University of Toronto Romance Series – serie

Esteemed in France as the leading writer of Romantic dramas, Victor Hugo created a body of work that revolutionized the dramatic canon of his time. In this book, Albert W. Halsall presents the first complete treatment in English of Hugo's plays.This valuable synthesis offers a history, plot summary, and detailed analysis of all the dramas, from Cromwel and Torquemada to the juvenilia and the epic melodrama Les Burgraves. Particular attention is given to Hugo's practical experiments in staging his own plays, which he nearly always directed himself in the 1830s. Also documented are the receptions accorded to Hugo's dramas, from the battle that greeted Hernani in 1830 to Richard Eyre's 1996 production of Le Roi s'amuse at London's Royal National Theatre, which pointed to the sexual high jinks among the royals of the period.By showing how Hugo's practice is situated in the history of the French theatre and the neo-classical genres of comedy and tragedy, Halsall produces a clear, generic definition of the Romantic drama. His study is a thoroughly researched and comprehensive analysis of Hugo's dramatic works.

This study takes a fresh look at the picaresque genre as seen in three important contemporary Latin American novels, Cortázar's Libro de Manuel, Skármeta's Match Ball, and the first picaresque novel, Lazarillo de Tormes. Gordana Yovanovich considers the genre in relation to the concept of play and shows how the traditional picaresque genre has been replaced by a distinctly modern version.Play and the Picaresque contends that within Latin American culture humour and play serve as forms of empowerment and means of survival for those who are marginalized in society. Like the pícaros of sixteenth-century Spanish novels, the proletarian characters in the Latin American fiction known as Magical Realism embody a playful and spontaneous approach to life and literature. The relationship of the magical to the real in Latin American fiction is, the book argues, comparable to the 'let's pretend' world and toys in play. The act of playing and living in these novels is a re-creative experience - a concept which has not been adequately explored in contemporary criticism.

Originally published in English in 1978, this full-scale examination of the philosophy of metaphor from Aristotle to the present, brings together and discusses significant viewpoints on metaphor held by writers in various disciplines. These include linguistics and semantics, the philosophy of language, literary criticism, and aesthetics.

The French presence in English literary history in the centuries following the Conquest has to some extent been glossed over or treated as an interlude. During this period, roughly 1100-1420, French, like Latin, was the language of the educated; in the courts of England, and for nobles, clerics, and the rising commercial elements, communication was multilingual.In his ground-breaking study, William Calin explores indepth this era of medieval English literature and culture in relation to its distinctly French influences and contemporaries. He examines the Anglo-Norman contribution to medieval literature, concentrating on romance and hagiography; the great continental French texts, such as Prose Lancelot and the Romance of the Rose, which had a dominant role in shaping literature in English; and the English response to the French cultural world - the two 'modes' in English where the French presence was most significant: court poetry (Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve) and Middle English romance.This book is grounded in French sources both well-known and relatively obscure. Translations of the Old French make The French Tradition and the Literature of Medieval England accessible to scholars and students of Medieval English, comparatists, and historians, as well as those proficient in French. Calin develops a synthesis of medieval French and English literature that will be especially useful for classroom study.

A quiet renaissance has been unfolding in certain parts of Europe - a renaissance of literature written in minority languages. In this book, William Calin explores the renaissance through an examination of twentieth-century works in Scots, Breton, and Occitan minority languages flourishing inside the borders of the United Kingdom and France.For each of the three bodies of literature Calin considers major authors whose works include novels, poetry and plays, and shows that all three literatures have evolved in a like manner, repudiating their romantic folk heritage and turning instead to modern and postmodern concerns. Drawing on current critical theories in periodization, postcolonialism and cultural studies, Calin raises a range of comparative questions: Is there a common form of narrative prevalent in minority cultures that is neither realism nor metafiction? Is the minority-language theatre limited to plots treating past history and the rural present? What is the relationship between the minority literature and literature in the national language? What kind of history should be written on the literatures of Scotland, Brittany and the South of France, manifest in their several languages?Calin's pioneering study is the first comparative scrutiny of these minority literatures and the first to bring all three together into the mainstream of present-day criticism. His work demonstrates the intrinsic importance in their twentieth-century renewal, as well as their contribution to global culture, in both aesthetic and broadly human terms.

