adapting Nineteenth-Century France charts such revision through a range of genres encompassing the modern media of radio, silent film, fiction, musical theatre, sound film and television.ContentsIntroduction, Kate GriffithsI Labyrinths of Voices: Emile Zola, Germinal and Radio, Kate GriffithsII Diamond Thieves and Gold Diggers: Balzac, Silent Cinema and the Spoils of Adaptation, Andrew WattsIII Fragmented Fictions: Time, Textual Memory and the (Re)Writing of Madame Bovary, Andrew WattsIV Les Misérables, Theatre and the Anxiety of Excess, Andrew WattsV Chez Maupassant: The (In)Visible Space of Television Adaptation, Kate GriffithsVI Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours: Verne, Todd, Coraci and the Spectropoetics of Adaptation, Kate GriffithsConclusion, Andrew Watts

This book analyses contemporary French films by focussing closely on cinematic representations of immigrants and residents of suburban housing estates known as banlieues. It begins by examining how these groups are conceived of within France's Republican political model before analysing films that focus on four key issues. Firstly, it will assess representations of undocumented migrants known as sans-papiers before then analysing depictions of deportations made possible by the controversial double peine law. Next, it will examine films about relations between young people and the police in suburban France before exploring films that challenge cliches about these areas. The conclusion assesses what these films show about contemporary French political cinema.IntroductionChapter One: Cinema and the RepublicChapter Two: T he Sans-papiers on Screen – Contextualising Immigrant Experiences in FilmChapter Three: Double peine: The Challenges of Mobilising Support for Foreign Criminals via CinemaChapter Four: C hallenging or Perpetuating Clichés? Young People and the Police in France’s BanlieuesChapter Five: C hallenging Stereotypes about France’s Banlieues by Shifting the Focus?ConclusionNotesFilmography and BibliographyIndex

In an era of commemoration, France's Colonial Legacies contributes to the debates taking place in France about the place of empire in the contemporary life of the nation, debates that have been underway since the 1990s and that now reach across public life and society with manifestations in the French parliament, media and universities. France's empire and the gradual process of its loss is one of the defining narratives of the contemporary nation, contributing to the construction of its image both on the international stage and at home. While certain intellectuals present the imperial period as an historical irrelevance that ended in the years following the Second World War, the contested legacies of France's colonies continue to influence the development of French society in the view of scholars of the postcolonial. This volume surveys the memorial practices and discourses that are played out in a range of arenas, drawing on the expertise of researchers working in the fields of politics, media, cultural studies, literature and film to offer a wide-ranging picture of remembrance in contemporary France.Introduction: The Postcolonial Nation, Fiona BarclayPart One: Narrative Gaps1. Amnesia about Anglophone Africa: France’s Rhodesian mind-set, its manifestations and its legacies, 1947–58, Joanna Warson2. From ‘écrivains coloniaux’ to écrivains de ‘langue française’: strata of un/acknowledged memories, Gabrielle ParkerPart Two: The Algerian War, Fifty Years On3. Conflicting memories: modernisation, colonialism and the Algerian war appelés in Cinq colonnes à la une, Iain Mossman4. Derrida’s virtual space of spectrality: cinematic haunting and the law in Mon Colonel (Herbiet, 2006), Fiona Barclay5. ‘Le devoir de mémoire’: the poetics and politics of cultural memory in Assia Djebar’s Le Blanc de l’Algérie, Jennifer Mullen6. (Un)packing the suitcases: postcolonial memory and iconography, William KiddPart Three: The Transnational Family7. Interrogating the transnational family: memory, identity and cultural bilingualism in Sous la clarté de la lune (Traoré, 2004), Zélie Asava8. Continuity and discontinuity in the family: looking beyond the post-colonial in Il y a longtemps que je t’aime (Claudel, 2008), Fiona HandysidePart Four: Contemporary Commemorations9. Anti-racism, republicanism and the Sarkozy years: SOS Racisme and the Mouvement des Indigènes de la République, Thomas Martin10. Playing out the postcolonial: football and commemoration, Cathal Kilcline11. Crime and penitence in slavery commemoration: from political controversy to the politics of performance, Nicola Frith

In an era of commemoration, France's Colonial Legacies contributes to the debates taking place in France about the place of empire in the contemporary life of the nation, debates that have been underway since the 1990s and that now reach across public life and society with manifestations in the French parliament, media and universities. France's empire and the gradual process of its loss is one of the defining narratives of the contemporary nation, contributing to the construction of its image both on the international stage and at home. While certain intellectuals present the imperial period as an historical irrelevance that ended in the years following the Second World War, the contested legacies of France's colonies continue to influence the development of French society in the view of scholars of the postcolonial. This volume surveys the memorial practices and discourses that are played out in a range of arenas, drawing on the expertise of researchers working in the fields of politics, media, cultural studies, literature and film to offer a wide-ranging picture of remembrance in contemporary France.

Women's Writing in Twenty-First Century France is the first book-length publication on women-authored literature of this period, and comprises a collection of challenging critical essays that engage with the themes, trends and issues, and with the writers and their texts, of the first decade of the twenty-first century.