Born in Mexico City in 1914, writer, poet, and diplomat Octavio Paz won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990, eight years before his death in 1998. The Writing in the Stars explores Paz's life and ideas by establishing a dialogue between the structure and recurring images of his major poems and the ideas of Carl Jung.Although other literary critics have pointed to Jungian concepts in Paz, a comprehensive study on the subject has yet to be undertaken. Rodney Williamson takes up this challenge, adopting a Jungian perspective to explore successive phases of Paz's poetry. Williamson illustrates how archetypal images infuse Paz's early poetry and his surrealist period and shows how the circular structure of Paz's longer poems, such as 'Piedra de sol' and 'Blanco,' are based on the Eastern sacred circle or mandala, a major archetype of psychic wholeness in Jung. He argues that a grasp of the psychological importance of Jung's archetypes is essential to understanding the various syntheses of creative truth and existence sought by Paz at different defining moments of his career as a poet. The Writing in the Stars will prove fascinating to anyone interested in Latin-American literature, Jungian psychology, or critical theory.

Miguel de Cervantes conceived his final work, The Labours of Persiles and Sigismunda: A Northern Story (1617), as a great prose epic that would accomplish for its age what Homer and Virgil had done for theirs. And yet, by the eighteenth century Don Quixote had eclipsed Persiles in the favour of readers and writers alike and the later novel is now virtually forgotten except by specialists. This study sets out to help restore Persiles to pride of place within Cervantes's corpus by reading it as the author's summa, as a boldly new kind of prose epic that casts an original light on the major political, religious, social, and literary debates of its era. At the same time it seeks to illuminate how such a lofty and solemn ambition could coexist with Cervantes evident urge to delight. Grounded in the novel's multiple contexts - literature, history and politics, philosophy and theology - and in close reading of the text, Michael Armstrong-Roche aims to reshape our understanding of Persiles within the history of prose fiction and to take part in the ongoing conversation about the relationship between literary and non-literary cultural forms. Ultimately he reveals how Cervantes recast the prose epic, expanding it in new directions to accommodate the great epic themes - politics, love, and religion - to the most urgent concerns of his day.

The multifaceted and labyrinthine oeuvre of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) is distinguished by having been written and published under more than seventy different names. These were not mere pseudonyms, but what Pessoa termed 'heteronyms,' fully realized identities possessed not only of wildly divergent writing styles and opinions, but also of detailed biographies. In many cases, their independent existences extended to their publication of letters and critical readings of each other's works (and those of Pessoa 'himself').Long acclaimed in continental Europe and Latin America as a towering presence in literary modernism, Pessoa has more recently begun to receive the attention of an English-speaking public. Embodying Pessoa responds to this new growth of interest. The collection's twelve essays, preceded by a general introduction and grouped into four themed sections, apply a range of current interpretative models both to the more familiar canon of Pessoa's output, and to less familiar texts – in many cases only recently published. As a whole, this work diverges from traditional Pessoa criticism by testifying to the importance of corporeal physicality in his heteronymous experiment and to the prominence of representations of (gendered) sexuality in his work.

This ambitious work aims to utterly change the way Don Quixote and Cervantes' other works are read, particularly the posthumous The Trial of Persiles and Sigismunda. William Childers sets out to free Cervantes' work from its context within the histories of the European national literatures. Instead, he examines early modern Spanish cultural production as an antecedent to contemporary postcolonial literature, especially Latin American fiction of the past half century.In order to construct his new context for reading Cervantes, Childers proceeds in three distinct phases. First, Cervantes' relation to the Western literary canon is reconfigured, detaching him from the realist novel and associating him, instead, with magic realism. Second, Childers provides an innovative reading of The Trial of Persiles and Sigismunda as a transnational romance, exploring cultural boundaries and the hybridization of identities. Finally, Childers explores traces of and similarities to Cervantes in contemporary fiction.Theoretically eclectic and methodologically innovative, Transnational Cervantes opens up many avenues for research and debate, aiming to bring Cervantes' writings forward into the brave new world of our postcolonial age.

Postcolonial Counterpoint is a critical study of Orientalism and the state of Francophone and postcolonial studies, examined through the lens of the historical and cross-cultural relations between France and North Africa.  Thoroughly questioning the inability of Western academia to shake free of universalism and essentialism and come to grips with the Orientalism within postcolonial discourse, Farid Laroussi offers a cultural tour d’horizon which considers AndrÉ Gide’s writing on Algeria, literature by French authors of Maghrebi descent, and the conversation surrounding secularism and the headscarf in France. A provocative investigation of the place of Muslims and Islam in Francophone culture, Postcolonial Counterpoint asks how we must proceed if postcolonial studies is to make a difference in reconciling history, identity, citizenship, and Islam in the West.

Postcolonial Counterpoint is a critical study of Orientalism and the state of Francophone and postcolonial studies, examined through the lens of the historical and cross-cultural relations between France and North Africa.  Thoroughly questioning the inability of Western academia to shake free of universalism and essentialism and come to grips with the Orientalism within postcolonial discourse, Farid Laroussi offers a cultural tour d’horizon which considers AndrÉ Gide’s writing on Algeria, literature by French authors of Maghrebi descent, and the conversation surrounding secularism and the headscarf in France. A provocative investigation of the place of Muslims and Islam in Francophone culture, Postcolonial Counterpoint asks how we must proceed if postcolonial studies is to make a difference in reconciling history, identity, citizenship, and Islam in the West.

This ambitious work aims to utterly change the way Don Quixote and Cervantes' other works are read, particularly the posthumous The Trial of Persiles and Sigismunda. William Childers sets out to free Cervantes' work from its context within the histories of the European national literatures. Instead, he examines early modern Spanish cultural production as an antecedent to contemporary postcolonial literature, especially Latin American fiction of the past half century.In order to construct his new context for reading Cervantes, Childers proceeds in three distinct phases. First, Cervantes' relation to the Western literary canon is reconfigured, detaching him from the realist novel and associating him, instead, with magic realism. Second, Childers provides an innovative reading of The Trial of Persiles and Sigismunda as a transnational romance, exploring cultural boundaries and the hybridization of identities. Finally, Childers explores traces of and similarities to Cervantes in contemporary fiction.Theoretically eclectic and methodologically innovative, Transnational Cervantes opens up many avenues for research and debate, aiming to bring Cervantes' writings forward into the brave new world of our postcolonial age.

This ambitious work aims to utterly change the way Don Quixote and Cervantes' other works are read, particularly the posthumous The Trial of Persiles and Sigismunda. William Childers sets out to free Cervantes' work from its context within the histories of the European national literatures. Instead, he examines early modern Spanish cultural production as an antecedent to contemporary postcolonial literature, especially Latin American fiction of the past half century.In order to construct his new context for reading Cervantes, Childers proceeds in three distinct phases. First, Cervantes' relation to the Western literary canon is reconfigured, detaching him from the realist novel and associating him, instead, with magic realism. Second, Childers provides an innovative reading of The Trial of Persiles and Sigismunda as a transnational romance, exploring cultural boundaries and the hybridization of identities. Finally, Childers explores traces of and similarities to Cervantes in contemporary fiction.Theoretically eclectic and methodologically innovative, Transnational Cervantes opens up many avenues for research and debate, aiming to bring Cervantes' writings forward into the brave new world of our postcolonial age.

The emblem and the device (or impresa as it was called in Italy) were the most direct and telling manifestations of a mentality that played a significant role in the discourse and art in Western Europe between the late Middle Ages and the mid-eighteenth century. In the history of Western symbolism, the emblematic sign forms a bridge between late medieval allegory and the Romantic metaphor. These intricate combinations of picture and text, where the picture completes the ellipses of an epigrammatic text, and where the text fixes the intention of the pictured signs, provide useful clues to the way pictures in general were read and textual descriptions visualized in early modern Europe.Daniel Russell demonstrates how the emblematic forms emerged from the way illustrations were used in late medieval French manuscript culture, how the forms were later disseminated in France, and how they functioned within early modern French culture and society. He also attempts to show how the guiding principles behind the composition of emblems influenced the production of courtly decoration, ceremony, and propaganda, as well as the composition of literary texts as different as Maurice Sc¦ve's Delie, Montaigne's Essais, and Du Bartas's Sepmaine.