This book provides a new interpretation of the relationship between consumption, drinking culture, memory and cultural identity in an age of rapid political and economic change. Using France as a case-study it explores the construction of a national drinking culture -the myths, symbols and practices surrounding it- and then through a multisited ethnography of wine consumption demonstrates how that culture is in the process of being transformed. Wine drinking culture in France has traditionally been a source of pride for the French and in an age of concerns about the dangers of 'binge-drinking', a major cause of jealousy for the British. Wine drinking and the culture associated with it are, for many, an essential part of what it means to be French, but they are also part of a national construction. Described by some as a national product, or as a 'totem drink', wine and its attendant cultures supposedly characterise Frenchness in much the same way as being born in France, fighting for liberty or speaking French. Yet this traditional picture is now being challenged by economic, social and political forces that have transformed consumption patterns and led to the fragmentation of wine drinking culture. The aim of this book is to provide an original account of the various causes of the long-term decline in alcohol consumption and of the emergence of a new wine drinking culture since the 1970s and to analyse its relationship to national and regional identity.

Women's Writing in Twenty-First Century France is the first book-length publication on women-authored literature of this period, and comprises a collection of challenging critical essays that engage with the themes, trends and issues, and with the writers and their texts, of the first decade of the twenty-first century.PART ONE: Women’s Writing in Twenty-First-Century France: Trends and Issues1. Women’s writing in twenty-first-century France: introduction, Amaleena Damlé and Gill Rye2. What ‘passes’?: French women writers and translation into English, Lynn Penrod3. What women read: contemporary women’s writing and the bestseller, Diana HolmesPART TWO: Society, Culture, Family4. Vichy, Jews, enfants cachés: French women writers look back, Lucille Cairns5. Wives and daughters in literary works representing the harkis, Susan Ireland6. (Not) seeing things: Marie NDiaye, (negative) hallucination and ‘blank’ métissage, Andrew Asibong7. Rediscovering the absent father, a question of recognition: Despentes, Tardieu, Lori Saint-Martin8. Babykillers: Véronique Olmi and Laurence Tardieu on motherhood, Natalie EdwardsPART THREE: Body, Life, Text9. The becoming of anorexia and text in Amélie Nothomb’s Robert des noms propres and Delphine de Vigan’s Jours sans faim, Amaleena Damlé10. The human-animal in Ananda Devi’s texts: towards an ethics of hybridity?, Ashwiny O. Kistnareddy11. Embodiment, environment and the re-invention of self in Nina Bouraoui’s life-writing, Helen Vassallo12. Irreverent revelations: women’s confessional practices of the extreme contemporary, Barbara Havercroft13. Contamination anxiety in Annie Ernaux’s twenty-first-century texts, Simon KempPART FOUR: Experiments, Interfaces, Aesthetics14. Experience and experiment in the work of Marie Darrieussecq, Helena Chadderton15. Interfaces: verbal/visual experiment in new women’s writing in French, Shirley Jordan16. ‘Autofiction + x = ?’: Chloé Delaume’s experimental self-representations, Deborah B. Gaensbauer17. Beyond Antoinette Fouque (Il y a deux sexes) and beyond Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)? Anne Garréta’s sphinxes, Owen Heathcote18. Amélie the aesthete: art and politics in the world of Amélie Nothomb, Anna Kemp19. Conclusion, Amaleena Damlé and Gill Rye

This book uses six canonical novelists and their recreations in a variety of media to argue a reconceptualisation of our approach to the study of adaptation. The works of Balzac, Hugo, Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant and Verne reveal themselves not as originals to be defended from adapting hands, but as works fashioned from the adapted voices of a host of earlier artists, moments and media. The text analyses reworkings of key nineteenth-century texts across time and media in order to emphasise the way in which such reworkings cast new light on many of their source texts, and how they reveal the probing analysis nineteenth-century novelists undertake in relation to notions of originality and authorial borrowing. Adapting Nineteenth-Century France charts such revision through a range of genres encompassing the modern media of radio, silent film, fiction, musical theatre, sound film and television.ContentsIntroduction, Kate GriffithsI Labyrinths of Voices: Emile Zola, Germinal and Radio, Kate GriffithsII Diamond Thieves and Gold Diggers: Balzac, Silent Cinema and the Spoils of Adaptation, Andrew WattsIII Fragmented Fictions: Time, Textual Memory and the (Re)Writing of Madame Bovary, Andrew WattsIV Les Misérables, Theatre and the Anxiety of Excess, Andrew WattsV Chez Maupassant: The (In)Visible Space of Television Adaptation, Kate GriffithsVI Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours: Verne, Todd, Coraci and the Spectropoetics of Adaptation, Kate GriffithsConclusion, Andrew Watts

The French novel’s “return to the story” in the last decades of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first is has been widely acknowledged in literary scholarship. But is this assessment accurate? With French Fiction in the Twenty-First Century, Simon Kemp looks at the work of five contemporary writers—Annie Ernaux, Pascal Quignard, Marie Darrieussecq, Jean Echenoz, and Patrick Modiano—in the context of the current French literary scene, and examines how far they pursue the innovations of their predecessors and just how far they have turned their backs on the era of experiment.