On the Defensive considers how our ethical responses to the Nazi camps have unintentionally repressed and denied the experiences of their victims. Through detailed readings of survivor narratives, particularly the works of political deportees Jorge Semprun and Charlotte Delbo, Sharon Marquart examines how well-intentioned people – including victims, their family members, and readers of witness literature – respond to such testimony in ways that are understood as ethical by their communities but serve instead to ignore victims’ experiences.As Marquart shows, collective disasters such as the Holocaust expose the limitations of our ethical theories. To cope with this instability we withdraw and defend ourselves through inattentive and formulaic responses that turn a blind eye to the plight of victims. Challenging contemporary theorizations of community, ethics, testimony, and trauma, On the Defensive is a far-reaching reflection on the ways in which communal understandings of our duties and responsibilities to others can facilitate the denial of an atrocity’s horrors.

On the Defensive considers how our ethical responses to the Nazi camps have unintentionally repressed and denied the experiences of their victims. Through detailed readings of survivor narratives, particularly the works of political deportees Jorge Semprun and Charlotte Delbo, Sharon Marquart examines how well-intentioned people – including victims, their family members, and readers of witness literature – respond to such testimony in ways that are understood as ethical by their communities but serve instead to ignore victims’ experiences.As Marquart shows, collective disasters such as the Holocaust expose the limitations of our ethical theories. To cope with this instability we withdraw and defend ourselves through inattentive and formulaic responses that turn a blind eye to the plight of victims. Challenging contemporary theorizations of community, ethics, testimony, and trauma, On the Defensive is a far-reaching reflection on the ways in which communal understandings of our duties and responsibilities to others can facilitate the denial of an atrocity’s horrors.

The multifaceted and labyrinthine oeuvre of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) is distinguished by having been written and published under more than seventy different names. These were not mere pseudonyms, but what Pessoa termed 'heteronyms,' fully realized identities possessed not only of wildly divergent writing styles and opinions, but also of detailed biographies. In many cases, their independent existences extended to their publication of letters and critical readings of each other's works (and those of Pessoa 'himself').Long acclaimed in continental Europe and Latin America as a towering presence in literary modernism, Pessoa has more recently begun to receive the attention of an English-speaking public. Embodying Pessoa responds to this new growth of interest. The collection's twelve essays, preceded by a general introduction and grouped into four themed sections, apply a range of current interpretative models both to the more familiar canon of Pessoa's output, and to less familiar texts – in many cases only recently published. As a whole, this work diverges from traditional Pessoa criticism by testifying to the importance of corporeal physicality in his heteronymous experiment and to the prominence of representations of (gendered) sexuality in his work.

In this study Professor Dorfman applies the methods of modern linguistics to literary analysis. Literature may be described as the structured use of language: the modern linguistic analyzes language in a search for the minimal units of sound and form, phoneme and morpheme, and determines the combinations by which they can communicate meaning. The author here searches for a minimal structural unit in the literary narrative analogous to the phoneme and the morpheme in language structure.Based on a detailed analysis of the Roland and the Cid and twelve additional Romance narratives, Professor Dorfman's argument is that the structure of the medieval Romance epics may be analyzed into functional units which he calls "narremes." He divides a narrative into two types of structure: the superstructure and the substructure. A narrative, by definition, is a series of incidents. All the incidents in the narrative, taken as written, form the superstructure. Analysis, however, shows that many of the incidents may be abstracted from the narrative without deflecting the story-line. On the other hand, other incidents reveal themselves as organically linked with each other, so they cannot be omitted, without destroying the story-line. These selected incidents are the narremes, which make up the substructure of the narrative.This method of analysis produces so interesting and surprising results, results which make an important advance in research in linguistics and Romance literature. Eugene Dorfman, as an orthodox structuralist, has focused strictly on the formal descriptions of the narratives; but his analysis leads into the great traditional problems of literary history, and in particular poses anew the problem of the origins of the epic.