Memories of May 68 charts the emergence of the conventional representation of the French events of 1968 and argues that the dominance of this narrative, despite its limitations, stems from the convenience that such a consensus provides for those that have been pivotal in shaping the collective memory of this critical moment in French history.

In examining a number of francophone Montréal novels from 1960 to 2005, this interdisciplinary study considers the ways in which these connect with material landscapes to produce a city of neighbourhoods. In so doing, it reflects on how Montréal has been seen as both home and not home for francophone Quebecers. Morgan offers an overview of the fiction; examines micro and macro geographies of Montréal, and identifies some key literary trends. In so doing, it reflects on the importance of the imaginary in our experiencing and understanding of the urban.

This book analyses contemporary French films by focussing closely on cinematic representations of immigrants and residents of suburban housing estates known as banlieues. It begins by examining how these groups are conceived of within France's Republican political model before analysing films that focus on four key issues. Firstly, it will assess representations of undocumented migrants known as sans-papiers before then analysing depictions of deportations made possible by the controversial double peine law. Next, it will examine films about relations between young people and the police in suburban France before exploring films that challenge cliches about these areas. The conclusion assesses what these films show about contemporary French political cinema.

Adapting Nineteenth-Century France uses the output of six canonical novelists and their recreations in a variety of media to push for a re-conceptualisation of our approach to the study of adaptation. The works of Balzac, Hugo, Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant and Verne reveal themselves not as originals to be defended from adapting hands, but fashioned from the adapted voices of a host of earlier artists, moments and media. The text analyses re-workings of key nineteenth-century texts across time and media in order to underline the way in which such re-workings cast new light on many of their source texts and reveal the probing analysis nineteenth-century novelists undertake in relation to notions of originality and authorial borrowing. Moreover, Adapting Nineteeth-Century France traces their subsequent recreations in a comparable range of genres, encompassing key modern media of the twentieth- and twenty-first-centuries: radio, silent film, fiction, musical theatre, sound film and television.

In an era of commemoration, France's Colonial Legacies contributes to the debates taking place in France about the place of empire in the contemporary life of the nation, debates that have been underway since the 1990s and that now reach across public life and society with manifestations in the French parliament, media and universities. France's empire and the gradual process of its loss is one of the defining narratives of the contemporary nation, contributing to the construction of its image both on the international stage and at home. While certain intellectuals present the imperial period as an historical irrelevance that ended in the years following the Second World War, the contested legacies of France's colonies continue to influence the development of French society in the view of scholars of the postcolonial. This volume surveys the memorial practices and discourses that are played out in a range of arenas, drawing on the expertise of researchers working in the fields of politics, media, cultural studies, literature and film to offer a wide-ranging picture of remembrance in contemporary France.

This book provides a detailed analysis of the political arguments about the place of Muslims in contemporary France, and also discusses the ideas put forward by a range of Muslim thinkers. France has become the setting for one of the most important conflicts in the modern world. On the one hand, it possesses a rigidly organized, centralized state, whose bureaucrats and civil servants are animated by a code of secular activism. On the other hand, France is also the home for Europe's largest Muslim minority, variously estimated at numbering between four and six million people. This means that in terms of simple numbers, France can be counted as the world's fifteenth Islamic power. Previous conflicts with religion have left a deep impression on French political culture: from the sixteenth and seventeenth-century conflicts between Catholics and Protestants played to the formation of the collaborationist Vichy government in 1940. In recent decades, Muslims have been stigmatized as an irreconcilable minority unable to adapt to the secular culture of the majority of French citizens. This work draws out the political implications of the current conflict. It is based on events and publications produced in a single five year period, beginning with the shock of the 2002 Presidential elections, in which Le Pen was the second most successful candidate, ranging through the legislation of March 2004 which banned the Islamic headscarf from French state schools, and which sparked off a series of bad-tempered exchanges between left and right-wing French nationalists, anti-racism campaigners, secularists, anti-clericals and a variety of Muslim authors.

Gangsters, aviators, hard-boiled detectives, gunslingers, jazz and images of the American metropolis were all an inextricable part of the cultural landscape of interwar France. While the French 1930s have long been understood as profoundly anti-American, this book shows how a young, up-and-coming generation of 1930s French writers and filmmakers approached American culture with admiration as well as criticism. For some, the imaginary America that circulated through Hollywood films, newspaper reports, radio programming and translated fiction represented the society of the future, while for others it embodied a dire threat to French identity. This book brings an innovative transatlantic perspective to 1930s French culture, focusing on several of the most famous figures from the 1930s – including Marcel Carné, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Julien Duvivier, André Malraux, Jean Renoir and Jean-Paul Sartre – to track the ways in which they sought to reinterpret the political and social dimensions of modernism for mass audiences via an imaginary America.