Emery Bigot's life spans the most brilliant years of seventeenth-century France. He left some six hundred letters addressed to the four corners of literary Europe; among his correspondents, acquaintances, and friends were men of the stature of Jean Chapelain, Nicolaus Heinsius, Charles du Cange, Richard Simon, John Milton, and Gilles Ménage. He travelled widely and was for some forty years at the very centre pf a firmly established, smoothly functioning network of mutual assistance and scholarly information that linked the countries of western Europe. From Uppsala to Venice, from Vienna to Oxford, Leiden, London: a network which quite naturally considered Paris its centre, and whose members represented every interest, very segment of intellectual society. Bigot was also the creator of what was perhaps the most important private library of his era. Yet today he is almost unknown, and his correspondence, scattered widely, has not been examined thoroughly since his death.This detailed biography and critical study is based on Bigot's letters and on other unpublished materials in France, Italy, Holland, Denmark, and England. Although much effort has been directed towards research on the more prominent contemporaries of Bigot, he himself – better known to the scholars of his period than a Racine, a La Fontaine, or a Molière – has gone unappreciated. Professor Doucette's book shows that Bigot represents an essential and seriously neglected side of French and European humanistic studies in the seventeenth century. Bigot's role as an outstanding classical scholar and bibliographic expert, his publications and projects for publications, his correspondence, and what is perhaps the most important facet of his activity, his collaboration with other authors in seventeenth-century Europe, all receive full and intensive coverage. This book holds special interest for scholars in several disciplines, especially historians of French literature and civilization, classicists, philologists, bibliophiles and bibliographers, and historians of religion.

It is only recently that historians of the theatre in French Canada have turned their attention to playwrights active before the twentieth century. Their practice had been to trace the roots of theatre to mid-1930s, to the appearance of Father Emile Legault and his troupe, the Compagnons de Saint-Laurent, dismissing what had gone before. In this innovative history, Leonard Doucette sets out deal for the first time with all plays that have survived to 1867 and to link them with the evolution of politics, institutions, and culture in French Canada.The study of theatre has often been handicapped also by the outdated practice of defining the literary-cultural history of a nation by identifying the masterpieces produced in specific periods and then defining other works in terms of what they are not. The surprisingly rich and varied history of theatrical forms in French Canada has just begun to receive the attention it deserves from scholars. Some of the texts and authors referred to in this history are identified for the first time: the materials cited and conclusions drawn are based upon original research in major Canadian libraries as well as the works of published critics and historians. The result is an excellent introduction to the various forms theatre has taken and the problems it has encountered in French Canada.

Despite an impressive body of poems, novels, short stories, and literary criticism; high praise for his writing by French and Swiss critics; and a collection of honours that includes the prestigious Prix Goncourt, awarded for his novel L’Ogre in 1973, Jacques Chessex is relatively unknown outside France and Switzerland. With this book, David J. Bond provides the first comprehensive study of his work in any language-a study that reveals Chessex’s deep ambivalence towards his Calvinist heritage and his efforts to resolve this dilemma through his texts.Born in 1934 in Payerne, in the region of French-speaking Switzerland known as the Vaud, Chessex grew up amid the pervasive influence of the Calvinist church. His writing, which tells of Vaud society and the hypocrisy of many of its leading members, reveals his preoccupation with a rigid morality, sin, remorse, and death. Bond shows that while Chessex uses his texts to escape this heritage and affirm alternative values, particularly sexual pleasure and enjoyment of life, his writing reveals a deep nostalgia for the stability and security of a strict religious system in a world that he finds unstable and even absurd without it. Chessex looks to the text as a univocal organizing principle that might impose order and sense. Bond sees in Chessex’s writing an attempt to find unity in opposing values, to establish contact with others, and to overcome an obsession with death and the passing of time.

New scientific theories, methods, and objectives exert subtle and often unnoticed influences on literary creation. The developments of the attitudes and aspirations of French scientists between the Renaissance and the Revolution and the impact of these new outlooks on French literature form the theme of this book by an authority in the interdisciplinary treatment of science and literature. Implicit in the author's exploration is the view that in the development of the scientific revolution there was no overall design, but rather random growth; human beings turn up at various moments, some of them appropriately, some of them not, so that the record is in part a story of successful endeavour, in part a comedy little short of farce. in the historical panorama of this book, four auhors, each known for his ironic, even comic, insight into the human condition, are chosen to illustrate the theme. As men of letters, Rabelais and Voltaire exhibit well-defined scientific interests, while Pascal and Maupertuis were drawn from their scientific vocations into the discussion of ideas in literary forms. Consideration of their similarities and differences suggested the title, Science and the Human Comedy. This work is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the historical and cultural conditions accompanying the advancement of science in a critical period, as well as of several ways in which the process was reflected, sometimes directly, more often indirectly, in literature. (University of Toronto Romance Series 30)

Paul Alexis was a novelist, journalist, and dramatist, one of the naturalistes, and a friend of Emile Zola. This volume brings together for the first time the 229 letters still in existence from him to Zola. Written over a period of thirty years, from the beginning of Rougon-Macquart to the Dreyfus affair, they are a  rich source of information on a particularly fertile period in French literature. The letters are intimate, lacking all pretensions to elegance and stylistic constraints; taken together they describe vividly the private life and thoughts of this fervent naturaliste.Alexis was the first to write a biography of Emile Zola, and his letters will be of interest to literary historians and critics for the fresh light they shed on Zola and on the history of naturalisme. Throughout the correspondence Alexis writes of his activities as a free-lance journalist, and provides a first-hand account of the press in France during the nineteenth century.The introduction and numerous biographical notes throughout the volume paint an accurate portrait of Alexis the man and writer, and place him and the letters in context of naturalisme. The letters, all previously unpublished, have been carefully annotated and documented. Included in the appendix are several unpublished documents as well as excerpts of articles from periodicals mentioned in the correspondence; most are signed by Alexis and are concerned with the history of naturalisme. A bibliography includes the works of Alexis and other books of interest to those studying the period.

The sources for La LÉgende de Saint Julien l’Hospitalier, one of Flaubert’s finest literary works, have long been the subject of numerous conflicting theories. The implications of the controversy are broad and important, not only for Flaubert’s work but also for our understanding of how writers generally use traditional material. Superficial resemblances have led critics to conclude that Flaubert relied heavily on a medieval tale of Saint Julian and that he borrowed details and specific phrases from his medieval predecessor. This book, by a world renowned specialist in Flaubert studies and a medieval philologist, demonstrates that the LÉgende is not medieval in structure or in spirit, and that its conception is distinctly modern; where Flaubert borrowed at all he used contemporary sources to recast the Julian legend in Romantic style. Bart and Cook establish definitely what legendary sources were and show how Flaubert came into contact with them. Their extensive commentary compares the sources and the LÉgende in detail, explains the circumstances under which Flaubert used his materials, and analyses how they were woven into the texture of his own tale.The book makes available source material scattered throughout obscure periodicals, reproduces accurately and dates correctly important segments of Flaubert’s drafts and scenarios, and provides the first modern printed edition of the AlenÇon life of Saint Julian which Lecointre-Dupont adapted in 1838, thereby giving Flaubert indirect access to the old tale.An introductory chapter explores the broader question of the development of legends and how a particular legendary sequence, embodying powerful themes, was amplified and made explicit from the twelfth century to Flaubert’s time.

The earliest foreign study of the life and works of Edgar Allan Poe, the text presented in this volume is something of a landmark in the history of comparative literature. Baudelaire’s first and longest essay on Poe was published in the Revue de Paris is 1852; it was revised and abridged for use as the preface of the first volume of his translation of Poe’s tales, Histoires extraordinaires. This study was significant especially in the area of Franco-American literary relations because it was the basis of not only the French attitude toward Poe, but of his reputation throughout Europe-one might almost say, throughout the world.The essay on Poe has never been the subject of a separate publication. This edition reveals for the first time the sources of information used by Baudelaire. It shows that a considerable part of the study was translated literally from articles by John M. Daniel and John R. Thompson in the Southern Literary Messenger (1849–50). Previous editions vary widely in excellence because almost all suffered from the mistaken belief that Baudelaire was acquainted with the American edition of Poe’s works when he wrote the 1852 essay and that it was largely based on Rufus Griswold’s Memoir contained in that edition. This led to the commentary and notes that were unconsciously misleading and in many cases false.The introduction to this edition presents a complete and accurate account of the genesis of Baudelaire’s essay, with supporting documents showing his indebtedness to American, French, and British sources. It enables the reader to distinguish clearly between what Baudelaire himself knew or thought about Poe and what he borrowed from other writers.

Despite an impressive body of poems, novels, short stories, and literary criticism; high praise for his writing by French and Swiss critics; and a collection of honours that includes the prestigious Prix Goncourt, awarded for his novel L’Ogre in 1973, Jacques Chessex is relatively unknown outside France and Switzerland. With this book, David J. Bond provides the first comprehensive study of his work in any language-a study that reveals Chessex’s deep ambivalence towards his Calvinist heritage and his efforts to resolve this dilemma through his texts.Born in 1934 in Payerne, in the region of French-speaking Switzerland known as the Vaud, Chessex grew up amid the pervasive influence of the Calvinist church. His writing, which tells of Vaud society and the hypocrisy of many of its leading members, reveals his preoccupation with a rigid morality, sin, remorse, and death. Bond shows that while Chessex uses his texts to escape this heritage and affirm alternative values, particularly sexual pleasure and enjoyment of life, his writing reveals a deep nostalgia for the stability and security of a strict religious system in a world that he finds unstable and even absurd without it. Chessex looks to the text as a univocal organizing principle that might impose order and sense. Bond sees in Chessex’s writing an attempt to find unity in opposing values, to establish contact with others, and to overcome an obsession with death and the passing of time.

Raymond Poisson, a contemporary of Molière, was the leading comic actor with the troupe of the Hôtel de Bourgogne and later at the Comédie Française during the first five years of its existence. He popularized one of the French stage's best-loved stock characters, the impudent servant Crispin, while finding time to supply his troupe with short comedies in which he himself starred. This study is thoroughly documented and reflects the author's detailed knowledge of, and interest in, the period. It establishes Poisson's place in theatrical history, and illuminates a whole tradition in French theatre in the seventeenth century.

Robert de Clari (died c. 1220), a member of the Lesser Picard nobility from the vicinity of Amiens, left a chronicle of the Fourth Crusade in which he took part. This is an important work in the study of the development of the French language, because it is one of the first original prose texts in French, neither translated from Latin nor resulting from "prosification" of verse-compositions.Professor Dembrowski's study is a close analysis of language and style, revealing Robert de Clari's ability in the narration of short anecdotes and in the reproduction of dialogue. University of Toronto Romance Series, Number 6.

In this study Professor Dorfman applies the methods of modern linguistics to literary analysis. Literature may be described as the structured use of language: the modern linguistic analyzes language in a search for the minimal units of sound and form, phoneme and morpheme, and determines the combinations by which they can communicate meaning. The author here searches for a minimal structural unit in the literary narrative analogous to the phoneme and the morpheme in language structure.Based on a detailed analysis of the Roland and the Cid and twelve additional Romance narratives, Professor Dorfman's argument is that the structure of the medieval Romance epics may be analyzed into functional units which he calls "narremes." He divides a narrative into two types of structure: the superstructure and the substructure. A narrative, by definition, is a series of incidents. All the incidents in the narrative, taken as written, form the superstructure. Analysis, however, shows that many of the incidents may be abstracted from the narrative without deflecting the story-line. On the other hand, other incidents reveal themselves as organically linked with each other, so they cannot be omitted, without destroying the story-line. These selected incidents are the narremes, which make up the substructure of the narrative.This method of analysis produces so interesting and surprising results, results which make an important advance in research in linguistics and Romance literature. Eugene Dorfman, as an orthodox structuralist, has focused strictly on the formal descriptions of the narratives; but his analysis leads into the great traditional problems of literary history, and in particular poses anew the problem of the origins of the epic.